The world’s largest tech companies are facing a legal showdown that could fundamentally change the way social media is designed.
The trial will take place in Los Angeles County Superior Court, where jury selection began on January 27. A new legal theory intended to spur greater regulation of social media platforms like TikTok, Snap, YouTube, and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram is being tested: Attorneys are gearing up to argue that the companies behind these platforms design their sites to be intentionally addictive, resulting in direct personal harm to users, especially children.
In total, the trial is expected to consist of nine cases, which judges across the country have compiled as some of the strongest indicators of this new argument. First on the docket is a case brought by a 20-year-old plaintiff identified as KGM, who says a lack of adequate guardrails on social media sites during her childhood led to compulsive use and mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm and risk of suicide.
The defendants named in KGM’s initial lawsuit were Bytedance, TikTok’s former majority owner; Snap, owner of Snapchat; Google, the owner of YouTube; and Meta. However, both Snap and TikTok settled the lawsuit in the days leading up to jury selection for undisclosed amounts, leaving only Meta and Google.
The results of these initial decisions are expected to serve as a testing ground for a second wave of federal cases headed to court this summer, in which several school districts, states and attorneys general plan to argue that social media a social nuisance and addictive for children.
Underlying all of this is a design-based claim: these tech companies use deliberately designed tricks to promote addictive behavior among young users. Court documents point to several specific user experience (UX) choices as evidence of this pattern. Here are some of the key examples in question.
[Illustration: FC]Endless scrolling
“Endless (or infinite) scrolling” is one of the main concerns in almost all cases filed. It refers to any feature that allows users to scroll through video content continuously and without interruptions.
One court documentfiled by the Florida Attorney General’s office against Meta, claiming that infinite scrolling “makes it difficult for young users to opt out [from the content] because there is no natural end point for the presentation of new information.”
In a trial before Bytedance’s settlement, KGM testified that TikTok’s endless scrolling feature disrupted her sleep and caused her to become addicted to the app. This is evident from confidential internal messages obtained by NPR in OctoberTikTok is aware of the addictive nature of the central ‘Explore’ page with endless scrolling and has even calculated that the number of videos needed to become addicted to the app is 260.
[Illustration: FC]Ephemeral content
Another pattern of social media design often cited in these legal documents is “ephemeral content.” This refers to any type of post that can only be viewed under certain time parameters, such as a one-time view on Snapchat or a 24-hour Instagram story.
The Florida Attorney General’s Office specifically mentioned Meta’s visual design features on Instagram Stories, which indicated that “the content would soon disappear forever,” noting that this tactic made young users feel more compelled to keep clicking on new content to avoid potential social fallout.
“Meta designed such ephemeral content features to induce a sense of ‘FOMO’, that is, a ‘fear of missing out,’ among young users, which would increase teen engagement,” the filing said.
[Illustration: FC]Algorithmic recommendations
One of the most troubling details in KGM’s testimony concerns the algorithmic recommendations she encountered on social media, which she says repeatedly led her to content with disturbing or harmful themes.
“I’ve gotten a lot of content promoting this kind of thing, like body checking and posts [of] what I eat in a day – just a cucumber – makes people feel bad if they don’t eat like that,” she said in her statement.
According to Florida Attorney General documents, Meta’s algorithms, by design, direct users to this type of content. The platforms, the document reads, “periodically [present] users with “emotionally affecting content to provoke intense reactions” (e.g., related to eating disorders, self-harm, suicide, violence, body image issues, and more), a result of what Meta reportedly calls the algorithms’ “preference amplification.” Despite Meta’s claims to the contrary, this design results in harm to young users.”
In turn, KGM’s lawyers base their arguments on past precedents set by cases ruling that products with a purposefully addictive design should be off-limits to children.
“Borrowing heavily from the behavioral and neurobiological techniques used by slot machines and exploited by the cigarette industry, [d]The defendants have purposefully embedded a series of design features into their products aimed at maximizing youth engagement to drive advertising revenue.” the lawsuit alleges. It adds: “Like the cigarette industry a generation earlier, [d]Defendants understand that a child user of today becomes an adult user tomorrow.”
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