Lawyers in landmark social media addiction trial make final appeals to the jury

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — After about a month of hearing from addiction experts, therapists, platform engineers and executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, 12 jurors are listening to closing arguments before deciding whether social media companies should be liable for harms caused to children using their platforms.

Closing statements in the trial began Thursday at the Spring Street Courthouse in Los Angeles. Lawyers representing the plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman, and those representing the two defendants, Meta and Google-owned YouTube, are making their respective cases to the jurors. TikTok and Snap were also named defendants in the lawsuit, but they each settled before the trial began.

The case, along with two others, has been selected as a bellwether trial, meaning its outcome could impact how thousands of similar lawsuits against social media companies are likely to play out.

The plaintiff, identified as KGM in documents or Kaley, as her lawyers have called her during the trial, says her early use of social media addicted her to the technology and exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts.

Mark Lanier, the attorney representing Kaley, began his closing statement by presenting the jurors with an image of a herd of gazelles surrounded by a lion. The lions never go after the strongest or boldest gazelles, he said, but rather target the ones they think are weakest.

“I think that’s what we got in this case,” he said.

In the first hour of his statement, Lanier pointed to several internal documents from Meta and YouTube that seemed to illustrate a clear understanding of the potentially addictive nature of their platforms.

“I don’t naysay the opportunity to make money, but when you’re making money off of kids, you have to do it responsibly,” he said.

Both the defendants and the plaintiff have pointed to a turbulent home life for Kaley. Her attorneys say she was preyed upon as a vulnerable user, but attorneys representing Meta and YouTube have argued Kaley turned to their platforms as a coping mechanism or a means of escaping her mental health struggles.

Throughout the trial, Meta argued that Kaley faced significant challenges before she ever used social media. The jury’s only task, a Meta spokesperson said in a statement Thursday, is to “decide if those struggles would have existed without Instagram. Not one of her therapists identified social media as the cause.”

As Lanier went through evidence and testimony presented during the trial, including Kaley's medical records and testimony, he argued that the young girl wouldn't have wanted to bring up her persistent social media use at risk of having her phone taken away. She would return to platforms despite being on the receiving end of cyberbullying on them because it was easier for her to endure the bullying than be off the platforms, he said, echoing her testimony from late February.

A in a briefing with reporters earlier, a Meta legal spokesperson also said they didn’t believe that youth mental health struggles, both broadly and with Kaley specifically, could be solved through litigation.

Instead of zeroing in on Kaley's mental health history, the attorneys representing YouTube have consistently argued that it is not a social media platform and that its features are not addictive. YouTube has also frequently made the comparison of its platform to television, emphasizing that it doesn't have the same social validation features as Instagram and other platforms.

Lanier, who has used drawings and illustrations throughout the trial to help jurors follow along with testimony and visualize the points being made, also brought out a cupcake to visualize a point related to the juror instructions that Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl had enumerated to them earlier Thursday morning.

Jurors must decide if Meta and YouTube’s negligence was a “substantial factor” in causing Kaley’s harm. The cupcake Lanier displayed to jurors had very little baking soda in it to cause it to rise, but it was a substantial factor in the baking process, he said.

Since it is a civil case, only nine out of the 12 jurors have to agree on each count. They will decide the case against each platform independently, and the judge advised them to treat it “as if it were a separate lawsuit.”

Jurors will also decide the amount of damages Kaley should be awarded in the event they find either or both of the platforms liable. Lanier advised them to think of one question as they were deciding on that amount: "What is a lost childhood worth?”

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Ortutay reported from Coloma, California.