US trial lawyer says Meta, YouTube ‘engineered addiction’ in children


By AFP
February 9, 2026

Meta and Google-owned YouTube “engineered addiction” in children, a lawyer for the plaintiff said on Monday as a landmark trial on the effects of social media on minors began in earnest in a California court.

“This case is about two of the richest corporations in history who have engineered addiction in children’s brains,” the attorney, Mark Lanier, told the jury in his opening statement.

“I’m going to show you evidence that these companies built machines designed to addict the brains of children, and they did it on purpose,” he added.

The Los Angeles trial before Judge Carolyn Kuhl focuses on allegations that a 20-year-old woman identified as Kayley G.M. suffered severe mental harm because she became addicted to social media as a child.

“I’m going to talk about how Google and Meta deliberately designed their products, YouTube and Instagram, to hook users and to keep them coming back — not by accident, by design — because addiction is profitable,” the lawyer said.

Lanier told the jurors that he would use evidence from the companies “in their own words” as well as brain science to demonstrate why “‘just put it down’ is never an option.”

The lawyer described Instagram as an “endless feed” of people’s “filtered lives” where users “spend time waiting for social validation.”

YouTube “plays the next video before you can decide to stop,” using an algorithm “that learns what keeps you watching and feeds you more of it, whether you search for it or not.”