In a Los Angeles courtroom, a 20-year-old woman known as KGM is the plaintiff in a case alleging that Instagram and YouTube are intentionally designed to be addictive to minors and cause foreseeable harm to them. The case will test the boundaries of when and how social media companies may be liable for allegedly harming minors. KGM has claimed that when she was a minor, her social media use led to suicidal thoughts and depression.
KGM is not alone. Plenty of other tweens and teens feel social media harms their mental health.
Adolescents should be routinely screened for signs of ‘problematic social media use’ that can impair their ability to engage in daily roles and routines, and may present risk for more serious psychological harms over time.”
the american psychological association
There can be little doubt that excessive social media use by children and teens is contributing to a mental health crisis among these groups. The surgeon general issued an advisory in 2023 to call “attention to the growing concerns about the effects of social media on youth mental health.” That same year, the American Psychological Association issued a health advisory that made multiple recommendations, including: “Adolescents should be routinely screened for signs of ‘problematic social media use’ that can impair their ability to engage in daily roles and routines, and may present risk for more serious psychological harms over time” and “Adolescents should limit use of social media for social comparison, particularly around beauty- or appearance-related content.”
I don’t need to read these advisories to be concerned about the effects social media has on young users. I see it, and I fear it. I spend hours each week talking with tweens and teens; I’m privy to at least some of their thoughts, anxieties, fears and hopes. And having listened and spoken to them, one of my biggest hopes for them is that they stay off social media for as long as possible. Anecdotally, I’ve yet to interact with a tween or teen who seems happier, more self-confident or better adjusted because of their social media use. Quite the opposite.
I live in the real world and understand that many things in life are gray areas. Social media is neither entirely good nor entirely evil. Healthy social media use can create a sense of community and shared experience. Unhealthy social media use can lead to, or exacerbate thoughts of, self-harm, body dysmorphia and eating disorders. Just to name a few of the effects.
The question isn’t whether at least some children and teens are being harmed by social media use. They are. Maybe they’re more vulnerable to begin with, but that doesn’t matter. Kids are suffering. The question is who should do something about it. And my best answer is: all of us.
As a big believer in personal responsibility, I’m convinced that parents have a role to play, at least up to a certain age. It is easy to hand a child phone to occupy their time and keep them quiet. That takes much less energy than talking to them or playing a game with them. But sometimes, particularly for working parents, working with one’s children or playing with them are not always options. In addition, it is downright delusional to think most tweens and teens won’t have at least some access to social media.
I wish the social media companies would step in and provide real safety controls. But as a law professor, I’m not sure social media companies should be forced by the government to do so.
This is where, on a human level, I wish the social media companies would step in and provide real safety controls, such as more robust age verification and accompanying limits on the content pushed to minors’ accounts, as well as limits on notifications and other addictive features such as autoplay and endless scroll. But this is also where, as a law professor, I’m not sure social media companies should be forced by the government to do so.
KGM’s legal argument is that social media platforms are defective and harmful products, akin to tobacco. She argues that social media companies employ autoplay, endless scrolling and algorithms that can create psychologically manipulative feedback loops specifically designed to make social media more addictive. If we are honest, isn’t that what almost every product is designed to do? Get us to use it (and perhaps binge on it)? Social media companies, of course, are somewhat different because the harm is different. Instead of eating too much junk food, or even spending too much time watching a show, some of our kids are spending too much time watching videos on how they can be thinner, prettier or more popular.
KGM is using the long-running Big Tobacco litigation as a guide. In those cases, plaintiffs prevailed by proving that tobacco companies fraudulently concealed and misrepresented the addictive and deadly nature of smoking, despite internal evidence to the contrary. But the theory faces serious hurdles.
First, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a federal statute that shields online platforms from liability for user-generated content. KGM is arguing that those Section 230 protections don’t undermine her suit, because her complaint is not with users’ posts but with the design of the platforms. KGM claims that her injury arises not from speech but from the addictive architecture of social media.
KGM may ultimately prevail with this argument at trial, and there is some case law that could support her claim. In 2021 the parents of two boys who died in a high-speed car accident successfully sued Snap Inc. for the negligent design of its smartphone application Snapchat. The 9th Circuit concluded that the parents’ lawsuit “neither treats Snap as a ‘publisher or speaker’ nor relies on ‘information provided by another information content provider,’” and that therefore Section 230 did not provide Snap with immunity. The key difference between the Snap case and KGM’s suit is that the former was based on the use of a “filter,” whereas the latter is based in part on the content of the posts that KGM and others see.
Simply put, the biggest legal hurdle for KGM here is that algorithms are designed to organize and present users’ speech. When Instagram and YouTube suggest posts or videos, at least some recent cases indicate that they are still acting as publishers or distributors, not creators. Put another way, courts generally treat recommendations and rankings as covered by Section 230 because they are part of a platform’s publisher function.
Second, even if Section 230 does not apply, the First Amendment looms. Social media companies are not cigarettes that deliver addictive nicotine. They are platforms that deliver content. The defendants (Meta and Google, the owners of Instagram and YouTube) are likely to argue that imposing liability for how they rank, recommend or present content burdens protected editorial judgment, which raises First Amendment questions.
Social media companies have contended that a person’s mental health is far too complicated to be able to draw a straight line between social media use and mental health harms.
Third, KGM won’t just have to link social media usage with mental health issues, she’ll also need to prove causation. There is a difference between showing that social media can be associated with harms in general and demonstrating that it caused this plaintiff’s harm. In addition, mental health, especially the mental health of adolescents, is shaped by a multitude of things, including family, genetics, schooling, sleep patterns, peer relationships and offline trauma. Social media companies have contended that a person’s mental health is far too complicated to be able to draw a straight line between social media use and mental health harms. The social media companies can point to the fact that sugar, television and video games all affect behavior and mental health but none is treated as defective by default.
I don’t have any easy answers. Frankly, I don’t know if anyone does. The ultimate answer probably lies not in stretching product liability doctrine beyond recognition, but in updating regulatory policy for a digital childhood. Our legal system, though, has almost always lumbered to adapt to new technologies and the new risks that accompany them. For the young people I know and love, I only hope that we endeavor to do something.
