A recent jury trial found Meta and Google liable for causing a plaintiff’s mental health problems. That’s a truly bad ruling.
In a high-profile civil case in California, a jury held that Meta and Google were to blame for the depression and anxiety of a woman who claimed she was addicted to social media as a child.
The plaintiff, identified only as Kaley, was awarded $3 million in compensation, and another $3 million in punitive damages. Two other social media companies, Snapchat and TikTok, settled before the trial.
The companies are appealing, but tort lawyers are celebrating. They live for finding large companies with deep pockets to sue on behalf of millions of customers they can convince a sympathetic jury were harmed by that company’s products.
The rest of us, however, should be worried.
“Youth mental health crisis”
News reports on the case say that the verdict holds “Silicon Valley accountable for its role in fueling a youth mental health crisis”.
The plaintiff claimed, and the jury agreed, that social media apps were deliberately designed to be addictive, and that company executives were aware of this and failed to protect their youngest users.
Let us set aside, for a moment, the genuine sympathy one feels for the plaintiff. Her story of all-day doomscrolling and body dysmorphia is clearly painful, and no reasonable person wishes ill on a young person who struggles with her mental health.
But sympathy for an individual does not make good law. This verdict fails on multiple counts, and the precedent it sets should alarm anyone who believes in individual responsibility, the rules of evidence, and the limits of government control over private enterprise.
Cultural panic
The narrative driving this litigation, and the wider cultural panic around it, rests on the dubious claim that rising rates of anxiety and depression in young people are being caused by social media.
Even in this specific case, such a causal leap is far more shaky than it appears.
Yes, reported rates of adolescent mental ill-health have risen. But a rising trend in diagnosis is not the same thing as a rising epidemic of suffering.
We live in an era of dramatically improved mental health literacy. Conditions that were once dismissed, misunderstood, or simply never discussed – like anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, ADHD, or autism – are now named, recognised, screened for, and talked about in schools, on television, and, yes, on social media itself.
A generation has grown up being taught the language of mental health. They will, unsurprisingly, be far better at identifying and reporting mental health symptoms than any previous generation. That is not a crisis. That may well be progress.
Detection rates
Epidemiologists routinely warn against conflating increased detection rates with increased incidence. When we began screening more aggressively for certain cancers, diagnoses rose sharply – not because the disease had suddenly spread, but because we were looking harder.
Controlling for better screening shows that while cancer incidence is rising in some parts of the world, it is declining in the developed world. On average, global cancer incidence is slowly declining, and age-standardised death rates from cancer have fallen by almost 40% since 1990.
The share of people with mental health disorders has been rising slowly over time, but suddenly increased sharply when the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020. If we control for the pandemic effect, the same dynamic of increased detection rates is almost certainly at play in adolescent mental health.
Before concluding that Instagram caused a generation to despair, we ought to at least rule out the far less dramatic alternative: that we are simply getting better at detecting and treating people with mental health conditions.
It’s not like nobody was depressed or anorexic in the 1970s.
No proof
Throughout the trial, Meta and Google insisted that there was no scientific proof that social media caused mental health issues, and that they were being used as a scapegoat for multi-faceted emotional issues children faced that could have many root causes.
That is not just corporate denial; that is a defensible position.
The correlations between social media use and mental health outcomes are real, but correlations are not causes, and in a domain as complex as adolescent psychology – shaped by family environment, economic stress, genetic predisposition, peer dynamics, and a dozen other variables, single-cause explanations should be treated with deep suspicion.
Meta and Google fought back by underscoring the emotional and physical abuse Kaley’s medical records indicated she experienced at home, and made the point that her own therapist never documented that social media use was a factor in her mental health problems.
These are not trivial observations. The very fact that a child is allowed to spend all day on her phone, doomscrolling, points to a home environment that is not conducive to good mental health.
Parenting
For every Kaley, there are any number of kids who use the exact same social media apps, but do not end up suffering from anxiety, depression, poor body image, or low self-esteem. Or at least, do not end up suffering any more than any generation before them did.
Like with any good thing – eating snacks, watching TV, playing video games, staying up late, yacking to boy- or girlfriends on the phone instead of doing homework – parents are supposed to teach children the value of moderation and self-discipline.
When parents fail to do so, it is perverse to blame the companies that create the products that children become “addicted” to.
An obese child isn’t a victim of companies that make burgers, crisps or chocolates. They’re a victim of bad parenting (or unfortunate genetics).
Similarly, a child who becomes “addicted” to social media (or video games, or any other technology product) is not a victim of the technology firms, but a victim of poor parenting.
Building a better product is not evil
Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that over-use of social media can cause negative mental health outcomes in some young people. Although it would be hard to prove causation, it is certainly plausible. Spending much of your day doomscrolling (or staring at a television) does older people no good, either.
This verdict makes a second unjustifiable leap: the claim that making a product appealing, engaging, and difficult to put down constitutes a defect. That it constitutes intent to do harm, or at least negligent disregard for the safety of (young) customers.
The plaintiff’s lawyers argued that features like infinite scroll, frequent notifications, autoplaying videos and beauty filters made apps like Instagram and YouTube equivalent to a “digital casino”.
But this framing, however rhetorically effective before a jury, is conceptually incoherent as a legal standard. Every consumer product in human history has been engineered to be as useful, satisfying, and compelling as possible.
That is what good product design is. Netflix autoplay keeps you watching. Spotify’s algorithm finds songs you’ll love. A well-written novel makes you miss your bedtime. A chocolate cake is engineered, through millennia of culinary refinement, to be irresistible. Are confectioners next?
Imagine a radio station or a music player that required you to press a button every time you wanted to listen to a new track. Autoplaying the next track might be “addictive”, but prohibiting autoplay would make the product awful.
Protecting people from themselves
The classical liberal tradition has always held that the legitimate function of the state is to protect individuals from force and fraud, but not to protect them from products they freely choose to use and find enjoyable.
Kaley was not deceived about what Instagram or YouTube were. She was not coerced onto the platforms. She found them compelling, as hundreds of millions of people do. That she, or her parents, did not manage that use effectively is a matter for the family, the school, and perhaps a therapist, but it is not a basis for a jury to punish the engineering teams that made the products.
The argument that users cannot be expected to regulate themselves because the platforms use techniques to keep a user’s attention is, at its core, a denial of human agency.
You might as well blame supermarkets for merchandising that convinces shoppers to buy products they don’t need, and then hit them with punitive damages when a customer spends money on frivolous purchases that should have been spent on nappies and baby formula.
Free will
An IEEE Spectrum piece endorsing the verdict approvingly cites the claim that “there’s actually no neuroscientific evidence for the presence of willpower”.
One hardly knows where to begin with this. If willpower does not exist, then not only are the defendants absolved of any intentional wrongdoing, since they too were merely following their predestined fate, but the entire edifice of moral and legal responsibility collapses.
If every “manipulative” technique is now a punishable attempt to “override individual control”, then we should ban merchandising, advertising, and salespeople.
Maybe people should be allowed to watch videos (or buy products) only when they specifically ask for them, without having seen or heard anything that might exploit their lack of willpower. (How they might learn about the existence of the videos that are available is left as an exercise for the trial jury.)
It is absurd to selectively invoke the claim that free will does not exist to punish corporations, while simultaneously expecting courts, parents, and teachers to hold individuals responsible for their behaviour.
Red herring
Comparisons were drawn to the legal crusade in the 1990s against Big Tobacco. This analogy is superficially compelling, but substantively misleading.
Tobacco companies were found liable principally because they lied. They were punished and regulated not because their products were addictive, but because they denied, suppressed and falsified evidence that their product caused cancer, while publicly insisting it was safe. That is fraud.
The tobacco precedent, moreover, took decades of litigation, mountains of internal documents demonstrating deliberate deception, and ultimately legislative action to hold companies responsible for how they marketed their products.
What the jury in this case has done is compress that entire process into a single trial about one young woman’s complex and painful personal history, on the basis of contested science and a legal theory – defective design – that could in principle be applied to any product that anyone has ever overused.
Social media making a teenage girl feel anxious about her appearance is not fraud.
It is, arguably, an unfortunate consequence of a medium through which people compare themselves to others, but then, people have been jealous of the good looks of others long before the internet came along.
Glossy magazines, television advertisements, and even just walking down a school corridor under the gaze of the popular crowd could play havoc with a teenager’s self-image, and cause real harm, including anxiety, depression and eating disorders.
Shakedown
The verdict is tied to about 2,000 other pending lawsuits brought by parents and school districts against social media companies. That is not a reckoning. That is not justice. That is a pure shakedown, with trial lawyers collecting millions in commissions.
The companies that will pay are the ones whose products billions of people use voluntarily and derive genuine value from – platforms that have connected isolated teenagers to communities, enabled creative expression, provided news and entertainment, provided access to skills and education, and given people tools to build businesses and audiences.
The customers that will pay are those of us who are not addicted to social media, and can control our impulse to just scroll endlessly on social media. This verdict makes those companies legally culpable for letting you discover content that is too much to your liking.
No more woodworking or piano or maths or prog rock videos for me! No more reruns of QI! I must be shown stuff I don’t want to watch, because I might be 13 and lack free will and spend too much time watching videos.
None of that was in the jury’s mind when they decided they wanted the companies punished. But it will be felt, all the same, in chilling effects on product design, in compliance costs passed to users, and in the slow drift toward a world where no company can make a product that people enjoy too much without bracing for litigation.
In loco parentis
Personal responsibility is not a victim-blaming slogan. It is the indispensable foundation of a free society.
When we abandon it, when we tell people that their choices are not really theirs, that the systems around them are to blame, and that governments must step in to protect people from the consequences of their own behaviour, we do not empower the vulnerable.
We infantilise them. And we deny everyone else the right to choose.
We place the government in loco parentis, not only over our children, but over all of us, with all the authoritarian powers of a nanny. A “governess”, if you will.
Punishing companies for making their products too good perverts the very notion of justice and consumer rights.
[Image: A young woman using a smartphone, Kaboompics from Freerange Stock]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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