Dana Taylor

It's always good to talk music with you, Melissa.

Thank you.

Thanks to our senior producer, Kaylee Monahan, for her production assistance.

Our executive producer is Laura Beatty.

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Thanks for listening.

I'm Dana Taylor.

I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA Today's The Excerpt.

For years now, parents, children, schools, researchers, and lawmakers have raised concerns about how social media affects young people, from mental health to how much time teens spend online.

Now those concerns are being tested in court.

As part of a series of lawsuits, a jury will for the first time hear arguments that platforms like TikTok, Meta, and YouTube didn't just host harmful content, but deliberately designed their products in ways that made them addictive and

especially for young users.

Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt.

I'm Dana Taylor.

Today is Monday, February 2nd, 2026.

While some companies have already settled, others are pressing their case in what legal experts are calling a landmark trial.

Will social media be persuaded to change its algorithms?

For more on this, I'm joined now by Clay Calvert, non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Thanks so much for coming on, Clay.

While thousands of social media addiction lawsuits have been filed nationwide, courts are only sending a small number to trial this year, the so-called bellwether trials.