🔥 Jury Says Social Media Is Addictive for Kids

A U.S. jury found that Instagram and YouTube were designed to capture children's attention, harming their mental health. As a result, Meta and Google were ordered to pay $6M to 20-year-old plaintiff Kaley.

She said she started using YouTube at age six and Instagram at nine. Over time, she stopped communicating with her family, spent most of her time on social media, and developed anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphic disorder.

📌 A key piece of evidence was an internal 2015 email from Mark Zuckerberg, where he set a goal to increase user time spent in apps by 12%. Zuckerberg himself called this a "hope for achievement" rather than a formal order.

"If you make your product better, people are going to use it more," Zuckerberg said.

💼 Lawyers for the companies unsuccessfully argued that Kaley's condition was linked to a troubled family environment, not the platforms themselves. She had been seeing therapists since the age of three. Both companies plan to appeal the decision.

💡 Media outlets are already comparing this wave of lawsuits to the tobacco industry scandals of the 1990s, when corporations were forced to pay billions in compensation for lying about the dangers of smoking.

Do social media platforms cause addiction?

❤️ — yes, they are designed that way
🔥 — no, it's about self-control

@hiaimediaen