Cecilia Kang

What the plaintiffs are going to really rely on is hundreds of thousands of documents that they've collected in discovery ahead of these trials that the plaintiff's lawyers say showed that the companies knew that there was a problem.

For example, in 2018, Meta began studying how beauty filters on Instagram...

Yes.

And they began studying that in 2018 and decided in 2019, after a lot of backlash publicly, that they would ban the filter.

But that same year in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, considered bringing the filters back to Instagram.

These were big drivers of engagement and young people like to use them.

And employees within the company implored him not to, including an executive, because she said they were really just so toxic for particularly young girls.

And she sent an email directly to Zuckerberg asking him to reconsider everything.

He ignored the email and decided in 2020 to reinstate the beauty filters.

Internal research at Facebook found that its photo sharing app, Instagram, can harm the mental health of millions of young users.

Research shows 95% of teens are on social media.

More than a third say they're on constantly.

So these social media companies have for years faced really tough scrutiny and criticism for being too powerful and crushing competition, for hosting content that is false, all kinds of harms related to the kind of content that is hosted on these platforms.

But the cases that are about to begin this week in trials is really different in that there are thousands of individuals, school districts and state attorneys generals, that have come together in a series of lawsuits that are arguing the same one thing.

which is that social media is addictive and that the addictive nature of these platforms have led to a bevy of personal injuries, including anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, eating disorders.

So what's really different is this is less about the content they host, and this is more about the nature of the technologies.

And this is a really novel legal theory.

It's essentially social media's big tobacco moment.

which led, as you know, to many years of litigation against the tobacco companies and ultimately led to the decline of smoking.

And so many in social media see this as a really existential moment.