Kaley was 9 years old when she began opening multiple accounts on social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube. With every like, her self-esteem would rise, and she wanted more and more. At 10, she was diagnosed with depression and body dysmorphia, caused in part by the filters she used in her posts to enlarge her eyes and shrink her nose.
She is now 20, and last March, a Los Angeles jury ruled that Meta, owner of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, and Google, owner of YouTube, must pay her six million dollars for intentionally creating addictive platforms that harmed her mental health.
It was considered proven that the number of "likes" on a post influences the emergence of negative feelings among younger users.
Likes are a key metric of social media. That thumbs-up, which explains much of Facebook's early success in the first decade of this century, is the most popular way for users to interact with texts, photos and videos.
However, they could disappear.
This is connected to another lawsuit that began last Tuesday in Oakland, California. In it, 29 U.S. states, including California and New York, allege that Meta consciously and deliberately designed features that make children addicted to its platforms. They also allege that the company collects data from children under 13 without parental consent.
They are therefore demanding up to 1.4 trillion dollars in compensation — Meta's stock market value is around 1.5 trillion dollars — and radical changes to Instagram and Facebook:
• Establishing a parental verification process for minors.
• Modifying its "dopamine-manipulating recommendation algorithms."
• Eliminating image filters that alter appearance in photos.
• Eliminating autoplay on videos.
• Prohibiting the creation of multiple accounts.
• Eliminating disappearing or "ephemeral" posts, such as Instagram Stories.
According to the lawsuit, these features were designed to keep users, including teenagers and children, on the platform for as long as possible.
Young people are particularly susceptible to this type of stimulus, as various studies demonstrate, since their brains are still developing, especially the prefrontal cortex.
The vicious cycle that begins is simple to explain: exposure to digital stimuli generates dopamine, which produces pleasure, but to repeat the experience, increasingly more time in front of screens is required, because the same effect demands ever-greater amounts of dopamine.
"We will demonstrate that Meta concealed what it knew about the harm its products cause to young people because it was more profitable to look the other way," said Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman ahead of the trial.
"Attorneys general are in the ideal position to achieve this. We did it with the tobacco settlement in the 1990s. We did it with the companies responsible for the opioid crisis. We will do it again with Meta," he added.
The massive class-action lawsuits against tobacco companies managed to transform that industry at the end of the 20th century. Thanks to greater awareness and education about the harmful effects of tobacco, consumption declined.
The current trial in California has a recent precedent that went against Mark Zuckerberg's company: in March, one day before the ruling in favor of Kaley mentioned at the beginning, a judge in the state of New Mexico fined the company 942 million dollars and ordered changes similar to those now being sought.
Among those changes is the removal of the "like" count on Instagram and Facebook for users under 18 and limitations on push notifications from the apps during certain hours. The judge — whose ruling only has effect in New Mexico — declared Meta a "public nuisance" like a factory that pollutes the air and causes "harmful effects" to an entire population.
If Meta were to suffer another unfavorable ruling, now in 29 states, the changes would surely affect its platforms throughout the entire U.S. At a minimum.
In the rest of the world, Australia was a pioneer in imposing restrictions on social media use for children under 16. France followed. The United Kingdom will do so next year, as will other European countries such as Spain and Austria. Brazil is studying the issue.
In Argentina, some surveys indicate that six out of ten teenagers spend more than five hours a day looking at their phones, but no restrictive measures have been announced.
The end of the trial against Meta in California is estimated to be five weeks away. It could also be the end of social media as we know it today.
