Tech giants called to account to American families. The trial of Meta and Google opened on Monday, February 9, before a civil court in Los Angeles on a charge by the plaintiff’s lawyer, who accused them of having “manufactured addiction in the brains of children”, who had become addicted to their platforms.
The mechanism observed on Instagram (Meta) and YouTube (Google) did not occur “by accident but on purpose”, insisted Mark Lanier in his introductory remarks, “because addiction is profitable”.
The outcome of the debates could establish a major judicial precedent in terms of the civil liability of social network operators, who have until now been exempt.
Dozens of files must, in fact, follow this one in the coming months.
The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, will be called to testify in this small windowless room on February 18, and the boss of Instagram (Meta subsidiary), Adam Mosseri, from Wednesday.
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In the absence of TikTok and Snapchat, who preferred to settle for a confidential amount, only YouTube, a Google subsidiary, and Meta, the tech giant behind Instagram, are defending this trial scheduled to last more than a month.
The 12 jurors, approved Friday after more than a week of meticulous voting, must decide the complaint of a 20-year-old Californian, Kaley GM
His file was deemed representative enough to constitute a test procedure whose outcome will set a benchmark for hundreds of similar complaints grouped together in California.
The young woman, a YouTube user from the age of six then the owner of an Instagram account at age 11, before Snapchat and TikTok two to three years later, claims to have developed a strong addiction to social networks which led her into a spiral of depression, anxiety and self-image problems.
The algorithm at the heart of the debates
In his opening remarks, Mark Lanier produced several internal documents at Google and Meta in support of his thesis, that of intentionality.
He also presented an internal email sent by Mark Zuckerberg, which he said urged his teams to reverse the disengagement of younger people on Instagram.
Mark Lanier recalled the economic model of Meta and Google, very largely based on advertising, whose prices depend on attendance, i.e. the time spent on the platforms.
“What they are selling to advertisers is not a product,” he explained, “it is access to Kaley,” who will only be present at the hearing to testify but will not attend the rest of the proceedings.
“This is the first time that social networks have had to face a jury for having caused harm to children,” underlined before the trial Me Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, whose team manages more than 1,000 similar cases.
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However, the debates will not focus on the toxic, depressing or manipulative videos that these platforms may host, because American law, in particular section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, largely exempts them from any responsibility for content published on them by third parties.
To get around the obstacle, the plaintiffs therefore attack the very design of social networks, that is to say the algorithm and the personalization functions encouraging compulsive viewing of videos.
The plaintiffs accuse this design of being negligent and harmful, repeating a strategy successfully carried out against the tobacco industry in the 1990s and 2000s.
On Friday, lawyers for Meta and YouTube asked the judge to ban any analogy in the proceedings between their tools and addictive products, such as tobacco and opioids. In vain.
In New Mexico, a separate trial accusing Meta of prioritizing profit over protecting minors from sexual predators is also scheduled to begin this week.
In parallel with the Los Angeles trial, social media addiction is the subject of a national mass proceeding, currently being heard before a federal judge in Oakland, near San Francisco.
With AFP
date: 2026-02-09 22:25:00