On the second day, an expert witness for the plaintiff argues platforms are designed to ensnare young users in a vicious cycle of addiction and mental illness.
LOS ANGELES—On the second day of a landmark jury trial in Los Angeles Superior Court—the first to take on tech giants over claims their social media platforms are addicting kids and fueling a national mental health crisis—attorneys for YouTube questioned on Tuesday whether the video app is, in fact, social media.
At the center of the case is a 19-year-old California woman identified in court documents by the initials “K.G.M.” or “Kelsey G.M,” who is accusing the tech giants of engineering products that rewire young people’s brains and trap them in a cycle of addiction and mental illness.
In arguments on Feb. 10, Luis Li, an attorney for YouTube and its parent company, Google, said, “It’s not social media addiction when it’s not social media and it’s not an addiction. … ‘Miss G.M.’ is not addicted.”
The plaintiff’s attorneys assert that K.G.M. was a minor when she allegedly became addicted to social media platforms, which she claims led to damaging mental health impacts, including depression, body dysmorphia, and suicidal ideation.
The case is one of three bellwether trials that will presage how thousands of related cases brought by children, parents, school districts and state attorneys general are argued and tried—and what kind of damages might be expected.
Like Big Tobacco and National Opioid settlements before them, the cases mark a generational turning point and could have profound, long-term impacts on how the industry operates.
The lawsuit names Meta, Snap, ByteDance and Google—parent companies for Instagram, SnapChat, Tiktok and YouTube, respectively—as defendants. Snap and Bytedance settled privately with the plaintiff in late January, but remain in related cases.
‘You Can Stop That Anytime You Want’
Looking to redirect the narrative after plaintiff’s attorneys on Monday used baby alphabet blocks to argue that the case was “as easy as ABC”—or, “Addicting Children’s Brains,”—Li argued that YouTube was “not trying to deviously get into your brain” but rather asking what you want to watch and giving it to you for free.
He suggested the video app is something more akin to Netflix or the Disney channel, offering unparalleled empowerment for content creators and an indispensable tool for America’s teachers.
But attorneys for the plaintiff contend that YouTube and Instagram are designed with features—including “endless scroll” features like YouTube’s “Shorts” and ephemeral ones like Instagram’s “stories”—that keep kids plugged into a “frictionless” supply of a drug they can’t turn away from, even when they want to.
Li countered that the “endless scroll” is in fact not endless.
“You can stop that anytime you want,” he said, adding that it was “not that different” from Netflix loading the next episode of a series. “Likes,” he said, are akin to Amazon Prime reviews, helping users figure out what they want.
“The internet works this way,” Li said. “If you don’t like it, don’t click it. Just turn it off.” He noted users can control their experience by disabling likes, changing notifications, or opting for fewer Shorts.
In arguing that K.G.M. was not addicted to YouTube, Li said her user history on the platform proved as much.
Over the five-year period from 2020 to 2025, she averaged a daily overall use of 29 minutes, with around four minutes per day from AutoPlay, and one minute, 14 seconds on Shorts, Li said.
“When you strip away all the rhetoric,” he said, “what you’re left with is a simple truth: Infinite scroll is not infinite. In some cases … it’s as little as one minute, 14 seconds per day.”
