Kaley would look at Instagram until she fell asleep. She would wake up in the middle of the night to check her notifications. She would open the app as soon as she woke up. One day, she spent 16 hours on Instagram.
”I stopped engaging with my family because I was spending all my time on social media,” Kaley told a jury in Los Angeles during a landmark lawsuit against Meta and Google, two of the biggest companies in the world.
TikTok and Snapchat, which were also named in her original suit, settled out of court.
Known only by her first name or initials to protect her privacy, Kaley’s story has become the test case for more than 2,000 similar lawsuits looking to hold social media companies to account for the alleged harm they pose to the mental health of their youngest users.
As the first of its kind, the five-week trial is being watched closely by legal experts and parents who believe their children were damaged, even pushed to suicide, by social media.
Lori Schott spent several days attending the LA trial despite having no part in the lawsuit. Her daughter Annalee took her own life aged 18, a tragedy Schott attributes to the way Instagram exposed her to psychologically damaging content, despite allegedly knowing what such content could do to young people.
”They hid the research. They knew that it was addictive. They gave us a false sense of security,” Schott said, describing to the BBC what she learned from the trial.
”Their public relations team just seemed to try and convince us that the world was all lollipops and unicorns.”
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