Taking to court one of the richest people on the planet, twenty-year-old Californian Kaley GM, has been heavily involved in the use of social media since she was only six years old. She and her mother accused Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat of being designed to encourage uncontrolled consumption by young Internet users, to the detriment of their mental health. Zuckerberg apologized to his accuser and other victims for the fact that Instagram’s filter to identify and then limit access to children under 13 did not work. The 41-year-old billionaire stressed that progress had been made but admitted that “I wish we had done it sooner.”
The trial began a week ago and will last several weeks. Meta and Google must demonstrate that their platforms, used by billions of people around the world, are safe and that they were not knowingly created to cause addiction among the most vulnerable such as children, adolescents and young adults. Meta’s business and advertising model is also under scrutiny, which depends on parameters such as the duration of users’ stay on the platforms. TikTok and Snapchat reached a settlement shortly before the trial began, the terms of which were not made public.
During his testimony a few days ago, the head of Instagram Adam Mosseri defended himself by stating that spending 16 hours a day on the app is not a symptom of “addiction”. The manager insisted that Instagram works hard to protect young people who use the service and said that “it is not good for the company, in the long term, to make decisions that make us profits but are harmful to people’s well-being”. Meta’s lawyers argued that “Kaley’s problems” were not caused by Instagram but by other “factors in her life.” One of these, Paul Schmidt, said in his opening statement that the company does not dispute that the young woman had mental health problems, but rather that the platform played a substantial role in those problems. The lawyer also referenced medical records showing a turbulent home life, accusing Kaley of turning against Meta “as a defense mechanism or as a means to escape her mental problems.”
More and more countries around the world are working to limit the use of social media by young people. Australia late last year introduced a ban on under-16s accessing the platforms. Britain, Denmark, France and Spain are considering similar measures.