Cecilia Kang

It could be school problems, stress with friends.

There could be all kinds of factors that lead to anxiety, depression and other mental health disorders and not social media alone.

What the plaintiff's lawyers are going to try to do is to again draw from all the internal documents they've collected.

And they will try to show how the push to increase engagement and to make their products sticky and even addictive.

But ultimately, it comes down to a jury in these California cases.

Juries will decide the subsequent cases as well.

And that might be favorable for the plaintiffs because everyone has a story about social media.

We know, for example, that the majority of American parents see social media as a problem.

And yet the companies have so far escaped scrutiny.

Remember decades ago,

When the trials began against Big Tobacco, it seemed crazy and really far-fetched to accuse the companies of creating an addictive and harmful product.

But they did.

And with social media, with all of these young people who have been blamed for years for being unable to regulate their use of these social media apps, the conversation might change.

The blame could lie in a different place with the social media companies.

Now, that won't take back the experiences of so many young people who say they've been harmed by these social media platforms.

But it could profoundly change the conversation in our society.

These companies have been under scrutiny for many years about the kind of content they host.

But this is the first time that they'll really have to defend themselves in court about the products themselves and how they're engineering the products in a way that's potentially harmful.

In this first trial and potentially future ones this year, we're going to see the tech CEOs stand on trial to defend emails and other documents where they themselves are confronted with evidence about the stickiness of their products and how they're being engineered to get people to engage more and more and how that was really concerning to a lot of other employees within these companies.

So, for example, YouTube will be asked to explain why there were slide decks