On March 25, a Los Angeles court found social media giants Meta and Google liable for a woman’s thoughts of self-harm and body dysmorphia. The woman was identified by her initials, K.G.M., throughout the proceedings. The verdict was rooted in the plaintiff’s argument that these online platforms have deliberately created addictive features — infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations, and autoplay videos — to maximize user engagement and increase revenue, sometimes at the expense of user mental health. Meta and Google, which own Instagram and YouTube, respectively, claimed that K.G.M.’s mental afflictions could not be attributed to her social media addiction, but to “familial abuse and turmoil.” After five weeks, their argument sank in court, and consequently, the two companies collectively paid K.G.M. $6 million in damages. This bellwether case sets a remarkable legal precedent, allowing individuals to hold social media platforms accountable for their mental and emotional well-being.
Nobles students spend a wide range of time on social media. Many students do not have accounts, others log on only a few minutes per day, and the upper band of screen time users seems to spend about three to four hours online daily. However, this time is not only spent scrolling, but also spent messaging with friends. “Social media is really bad for your mental health if you’re just scrolling, but it can be good for your mental health if you’re using it actively,” Wellness and Personal Development Instructor Kate Harrington said. “Active use is when you are messaging friends, posting content, and engaging with others. There’s a real difference between active use and passive use.”
That said, it is easy to get sucked into the “passive” type of engagement. “I’ll get notifications that just say ‘you have a notification,’ when nothing has happened. It’s just a way to get me on Instagram,” Maggie Mahoney-Bennett (Class IV) said. “I’ll always click on it, and then I’m going to be stuck there for the next 30 minutes scrolling because it just continuously shows me videos.” Johanna Heller (Class II) pointed out a similarly addictive feature designed by Apple. “I just got the new iPhone. Before, when you’d turn off the lock on the side, it would turn your phone completely black. Now it just darkens your phone. So your phone is never really off,” she said. This feature displays notification piles without requiring people to actually pick up and check their phones.
A consumer company’s mission is to provide a service or product that users enjoy in a way that generates profit, which, one could argue, Meta has accomplished. However, there is a distinction between attraction and addiction. “Does a person really like your product, or have you created a habit? If it’s simply a need that they need to fulfill, or that they’re attached to this rush that they might get, they probably don’t,” Senior Information Technology Support Specialist Jake Bonenfant said. “Do people like cigarettes or are they addicted to nicotine?” Addicted users may ‘need’ to be online rather than ‘want’ to be online.
Bonenfant alludes to a critical point: Meta differs from the average company that seeks to provide an enjoyable user experience in that it engineers features to strip users of the conscious choice to be online, and for what length.
Obviously, addiction and excessive social media use come with largely adverse mental health effects. Mayo Clinic reports that excess social media use can erode sleep duration, increase the risk of depression and anxiety, and distract users from more productive activities. “I feel bad after scrolling for a long time, sort of like I wasted the time and could have done something more productive. I feel unfulfilled,” William Johnson (Class III) said.
The debate central to this lawsuit series is who is to blame for these mental health problems: the user themself, content creators, or the platform as a whole. Nobles students and faculty hold diverse views on this topic.
“If social media is the only contributor to mental health issues, then it’s your own responsibility. If I become depressed from social media, that’s my own problem. I think that the whole point of entertainment is to be addictive. When you go on TikTok, you want to zone out,” Landon Zou (Class II) said. Conditions like depression are often influenced by other factors, such as a user’s predisposition to it, so mental illness can rarely be attributed solely to social media.
Boys Crew Coach Adam Balogh partially attributes the problem to the naivety of social media users. “We should have realized there’s no free lunch. Nothing’s free. We accepted too naively that we’re in charge on social media,” he said. In today’s attention economy, social media platforms have created a market around user engagement and data, translating them into currency. Thus, a user’s relationship with social media could be understood as transactional.
Computer Science Faculty Max Montgomery holds the government responsible for restricting social media platforms. “I don’t think you can hold social media companies responsible for mental health, but I do think you can hold them responsible for adhering to certain standards that they’ve claimed that they cannot enforce,” Montgomery said. “We have to hold them responsible via legislation because there’s no reason they would ever adhere to stricter standards, since it’s against their business model.”
That said, such government-issued regulations would face resistance from social media companies given their financial dependence on addiction. “I don’t believe that Instagram is gonna make their platform less addictive, because they profit off of the fact that you want to scroll,” Heller said. “It’s unreasonable to ask a business or business owner to do that because they want to make money.”
As stated in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, “If the product is free, then you are the product.” This rings true for social media, a highly accessible digital commodity, where views are monetized, and methods for increasing and prolonging said views have proven deleterious. Perhaps these lawsuits will put pressure on Meta and other leading social media companies to strike a balance between generating revenue and prioritizing the mental health of their users.
