'I was on Instagram all day' - woman tells landmark trial

BBC

A young woman, who is suing Meta and Google over what she claims is the addictive nature of social media, has told a jury her childhood years were taken over by her use of Instagram and YouTube.

"I stopped engaging with family because I was spending all my time on social media," said the woman, who is known as KGM or Kaley, to protect her privacy.

She told the court in Los Angeles that she began using YouTube at the age of 6 and Instagram at 9, and encountered no barriers to using them despite her young age.

Meta has so far argued that Kaley's excessive use of Instagram was not an addiction and that its platform was not to blame for her ensuing mental health problems.

While much of the court proceedings so far have focused on Instagram and Meta, Google's YouTube is also a defendant in the lawsuit.

TikTok and Snapchat were also initially sued, but the companies settled shortly before the trial was scheduled to begin. The terms of those settlements were not disclosed.

The result of the trial, which is expected to last until mid-March, will be the first legal ruling on what responsibility social media operators carry for their youngest users. It is likely to affect thousands of similar lawsuits that have been filed across the US by families and state governments over the harm they say children have suffered online.

Mental health

Now 20 years old, Kaley told the court that looking at Instagram was "the first thing" she did when she woke up each day and that she continued "all day" until she went to sleep at night, leading to difficulties at school, at home and with her mental health.

She also watched YouTube videos for hours on end, noting that the platform's "autoplay" feature, which starts a new video automatically after the previous one ends, kept her on it.

Failing to get enough "likes" on her social media posts left her feeling "insecure" or "ugly", she said.

Kaley has been diagnosed with body dysmorphia, a condition where people worry excessively about their physical appearance. Asked by her lawyer, Mark Lanier, whether she had experienced such feelings before joining social media, Kaley said, "No, I didn't."

Kaley also noted that her first feelings of anxiety and depression arose when she was nine and 10 years old. She was subsequently diagnosed with those disorders as a teenager.

By age 10, she was engaging in self-harm, cutting herself, Kaley said. She has seen a therapist since she was 13.

Kaley's testimony comes a week after she attended court to sit directly across from Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's co-founder and chief executive, as he spent around seven hours being questioned by lawyers, the first time the billionaire had ever appeared before a jury.

Meta's lawyers have broadly argued that Kaley's struggles with her mental health stemmed from problems with her family life, not her use of Instagram.

Paul Schmidt, a lead lawyer for Meta, pointed during the first day of the trial to statements Kaley had made before filing her lawsuit about her home life, including a difficult relationship with her mother that had led to thoughts of self-harm.