Santa Barbara teen Lola Leachman admits she’s addicted to social media.
“I can’t stop,” says the 16-year-old, who spends several hours a day on TikTok and Instagram. “I know I have a problem and I should try to limit myself … toget off my phone and do something else.
“But sometimes — I just really don’t want to.”
Lola’s not unusual. The average American teen spends four to five hours per day on social media.
“I definitely think ‘addictive’ is a fair term,” says Johnny Yasko, 16, who has a 900-day Snapchat streak with one friend — and says he’s put off doing homework to scroll (and scroll and scroll) Instagram. “There’s short-form content where you tell yourself you’re only gonna watch a couple — but the one you were gonna end on isn’t something you like, so you keep going….”
The jury in a landmark verdict last week thought “addictive” was an exceptionally fair term. They found Meta (which owns Instagram and Facebook) and Google (which owns YouTube) not only designed their platforms to be addictive — but knew they could harm the mental health of kids.
Snapchat and TikTok were also named in the lawsuit but settled before the trial.
The damages are just $6 million — a pittance to trillion-dollar tech giants. Meta and Google will appeal and likely win in the end because our legal system favors parties with near-unlimited resources.
But this ruling is the first time social-media companies have been held accountable for deliberately exploiting the developing brains of minors. For 30 years (!), these apps have been protected by a federal law that considers them not publishers but tools that cannot be held responsible for content that their users post.
So, the lawyers in this case went after these platforms as tools: They showed that their very architecture — features such as infinite scroll, beauty filters, constant notifications, “Like” buttons, and disappearing stories — was designed to hook users. And the impact on those users can be serious.
The plaintiff is a young woman who claims she suffered depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, and social withdrawal as a result of her addiction to YouTube and Instagram, starting when she was 6 and 11, respectively.
Critics of the verdict say it’s a slippery slope from blaming apps for depression to, say, suing Pepperidge Farm for causing obesity with their damned delicious Milanos. And it’s a fair point; when adults become obsessed with beauty filters, spend our days tallying Likes, and fail to put our phones down, well, shame on us. But kids are a different story.
Thousands of cases await trial from parents claiming their children’s lives spiraled after prolonged social-media use. And it’s worth remembering the playbook that ultimately brought down Big Tobacco: Proof of addiction by design, evidence of company-wide deception, and a history of targeting children without warning of the potential harms.
Aforementioned TikTok junkie Lola Leachman says she has to actively work to avoid letting self-doubt creep in when she’s scrolling her feeds.
“Sometimes, I see video after video of ‘Here’s my two-hour ab routine!’ or ‘Here’s my low-calorie, high-protein recipe!’ And I just think, Why is everybody so freakishly skinny right now?! What’s happening??” she says. “If there’s a 10-year-old girl on TikTok and every video she sees is a 20-year-old who you can see their ribcage, she’s gonna go, I don’t look like that. Should I look like that?? That’s not something a child should have to deal with.”
Still, Lola thinks the responsibility for helping kids navigate social media should fall to parents — not tech companies or our government. When she first got a phone, her own parents added a password-protected tool that shut off social media after a specified number of minutes.
Alas, that verdict was quickly overturned:
“I figured out the password,” Lola said, “and turned it off.”
