YouTube argued on Tuesday that it was not social media and was not addictive, on the second day of opening statements in a landmark social media addiction trial.
YouTube, its lawyers said, is an entertainment platform more like Netflix than a social network like Facebook. People use the video streaming app to learn how to cook, knit, and become pop stars, not endlessly scroll, they added.
“It’s not trying to get in your brain and rewire it,” Luis Li, YouTube’s lawyer, said of the app’s video recommendation algorithm. “It’s just asking you what you like to watch.”
In this case, a 20-year-old California woman identified as K.G.M. has accused YouTube and Meta’s Instagram of creating addictive apps that harmed mental health. The trial, in the California Superior Court of Los Angeles, is the first in a series against Meta, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube, testing whether social media use can lead to addiction comparable to slot machines at casinos and cigarettes.
Teenagers, school districts, and states have filed thousands of lawsuits against the tech companies, accusing them of designing their platforms to encourage excessive use.
The social media companies have argued that there is no scientific evidence proving that their platforms cause addiction. They have also pointed to a federal law that protects them from liability for what their users post online.
But a win by the plaintiff in this trial could open the door to significant monetary damages in similar lawsuits. Judges could also order the companies to change their app designs.
This summer, a second set of cases will be tried in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland. In those cases, school districts and states plan to argue that social media is a public nuisance and that they have had to shoulder the costs of treating a generation of youths suffering from addictive social media use.
K.G.M., or Kaley, sued the social media companies in 2023. She accused them of engineering their apps in a way that created compulsive use, leading to body dysmorphia, anxiety and depression.
She settled with Snap and TikTok under undisclosed terms before the trial began.
On Monday, her lawyer, Mark Lanier, argued that K.G.M. had become hooked on YouTube and Instagram as a child because the apps were like “digital casinos,” with features such as endless swiping that are comparable to the handle of a slot machine, he said.
Lanier pointed to internal documents from YouTube’s parent company, Google, referring to features as “slot machines.” In separate documents, Meta employees have twice stated that the company’s tactics remind them of those used by tobacco companies.
Meta’s lawyers pushed back in their opening statement Monday, arguing that K.G.M.’s mental health issues were caused by familial abuse and turmoil, not social media. They also presented medical records to show that social media addiction was not a focus of her therapy sessions.
Lawyers for YouTube focused more on the app’s features.
Li showed the jury screenshots of an Ariana Grande music video and highlights of a National Football League game, arguing that YouTube was a source of creativity and income for young entertainers.
Features such as infinite scroll and video recommendations are meant to help users, not harm them, he said.
Between 2020 and 2024, K.G.M. used YouTube for just 29 minutes a day, he said. Of that, she spent only four minutes watching videos that had been automatically surfaced, and much of the time was spent listening to music, Li said. She spent just over a minute each day watching videos on YouTube Shorts, which uses an endless scroll feature.
Li also argued that features the plaintiff’s lawyer had described as addictive could be turned off in YouTube’s settings.
“If you don’t like it, turn it off — it’s that simple,” he said. “Infinite scroll is not infinite.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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