Kids vs. the algorithm

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It… digital justice.

Last week, a 20-year-old woman testified in a high profile trial that her near-constant use of social media as a child hurt her mental health. Now, she’s suing Meta and YouTube. It’s the first time the social media giants are defending themselves before a jury. To protect her privacy, the woman goes by the initials, KGM. She says the companies built their platforms on purpose to addict children.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: TikTok and Snap settled out of court. This is the first in a wave of thousands of cases against social platforms going to court this year. The trial started in January and is set to end in April.

Joining us to talk about it is attorney Matthew Bergman. He’s founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center and represents the young woman.

Good morning, Matthew.

BERGMAN: Good morning. How are you?

REICHARD: Doing well, so glad you’re here. Tell us about your client. How does KGM say these platforms harmed her?

BERGMAN: Well, from the age of six, when she got on YouTube, she became addicted to social media. It took over her life and robbed her of her childhood. And over a period of time, she developed very extreme mental health challenges that she struggles with to this day, anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia, to be particular, as a result of these addictive social media apps.

REICHARD: Now, in the past, plaintiffs like your client have lost because of a law that says platforms can’t be held liable for content posted by users. It’s Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. How is this case different?

BERGMAN: Well, we filed the first cases in the country involving individuals such as KGM—suffering from harms as a result of social media—that were allowed to go forward. Up until we started doing our work, any effort to hold social media companies accountable was stopped in its tracks. The cases were being dismissed under Section 230 before they even got started. And we developed a different approach. Not suing the companies for bad content moderation, although they clearly do that, not suing them for negligently allowing malign material to be posted on its platforms, although they do that, but rather for intentionally designing an addictive product that hooks kids, not by showing them what they want to see, but what they can't look away from. So, rather than focus on the content, we focused on the design and the failure to warn. And courts have held that that is a different theory of liability than holding them liable as a publisher. And for the first time, allowed these cases to go forward, allowed discovery to proceed and allowed us to determine and discover many hot, many smoking gun documents that demonstrate the company's deliberate intention to addict young people to their platforms.

REICHARD: You know, some people are comparing this to the cases against Big Tobacco in the 1990s—treating the platforms as a product that causes harm instead of a publication deserving free speech protections. What do you think about that analogy?

BERGMAN: Well, not only is that a viable comparison, Meta’s own documents support that. They analogize themselves to tobacco. The evidence also indicates that the addiction to social media is a physiologic addiction, very similar to the addiction to a substance or to nicotine. And very much like the tobacco companies that focused on adolescents and young teens as being their lifetime users of tobacco products, so have social media companies focused on tweens as the greatest growth potential for their dangerously defective and addictive products.

REICHARD: Matthew, if you win this case, what do you think will happen to the platforms and the internet in general?

BERGMAN: Well, it's not just this case. It is the many cases that we have brought. The fact that we simply have the opportunity to bring our case to trial before a fair and impartial jury is a cataclysmic change in the landscape for social media companies, who, heretofore, have assumed that they don't have to play by the same rules as every other company. And so we believe that simply starting this trial is a great victory. But this is this is a new chapter of accountability. And we are hopeful that when the companies have to bear the financial consequences of their deliberate design decisions, to prioritize profits over safety, that they'll implement modifications that will make their platforms much safer for vulnerable young people.

REICHARD: Your organization, as we mentioned is The Social Media Victims Law Center—is representing thousands of clients. Are there any other cases that stand out to you in particular?

BERGMAN: So the people that I represent are mothers and parents of children who have lost their lives to social media, either through taking their own lives or through accidental deaths, through dangerous challenges, or in other cases, fentanyl poisoning. I have never in 30 years of law practice, been more privileged to represent clients, less concerned about money and more concerned about justice than these mothers and these families,

REICHARD: That’s so moving. Are there aspects of this case that you think are underreported?

BERGMAN: What is significant about this case is it was specifically selected by the court as being representative of many other cases. And the young woman in this case is somebody whose injuries are not unique, unfortunately, but are very representative of an entire generation of young people who have literally had their youth stolen from them through these exploitative and addictive and dangerous social media apps.

REICHARD: If Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or YouTube’s leaders were here right now, what would you ask them to answer under oath?

BERGMAN: I would ask them, first and foremost, ‘why do you produce a platform that you don't let your own kids on?’ I would ask them, ‘how many billion dollars is enough? Why have you subordinated safety to profit?’ And ‘why have you been deaf to the cries of parents and the cries of children who've called out again and again and again for say, for social social media products, what is so important about making money that it subordinates any other ethical or moral or legal priority.

REICHARD: Matthew Bergman is the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center and represents KGM, the teen who is suing Meta and YouTube.

Matthew, thank you so much for your time and your work. We’ll be watching.

BERGMAN: Well very good! I thank you for covering this issue and it’s going to be a very very interesting and informative process.

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