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Chapter 1: What concerns are being raised about social media addiction?
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.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of the KGM case in social media lawsuits?
Thanks so much for coming on, Clay.
No, thank you very much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.
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. These are test cases meant to guide how the remaining lawsuits are resolved. The first case is being called the KGM case to maintain the plaintiff's anonymity. Can you tell me about that case, Clay?
Sure. So KGM, as you said, is the bellwether test case, really the first of more than a thousand personal injury lawsuits that essentially alleged that social media platforms were designed to hook minors to keep their eyeballs on social media and that that process has caused them multiple harms. In KGM's case, she's suggesting anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and other injuries.
Chapter 3: What legal arguments are being presented in favor of the plaintiffs?
So her case is the first one up. She's a young adult now, but she claims that when she was very young, she started watching on YouTube videos and then basically later used Instagram, ByteDance and the other platforms. Now, in this particular case, what's important is that ByteDance, which is TikTok and Snapchat, Snap have settled.
So all we have left are really the two biggest companies as we would think of them. We have Meta, which is Instagram as a defendant, and we have Google, which is YouTube as a defendant. So those are the two defendants that are in this case that KGM is suing.
The courts have dismissed many similar lawsuits in the past. What legal arguments or evidence here convinced a judge to let these cases proceed?
That's a really good question. There's a key question here, and this is what she said.
Chapter 4: How does Section 230 impact social media liability?
I'm going to leave it to the jury. I'm not going to decide this for myself. And the question really is what caused the harm that KGM says she's suffering? Is it the content of the videos and the posts that she has seen and watched on social media platforms? Or is it defects, alleged defects in the design of the platforms themselves?
And by that, we're talking about things like endless scroll notifications, algorithmic delivery of content, image filters. autoplay. Those are the types of characteristics or features that she is claiming are defective and designed to hook minors. So why is that difference important? Here's why it's important.
Chapter 5: What are the challenges in proving causation in social media cases?
If the harm was caused by the speech itself and not the alleged defects or features of the platform's Then something called Section 230 immunity kicks in. Section 230 is a federal statute that was adopted 30 years ago back in 1996. Essentially what it does is it says that social media platforms are immune from civil liability for what we call third party content.
That means user generated content or content posted by others.
So if it's the content of others that she watched and caused her harm, she saw videos of people who were abnormally thin, whatever it is she's going to say in this case, if it was the content that caused her the harm, then Section 230 federal statute will kick in and provide immunity from civil liability for Google and Meta in this case.
On the other hand, if it's the features, right, those design features that cause the harm, and that's what she's arguing it is, then there's a possibility that indeed Google and Meta will be held liable here for causing her the harm. So the jury is going to have a really difficult case. How do you parse out what really caused the harm?
Chapter 6: How do settlements by some companies affect ongoing lawsuits?
And so causation is going to be a key question in these cases and in hers in particular.
Clay, how significant is this shift in theory for product liability law?
That's very important here. Essentially what the plaintiffs are attempting to do is plead around Section 230. Section 230 has proven to be a very formidable barrier in terms of protecting social media platforms for liability based on the content of others posted, right?
So what plaintiff's attorneys have done here in this case and in other cases, they've tried to find end runs or theories around that. So by focusing on the product itself, and there's a question really here, are social media platforms really products or are they services?
And what the judge in Los Angeles has done is she says, we're going to allow negligence causes of action to go forward, that these platforms were negligently designed. They breached a duty of care the platforms did in designing them. And that breach of the duty of the care caused the minors to suffer harm.
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Chapter 7: What role will Mark Zuckerberg's testimony play in the trial?
She's also allowing a cause of action called negligent failure to warn that social media platforms had a duty to warn minors of the potential harms. So it's very important that she is focusing, as you said, on the defects, essentially, of the services or products in question rather than on the content. And she's let the jury decide that question.
Plaintiffs are borrowing language and strategy from tobacco and opioid litigation from a legal historian's perspective. Where do those comparisons stand firm and where do they break down?
So I think they stand firm in the idea that the plaintiff's attorneys in these cases really see a potential money train rolling through town in the hope of large, massive settlements coming from opioid types of cases, as you suggested, jewel vaping types of cases and cigarette tobacco litigation. So I think that's that's one thing we see.
Those, of course, are products that are ingested that cause alleged addiction. This is a little bit different. Nobody ingests social media.
Chapter 8: Could this trial lead to broader regulations for social media platforms?
So really what we're dealing here differently is what we might think of as behavioral addiction. Essentially, that's the allegation that's being made. But where I think the analogy really breaks down is that social media platforms are speech services or speech products.
They convey speech and speech is protected in the United States by the First Amendment, as long as it doesn't fall into an unprotected category like child pornography or obscenity. And we're not talking about in this case. Meanwhile, tobacco, cigarettes, vaping, opioids, those don't have any First Amendment based speech protection.
So the analogy holds true for part, but not on the big picture, because really what's at issue here is speech. And that's protected by the First Amendment. Cigarettes aren't First Amendment products protected by that. So I think that's where that analogy kind of breaks down a bit.
You touched on this, but I want to make sure that I'm clear. One of the biggest hurdles for plaintiffs here is causation. What do they have to prove to convince a jury that platform design directly contributed to harming a user?
And that's it. Did it directly contribute was a substantial factor in causing the harm. And so there's going to be fights, really, I think, over which platforms were watched, for how long were they watched? Because we're going to have, as I said, we've got two different defendants now left in this case. We've got Meta and Google. We've got YouTube and Instagram as the platforms in question.
There's also a question of pre-existing injury and other contributing factors that may have caused KGM problems. We don't know. But I suspect one argument the defendants might say is that She had other issues already before she watched social media platforms or things. Think about like the covid pandemic people, minors especially. Right.
Stressed out a stressful time that there may be multiple variables or factors that intervene or contribute to or cause the injuries that she says she's suffering. So I think that that's really a great issue or important issue, as he pointed out, is causation. So it's going to be tough for the plaintiffs to do. We're going to see battles of the experts on causation. And that always gets tricky.
Both sides will have experts saying that this caused it or this did not cause it. And then that's going to be possibly confusing for jurors. Right. Jurors have to weigh the credibility of that evidence and say, OK, I find this expert credible. I don't find that expert credible. You know, I find KGM credible. I don't find Zuckerberg credible, whatever it is. Right.
And that's going to be difficult for them to parse all that out.
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