By Bill Hetherman
City News Service
LOS ANGELES (CNS) – The video-sharing service YouTube does not engage in practices aimed at getting users addicted to the site, an attorney for parent company Google told jurors today, while also denying that a woman suing social media companies was ever addicted to the platform.
Jurors in downtown Los Angeles began hearing opening statements Monday in the trial of a lawsuit filed by a Northern California woman identified only as K.G.M., who alleges she suffered severe mental harm because she became hooked on social media in her childhood.
The lawsuit targets Google – parent company of YouTube – and Meta – parent company of Instagram and Facebook.
Speaking to jurors Tuesday as opening statements continued, Luis Li, attorney for YouTube/Google, said K.G.M. only watched YouTube for an average of 29 minutes per day, according to her user data. He also insisted the site makes it easy for users to disable features the plaintiff contends contributed to her addiction. Li said KGM’s user data showed she spent an average of 1 minute and 14 seconds per day using an “infinite scroll” feature that her attorney criticized as addictive during his opening statement Monday.
“What you are left with is a simple truth – infinite scroll is not infinite,” Li said. “… It’s not social media addiction when it’s not social media and it’s not addiction.”
He said evidence during the trial will show that K.G.M. personally stated that she was not addicted to YouTube, and she never claimed to be addicted or was given a treatment plan to counter any addiction to the site. He added that both her doctor and her father also denied that she was addicted to the site.
Li also said YouTube doesn’t qualify as a “social media” platform. He said the site mainly allows people to “watch something essentially for free on your computer, on your phone, on your iPad.”
On Monday, K.G.M.’s attorney Mark Lanier delivered a lively opening statement accusing social media sites of fostering addiction in young users.
“This case is about two of the richest corporations in history who have engineered addiction in children’s brains,” Lanier told the panel of 12 regular jurors – six men and six women – and six alternates.
He noted during his opening statement that K.G.M. started using YouTube at age 6 and posted nearly 300 videos on YouTube before she graduated elementary school.
According to her suit brought in July 2023, K.G.M.’s mother did not want her using social media and tried using third-party software to prevent her daughter’s use, but the companies design their products in a manner that allow children to avoid parental consent and K.G.M. did just that, the suit stated.
Prompted by the addictive design of the Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok products, and the constant notifications that Meta, Snapchat and TikTok began pushing to her 24 hours daily, K.G.M. developed a nonstop compulsion to engage with the products, the suit alleges.
She did not know that each company made programming decisions aimed at targeting K.G.M., the suit states. For example, Meta and Snap’s AI user recommendation and connection tools facilitated and created connections between minor plaintiff K.G.M. and complete strangers, including predatory adults and others she did not know in real life and would not have met but for the seemingly random connections these companies made, the suit further stated.
At one point, K.G.M. suffered bullying and sextortion via the Instagram product, and she and her mother never could determine whether the abuser was someone who knew K.G.M. in real life or if it was a random stranger, the suit stated.
“It took K.G.M.’s friends and family spamming and asking other Instagram users to report the persons targeting minor K.G.M. for a two-week period before Meta did anything about the abuses, violation of terms and illegal conduct,” the complaint stated.