“Engineering of Addiction”: Meta and Google Liable for Child’s Mental Health Harm

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A jury in Los Angeles has ruled in a landmark verdict that Meta (Instagram, Facebook) and Google (YouTube) deliberately designed addictive platforms that caused significant psychological harm to a now-20-year-old woman during her childhood and adolescence.

The jury awarded the plaintiff, who was known during the proceedings by the initials KGM, a total of six million US dollars in damages. It is the first time in US legal history that a court has held tech companies liable for the effects of their platforms on the mental health of young users.

The Case: From Childhood into Addiction

The plaintiff, publicly known as Kaley, stated that she began using YouTube at the age of six and was already active on Instagram by the age of nine. By the time she was ten, she said she had developed depression and begun self-harming. At 13, her therapist diagnosed her with body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia, both of which Kaley attributes to her intensive use of Instagram and YouTube. She also reported suicidal thoughts and persistent difficulties at school and in her family environment.

The twelve-person jury decided by a majority of ten to two that the companies had acted negligently and had provided inadequate warnings about the risks of their products. The jurors further found that Meta and Google had acted “with malice, oppression, or fraud,” which led to the award of additional punitive damages.

The Distribution of Damages

Of this amount, three million dollars represent compensatory damages and a further three million represent punitive damages. TikTok and Snap, which were originally also involved in the case, reached a settlement before the trial began.

The Four Addictive Design Mechanisms in Detail

At the heart of the lawsuit was the argument that the plaintiff’s psychological harm was not a coincidental outcome, but the result of deliberate technical decisions. The plaintiff’s attorneys described this as the “engineering of addiction” — the conscious construction of addictive behavior. Four specific product features were at the center of this argument:

1. Infinite Scroll

Traditional media has natural stopping points — for example, the end of a newspaper or the pause menu of a video game. The so-called infinite scroll removes these interruptions entirely: the feed automatically loads new content as soon as the user reaches the bottom of the page. There is no moment at which the platform signals to the user that it is time to stop. According to the plaintiffs, this feature is explicitly designed to suppress the natural impulse to stop.

2. Autoplay

The automatic playback of the next video or piece of content eliminates the user’s conscious decision to continue watching. Rather than having to actively click “next,” the following content begins playing on its own after a few seconds. This feature significantly lowers the threshold for continued use and causes users to remain on the platform considerably longer than they originally intended. In children and adolescents, whose impulse control is not yet fully developed, this mechanism is particularly powerful.

3. Algorithmic Recommendations

According to the plaintiffs, the recommendation algorithms of both platforms are not optimized to show users content that serves their well-being. Instead, they prioritize content that generates maximum attention and time spent on the platform, regardless of whether that content is harmful to the individual user. For young users like Kaley, this meant that the algorithm increasingly served content related to body image, beauty standards, and social comparison, which is said to have contributed to the development of body dysmorphic disorder.

4. Constant Notifications (Push Notifications)

Through a continuous stream of notifications — for example, about new likes, comments, or follower activity — users are repeatedly drawn back to the platform. This mechanism exploits the brain’s dopaminergic reward system: each notification triggers a small release of dopamine, thereby reinforcing the urge to open the app again. In children and adolescents, whose brains are still developing, this effect is particularly pronounced.

Voices from the Proceedings

“How do you get a child to never put down the phone? That’s called engineering of addiction. They engineered it, they built these features. These are Trojan horses: they look wonderful and great, but you invite them in and they take over.”

This is how Mark Lanier, the plaintiff’s attorney, framed it in his closing argument. The plaintiffs’ strategy was deliberately modeled on the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s, in which cigarette manufacturers publicly claimed the opposite for years despite internal knowledge of the addictive risks.

“Today’s verdict is a historic moment, for KGM and for the thousands of children and families who have been waiting for this day.”

This statement was published by the plaintiff’s attorneys immediately after the verdict was announced.

Reactions from the Companies

Both companies rejected the verdict and announced they would appeal. Meta stated that it “respectfully disagreed” and emphasized that the mental health of young people is a complex issue that cannot be attributed to a single app. The company also pointed to its longstanding policy of denying users under the age of 13 access to its platforms — an argument that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had already made when he testified before the jury in February.

Google spokesperson José Castañeda described the verdict as a misunderstanding of the nature of YouTube. “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly designed streaming platform, not a social network,” said Castañeda. Both companies had denied any wrongdoing throughout the entire proceedings and argued that Kaley’s psychological problems were attributable to a difficult home environment.

Context and Outlook

The verdict comes at a time of growing societal and political criticism of social media. Just one day earlier, a jury in the US state of New Mexico had ordered Meta to pay 375 million dollars, finding that the company had deceived consumers about the safety of its platforms and had, among other things, enabled the sexual exploitation of children. Countries such as Australia have already introduced legal restrictions on the use of social media by minors, and the United Kingdom is currently piloting a corresponding program for those under 16.

Mike Proulx, research director at the consulting firm Forrester, sees the successive verdicts as a “turning point” in the relationship between tech companies and the public. “The negative sentiment toward social media has been building for years, and now it has finally been brought to a boil,” said Proulx.

The KGM case is the first of more than 20 so-called bellwether trials that are set to be heard in California in the coming years, serving as test cases to gauge jury responses and establish legal precedents. In total, more than 1,600 plaintiffs in California — including over 350 families and 250 school districts — are involved in similar class-action lawsuits against Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Snap. A further bundle of nationwide lawsuits involving hundreds of plaintiffs is scheduled to come to trial in San Francisco in June.