For years, parents, teenagers, pediatricians, educators, and whistleblowers have pushed the idea that social media is detrimental to young people’s mental health and can lead to addiction, eating disorders, sexual exploitation, and suicide.
“The era of Big Tech invincibility is over,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project. “After years of gaslighting from companies like Google and Meta, new evidence and testimony have pulled back the curtain and validated the harms young people and parents have been telling the world about for years.”
While it’s too soon to tell if this week’s outcomes will lead to fundamental changes in how social media platforms treat their young users, the dual verdicts signal a changing tide of public perception against tech companies that is likely to lead to more lawsuits and regulation. For years, they have argued that the harms their platforms cause to children are a mere byproduct, unintentional and inevitable consequences of broader societal issues or bad actors taking advantage of safeguards. They pushed against the notion that psychological harms could be the result of social media use and downplayed research that showed otherwise.
When asked about whether people tend to use a platform or product more if it’s addictive during his testimony in the Los Angeles trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “I’m not sure what to say to that. I don’t think that applies here.”
