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We all need to take steps to break the social media addiction

Do you find social media addictive? If so then, you might be up for a multi-million dollar pay-out.

That’s what a woman in Los Angeles was awarded this week after a jury found that Instagram’s owner Meta and YouTube had made their products deliberately addictive. The plaintiff — named only as Kaley G.M. — was awarded a total of $3 million.

Reaction to the case has been predictably polarized. On the one hand endless potential plaintiffs (and of course lawyers) will spot a payout bonanza. They will claim that they have also suffered anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and other mental health conditions as a result of spending too much time online.

On the other side there are free-marketeers bemoaning that this is all just going to be one big hustle and that there is little else to see here. They say that judgements like that in Los Angeles will not just punish tech companies like Meta and Google. They claim that this in turn will prevent the big tech companies from making further AI innovations which may yet cure everything from the common cold to cancer.

In fact all this misses the much bigger point.

Kaley G.M.’s case succeeded because the plaintiff was a child at the time. And her lawyers showed that the big tech companies deliberately targeted their products to be addictive to children. “They knew” said the attorney for the plaintiff. “They targeted the children.”

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