{"id":14557,"date":"2026-01-26T07:18:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T07:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/meta-tiktok-and-youtube-face-landmark-us-trial-over-claims-platforms-were-designed-to-addict-children\/"},"modified":"2026-01-26T07:18:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T07:18:11","slug":"meta-tiktok-and-youtube-face-landmark-us-trial-over-claims-platforms-were-designed-to-addict-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/meta-tiktok-and-youtube-face-landmark-us-trial-over-claims-platforms-were-designed-to-addict-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta, TikTok and YouTube face landmark US trial over claims platforms were designed to addict children"},"content":{"rendered":"
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SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 26 — A landmark trial beginning this week in Los Angeles could establish a legal precedent on whether social media companies deliberately designed their platforms to addict children.<\/p>\n

Jury selection is set to start tomorrow in California state court in what is being called a “bellwether” proceeding because its outcome could set the tone for a tidal wave of similar litigation across the US.<\/p>\n

Defendants in the suit are Alphabet, ByteDance and Meta, the tech titans behind YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.<\/p>\n

Meta co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is slated to be called as a witness during the trial.<\/p>\n

Social media firms are accused in the hundreds of lawsuits of addicting young users to content that has led to depression, eating disorders, psychiatric hospitalisation and even suicide.<\/p>\n

Lawyers for the plaintiffs are explicitly borrowing strategies used against the tobacco industry in the 1990s and 2000s that faced a similar onslaught of lawsuits arguing that companies sold a defective product.<\/p>\n

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The trial before Judge Carolyn Kuhl in state court is expected to start the first week of February, after a jury is selected.<\/p>\n

It focuses on allegations that a 19-year-old woman identified by the initials K.G.M. suffered severe mental harm because she was addicted to social media.<\/p>\n

“This is the first time that a social media company has ever had to face a jury for harming kids,” said Social Media Victims Law Center founder Matthew Bergman, whose team is involved in more than 1,000 such cases.<\/p>\n

The center is a legal organization dedicated to holding social media companies accountable for harms caused to young people online.<\/p>\n

“The fact that now K.G.M. and her family get to stand in a courtroom equal to the largest, most powerful and wealthy companies in the world is, in and of itself, a very significant victory,” Bergman said.<\/p>\n

“We understand that these cases are hard fought and that it is our burden to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that K.G.M. was harmed by the design decisions of these companies — that’s a burden that we happily undertake.”<\/p>\n

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Design not content <\/strong><\/p>\n

A decisive outcome of the trial could provide a “data point” for settling similar cases en masse, according to Bergman.<\/p>\n

Snapchat last week confirmed that it made a deal to avoid the civil trial accusing it, along with Meta, TikTok and YouTube, of addicting young people to social media.<\/p>\n

The terms of that deal were not disclosed.<\/p>\n

Internet titans have argued that they are shielded by Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act, which frees them of responsibility for what social media users post.<\/p>\n

However, this case argues those firms are culpable for business models designed to hold people’s attention and promote content that winds up harming their mental health.<\/p>\n

“We are not faulting the social media companies for failure to remove malign content from their platforms,” Bergman told AFP.<\/p>\n

“We are faulting them for designing their platforms to addict kids and for developing algorithms that show kids not what they want to see but what they cannot look away from.”<\/p>\n

Lawsuits accusing social media platforms of practices endangering young users are also making their way through federal court in Northern California and state courts across the country.<\/p>\n

None of the companies responded to requests for comment. — AFP<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Meta, TikTok and YouTube face landmark US trial over claims platforms were designed to addict children<\/sub><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 26 — A landmark trial beginning this week in Los Angeles could establish a legal precedent on whether social media companies deliberately designed their platforms to addict children. Jury selection is set to start tomorrow in California state court in what is being called a “bellwether” proceeding because its outcome could set the…<\/p>\n

Read More “Meta, TikTok and YouTube face landmark US trial over claims platforms were designed to addict children”<\/span> »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14558,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}