As a landmark social media trial winds down, lawyers engage in final, heated skirmishes over the woman’s addiction narrative.
LOS ANGELES—An expert witness, called by defendants in a high-stakes trial considering whether social media companies designed their platforms to be addictive to children despite known harms, on March 10 told a Los Angeles Superior Court jury that genetics and external stressors—not social media addiction—likely led a 20-year-old plaintiff to develop multiple psychiatric disorders.
Dr. Sonia Krishna, a child and adolescent psychiatrist based in Austin, Texas, told the court that the plaintiff, identified in court documents as “Kaley G.M.” or “K.G.M.,” did not in fact suffer from a clinical social media addiction, and that her mental health outcomes would have been the same without exposure to social media.
“I would not say she has a social media addiction,” Krishna said, acknowledging a period of “heavy use” but suggesting that there were “other reasons” that drove it.
“I don’t think she had impairment in her functioning. … She was able to attend school every day.”
Learning disorders diagnosed since kindergarten, a volatile family life, genetically determined risk, difficulty with peer relationships, and bullying online and off all drove “Miss G.M.,” as defense attorneys called her, to develop anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphic disorders, according to Krishna.
“I think number one for most mental health disorders is genetics. … And it sounds like it goes back to her grandparents,” Krishna said. The witness did not elaborate on an alleged history of mental illness among the plaintiff’s grandparents or on whether that information came from her medical records.
The current case, which names Instagram (parent company Meta) and YouTube (parent company Google) as defendants, is one of a handful of bellwether trials expected to have a profound impact on how thousands of related personal injury civil cases—brought by children, parents, school districts, and attorneys general across the country—will play out.
K.G.M. also sued Snapchat (parent company Snap Inc.) and TikTok (parent company ByteDance). Both companies settled privately days before the trial began, but they are still named in related cases.
To a contentious battle over the meaning and import of social media addiction—a relatively novel phenomenon that is by no means standardized in terms of diagnoses, treatment, or even an understanding of its true scope—the witness added a new take: the idea that problematic social media use is often a coping mechanism in response to underlying psychiatric illness.
“A lot of teens are on social media, so it comes up very often in my conversations,“ said Krishna, who sees patients remotely in her private practice. ”Most are able to have a healthy relationship with it, but some people use it too much. It’s usually because they’re trying to cope with an underlying psychiatric disorder.”
When she can treat that disorder, the compulsive social media use symptoms usually go away, Krishna said.
That contrasts with what witnesses for the plaintiff have called a “maladaptive coping mechanism” that itself became a debilitating illness for K.G.M.
Experts testified about skyrocketing rates of social media addiction among adolescents and about a growing body of research that points to an array of resulting psychological harms.
Defendants YouTube and Instagram, the plaintiff’s complaint alleges, have “borrowed heavily” from mechanisms used in slot machines to engineer features and algorithms that hook users and keep them trapped in a vicious cycle of addiction, withdrawal, and regret.
