In ongoing legal proceedings in Los Angeles, a 20-year-old woman is being presented as an example of the suffering caused by addictive social media.
When the woman was little, her mother described her as a particularly creative child, her lawyer has said. She began using YouTube at six and Instagram at nine - and, it is claimed, the girl fell into a rigged addiction trap that would fundamentally change her.
"This case is about how two of the richest companies in history have created addiction in the brains of children," said attorney Mark Lanier in his opening statement.
Flood of legal cases
Tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg will personally testify before a jury on Wednesday as Meta's chief executive, with the jury's decision expected to set the tone for more than 2,500 similar lawsuits pending in the United States.
According to the allegations, Zuckerberg's Meta and Google's parent company Alphabet have built services aimed at keeping children engaged, with personalized algorithms and a near-constant stream of attention-grabbing content.
Mark Zuckerberg is accused of demanding measures that make users spend even more time on the platforms. In another legal case, he is accused of giving the green light to an AI system despite internal alarms that it could initiate sexually charged conversations even with minors.
Grieving parents
Behind the 20-year-old woman in the courtroom, distraught parents have gathered. Their children have taken their own lives under circumstances they link to social media.
In the many legal cases, the internet giants are accused of causing depression, eating disorders, and other health problems.
The health warning has been ignored because abuse is easy to make money from, the prosecuting lawyers argue. They liken it to how the tobacco industry was long allowed to market and sell products that were known to be harmful to health.
Want to distinguish between addiction and problematic use
"I think it's important to distinguish between clinical addiction and problematic use," Meta-owned Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said in court last week.
Meta and Alphabet deny the allegations. Meta says new safeguards have been put in place in recent weeks.
In the Los Angeles court case, Snapchat's parent company and TikTok were also defendants, but they chose to settle rather than go to trial.
Meta is Facebook's parent company and also brings together platforms like Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp under its umbrella. In recent years, the focus has shifted to AI.
The company was originally called Facebook, but was given a new name in 2021. At that time, it faced widespread criticism and political opposition for inadequate measures against disinformation, monopolistic behaviour, arbitrary censorship and violations of user privacy, including instances when data was leaked to actors seeking to influence political elections.
The site and the company were founded by Mark Zuckerberg and colleagues in 2004. It grew into the world's largest social media platform with several billion users and a business model built on targeted advertising.
Meta is today one of the world's largest companies, with a market capitalization exceeding 17,000 billion Swedish kronor.
