LOS ANGELES (BP) – A court case over social media’s addictive properties is the first in a series in the coming months, fueling discussions over technology’s proper place in society and parental responsibilities for hedging its influence.
“K.G.M.” is a young woman among many suing several social media companies. She claims that watching YouTube from the time she was 6 and having accounts with Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok by 14 led to her addiction and bouts of physical and emotional harm.
Snap, which owns Snapchat, and TikTok settled in January. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified last week, pushing back against claims that Instagram was intentionally harmful to children.
The case that brought several school districts as fellow plaintiffs points to internal documents that include Meta researchers referring to Instagram as “a drug … we’re basically pushers” and a TikTok report stating that “minors do not have executive mental function to control their screen time.” Snapchat executives said users have an “addiction [with] no room for anything else.”
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose book “The Anxious Generation” has become an oft-cited work for student ministry leaders, addressed the case on a recent podcast.
“There’s never a consumer product that hurts so many kids, but it turns out that I vastly underestimated the harm because I focused on mental illness,” he said. “And what I now came to see, what I’ve come to see since the book came out, is that the far larger harm is the destruction of the human ability to pay attention.”
During the interview, Haidt happened to have comments from social media leaders on his screen and began reading one.
“Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of mental health effects like loss of analytical skill, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy and increased anxiety,” he read from a TikTok report. “It interferes with personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities and connecting with loved ones.”
Other reports, from TikTok alone, refer to addiction and optimizing for engagement, he added.
“There are so many others where they talk about addiction [and] how they optimize for engagement. And that’s just from TikTok.”
The suit is one of three making up the JCCP 5255 social media cases. The other two are scheduled for March 9 and May 11. They occur in an atmosphere where 20 states have enacted laws concerning social media and children. Additionally, Australia became the first country to ban social media for children under 16, with Denmark and France considering similar regulations.
“With many children gaining unsupervised access to the internet at younger and younger ages, there has been an explosion in awareness of the harms this is bringing to many children,” said the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission on a page devoted to resources for protecting children online.
The trade of textbooks for laptops and tablets in schools was expected to generate brighter students. But Gen Z is the first generation to test as cognitively less capable than their predecessors at the same age, and screens are the primary factor, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath recently told Congress.
“Here’s a fun experiment you can try,” he said. “Take any state [National Assessment of Educational Progress] data [and] compare that to when that state adopted one-to-one technology widely, and watch what happens. The NAEP data will plateau and then start to drop.”
The case is getting more consideration as Big Tech’s Big Tobacco Moment. Horvath’s opening comments to Congress referenced the importance of something being in its proper place, rather than in control.
“Rather than determining what we want our children to do and gearing education towards that, we are redefining education to better suit the tool. That’s not progress; that is surrender.”
The documents are the proof, Haidt told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, that tech leaders were aware of what they created.
“They knew … that they were addicting kids,” he said. “The program was designed to be addictive. Instagram was designed to be addictive. They know they are addicting kids [and] they reward their engineers for increasing engagement. … We know that they did this on purpose.
“And now, finally, for the first time in all of their history, they are facing a jury and are going to be held accountable.”
