Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Can You Sue For Social Media Addiction?

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

The Internet as we know it is on trial. A major suit claiming social media addiction could give the government unprecedented power.Support my independent journalism:🙏 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz   🗞️ Substack: https://www.usermag.co   A landmark lawsuit in California claims that social media giants like Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat are intentionally designing their platforms to be addictive, causing severe mental health issues in minors. But is this really about protecting children, or is it a backdoor to destroy the free and open web? Experts say this lawsuit would set a dangerous legal precedent that gives the government total authority to regulate, censor, and control online content.I sat down with journalist Liz Nolan Brown to break down the bellwether case that could end Section 230 protections and force Big Tech to work with the government to censor the internet like never before. We discuss the controversial claims of "social media addiction," the lack of scientific evidence linking apps to depression, and why this moral panic is similar to that surrounding the telephone decades ago.Ultimately, this lawsuit is about who controls the internet and whether the government should have the power to control 100% of what we see and read online. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz     https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0    https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenzhttps://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social https://twitter.com/taylorlorenz Topics covered:The "Kagome" lawsuit against Meta, Google, and TikTokDoes social media cause depression and anxiety?The threat to Section 230 and free speechWhy "design defects" are the new legal weaponThe history of moral panics in technology online privacy and surveillancegovernment control of the internet

You can't make the internet so that no one is ever triggered by anything because, yeah, you wouldn't have anything left to have online. Right now, there's a legal case working its way through the California court that could have massive implications on the internet as we know it. An anonymous 19-year-old California woman is claiming that she became addicted to social media as a minor, which caused her to have low self-esteem, body dysmorphia, depression, and anxiety. She claims that it's not the content on these social media apps that call. these issues, but the ways these platforms are designed, arguing that meta, bite dance, and Google should all be held accountable. But held accountable, how? By giving users more control over their data, empowering people to direct their own online

experiences and cracking down on the business models of big tech? No, this anonymous plaintiff doesn't want to do any of that. Instead, her lawsuit is just one of thousands leveraging the concept of social media addiction, something that every single major expert actually studying this topic has reiterated does not exist to push mass surveillance and censorship laws. The laws and legal precedent that this 19-year-old woman and groups like the Heritage Foundation seek to set by pushing the idea of social media addiction would give the government complete authority to censor any and all content that they don't like all in the name of protecting children from social media addiction. Liz Nolan Brown is a

long-time friend of mine and a journalist covering all of this. She's joining me today to break down this case, talk about what's at stake, and discuss why it's so crucial to fight against these legal efforts that would destroy a free and open web. Hi, Liz. Welcome. Hi, thanks for having me on. Thank you so much for being here. I think you've come on the show before, but it's always great to have you back. Today I want to talk about this lawsuit that you covered, which you wrote was this landmark social media addiction trial. It's happening in California, the state that I live in that is always sort of at the scene of the crime for this stuff, I feel like. Can you tell me a little bit about this lawsuit? What's happening and what's at stake? So basically, thousands of people, including

hundreds of families, hundreds of school districts, like 40 state attorneys general have all sued social media sites claiming that their features are addictive to people in general and especially to minors. And the judges have consolidated these into a couple of different cases so that they're not having to, you know, do 1,000 different trials or something like that. And the first of these sort of they call bellwether cases, they're sort of going to be like the test cases of the theories that all of these cases are based on. The first of those three that are going to happen starts today in Los Angeles County. So tell me what these people are arguing. Yeah. So the case that started, there's a 19-year-old woman who is going by the pseudonym KGM. She says that she says that

she started using social media when she was under 10 years old, and she became addicted to it and spent way too much time on it and that it contributed to all sorts of harms, that it caused her to have depression and anxiety and body dysmorphia and self-esteem issues and ultimately societal thoughts. And she's blaming the social media companies for all of this. Her suit originally sued Snap and Meta and TikTok and Google because she used YouTube, but Snap has settled. So now it's just Google and meta and TikTok that are part of the lawsuit. And so she says that, you know, their features caused her to become addicted and that they intentionally did this or at least that they were negligent in in not stopping it. And so therefore she's suing them for negligence and

failure to warn. What proof does she have that, you know, all of these issues in her life were caused by social media. These are all issues that are, especially eating disorders are known to start showing themselves around the time of adolescence, depression. You know, we know that actually it's not correlated with social media use. We know for a fact based on overwhelming evidence that there is actually no relationship between social media use and poor mental health outcomes among young people. So how is she attempting to prove this? That's going to be one of the big key issues. And I think one of the big hurdles for her to overcome in this case is proving that this was caused by social media because we've been through decades of sort of awareness campaigns

about issues like depression and how they are complex and they are not just a matter of cause and effect. It's not just something bad happens to you or something sad happens to you when you get it. It's an interplay of environmental factors, social factors, you know, your biology, the things that happened to you, all of it. So I think that that is going to be one of the major roadblocks in this case is, you know, trying to say that this is because of TikTok or this is because of Instagram and not because of many other things that were going on in her life. I mean, part of the case is based on this idea that she was a victim of cyberbullying, that she was bullied by people at school, that she was a victim of extortion,

where people, you know, convinced her to show them pictures of herself and that tried to get money from her for them. So, I mean, these are all things that could contribute to depression, to anxiety, things like that. And while some of these were mediated by social media, you know, you'd be hard for us to say that social media is the fault because teenagers are bullied one another. Yeah. I mean, it reminds me. I did a video recently where I was talking about just like the history of moral panics and how people were calling on telephone companies when landlines became pervasive to regulate, you know, the speech happening on them because people were getting angry and people were saying horrible things or making threats over phone calls. And so people are like, this must be stopped, you know? I guess these same people would argue that we should, you know, also regulate letters. I guess the government should read everyone's letters, right, in case you write a threatening letter to someone. I don't know. It's, it's, it's. It's. It's. seems like a lot of it is kind of speculative. Why is this like case so important? Because I feel like we've seen a lot of these claims and a lot of dubious claims. And not that this girl didn't

have a horrible time on the internet. It sounds like she did. Trust me, I have also had a horrible time on the internet and a lot of times. But like I don't know that these platforms would have solved that. Why is this case so significant? Yeah. This is the first time that social media addiction claims are going before a jury trial. So this has the potential to shape these thousands of lawsuits that have been filed to sort of influence the way they turn out, not to mention any future lawsuits that might be filed. And really, there's, you know, there's a huge amount at stake here. Generally, a lot of claims like this are based on the content that is published on these platforms, right? And as we all know, content is protected by the First Amendment.

Speech, unless it falls into one of a very few narrow categories, is protected by the First Amendment. And when it comes to Internet speech, that's, you know, by third parties on, on Internet platforms, it's also protected by Section 230. So what happens is the this case could end up having a big effect on how tech companies operate going forward, whether or not they feel the need to quash a lot of speech, whether or not they're going to be subject to constant lawsuits, which if they are, you know, is going to result in especially smaller tech companies being sort of unable to operate because they're going to be so afraid of lawsuits. So this really could change the way that social media companies and tech companies in general

operate if these lawsuits, and this is the first one, are successful. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon. on via the link below or by a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.com. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues and for challenging power. As you can imagine, advertisers are not exactly eager to work with somebody who covers a lot of the topics that I cover and talks about the things that I talk about. These videos I make are entirely funded by you and I can't continue to make them without your support. So if you get any value out of the videos that I create and you want me to be able to

create more, please support me on Patreon or Substack via the links below. On Patreon, I do bonus episodes, monthly Q&A live streams, and post frequent updates about my work. My Substack newsletter gives you a bi-weekly roundup of everything that I'm seeing and reading and paying attention to online. You can also get my newsletter on Patreon. Once again, the links to everything are below in the description. Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. As you mentioned, I think the fundamental thing here for people to understand is this is ultimately about the content. It's about the speech on the platforms. Because when you look at her case and you, you know, I was reading your article over coverage of it. Yeah, okay, she accessed this content via these platforms, but her issue is with the content.

And it's very ridiculous. Like she says things like, for instance, you know, when she's talking about how she got an eating disorder, she says, I have gotten a lot of content promoting like body checking, posts of what I eat in a day, maybe just a cucumber, people, people, making people feel bad if they don't eat like that, which it's like, okay. That's content. That is the content. And they're trying to say it's not content because they're trying to get around the First Amendment issues here because obviously this is protected speech and it is spoken

by third parties. And they're trying to get around that by saying like, no, it's the design features. It's things like the infinite scroll. It's things like the recommendation algorithms which recommend this content. People wouldn't have strong emotions about the design features. It's clearly the content that is causing the strong emotion. You don't get anxiety about endless scroll independent of the things that you're seeing on scroll. You don't get anxiety about the content that's recommended to you independent of what's actually

in that content, the speech. So, you know, people are trying to act like you can separate these things. And clearly, no, it is the content that is, you know, causing strong feelings, causing quote unquote addiction and things like that. I feel like this is something that people have a really hard time understanding. And when I try to explain to people that this whole stuff about social media addiction is quite literally just another moral panic about a new form of media. And they say, no, as you mentioned, oh, it's about the tech. It's about the design features. You know that it's not about the technology

because if the entire internet was just Wikipedia, informative Wikipedia articles, that's like a litmus test. I'm like if all of YouTube and all of TikTok was just informative information about boring topics like science and math and learning, would you have this lawsuit? Would you be claiming it's addicting? Would you? No, you wouldn't because you like that it's the, it's the content. It's the content. And that is why you know that this is ultimately about speech and this is ultimately about restricting speech, basically, and restricting certain types of speech. Exactly, because these design features, I mean, you have things like Coursera or whatever, like learning platforms that use these same sort of design features, right? They send notifications on the phone,

on people's smartphones. They send you a bunch of emails saying, hey, here's what you're missing. They have endless scroll on their feeds. They have all these same design features that social media has. And people aren't claiming that they're addicted to these. sort of online learning websites or to things like that. So it's clearly, yes, it's clearly about the speech about the content, not just about the design features. The Coursera thing is such a good point. There are so many of these online learning portals, as you said, that actually, if you

were to go to them, they look almost exactly like YouTube. Or shopping sites. Right. When you're scrolling down like Ann Taylor's websites and it auto reloads. Like, yeah, people, I don't think people are freaking out about that or making sure that, yeah, there must be page numbers on, you know, certain things. I also think of just even food menus, like when you go on something like Uber Eats and you're scrolling this endless stream of food options or whatever, right? Like you're not addicted to it.

I guess some people would say like, oh, maybe it makes me want to order Uber Eats or something. Well, because you're looking at tasty food. If that entire, like think of Uber Eats, but think of the only thing on there is saltine crackers. That's the only thing, right? Like, no, you wouldn't claim that that app is like addicting and making you order junk food or whatever. The point is, like, it's the content. I get so much flack when I say, like, stop pushing these narratives about addiction. They're like what this moral panic is predicated on because people are like, but social media

addiction's real, despite the fact it is not real. It is very much not a real thing. Just the way that like music addiction is not a real thing. Like you can't become addicted to media in this way. Like why is framing the internet and social media as addictive so harmful? Yeah. I mean, I think that this is a very calculated strategy and it's in part done by politicians who want to grab more control of internet speech.

in part drawn by like personal injury lawyers who are mad that, you know, they can only sue random individuals for their speech and not the big tech companies that have the deep pockets behind them. So it's a very calculated strategy using the language of addiction when you talk about social media because people know that that gets attention, right? You hear addiction and suddenly it's like, oh, well, no, they couldn't just use willpower to overcome it. You couldn't just rely on parents to, you know, parents and stop their kids from using these

things because it's addiction, it's an addictive substance. And it sort of activates this thing in people's brain where they hear that and they think, you know, they think that people are powerless to stop it on their own. So it really plays into this narrative where we need things like these lawsuits. We need things like government regulations of speech online. We need all of these external controls of speech online because, you know, people can't possibly overcome this addiction by themselves. And it also sort of lends itself to using the same playbook as you use for big tobacco, which is like a substance that really. really is biologically physically addictive, right? Like it's worlds apart than, you know, TikTok or Instagram.

But you see again and again that comparison being made by politicians, being made by lawyers who are representing plaintiffs in cases like these, saying to the media, we're going to go after them now like we went after big tobacco. It's time to hold them accountable. And you really see people trying to drive home this idea that the tech companies are just like big tobacco because that's the narrative they want to push. I think another thing that people forget, too, is that like people, can have problematic use of all sorts of things, right?

Like you can engage in sort of a problematic use of television or video games. Anything can become a crutch for people who are already struggling with mental health issues or with self-esteem issues and things like that. And I think that's what we see with social media is people sometimes do use them as a crutch when they're already suffering from pre-existing issues, but then they reverse the causation there. They think, like, oh, this is causing my problems or they want people to think, this is causing my problems rather than I'm turning to this because I already have problems.

I think it's so important for people to understand. This is about content. This is about media. And all of these arguments about media have been made of every other new form and type of media. Like when you sort of explain it in the realm of music, I think people understand where it's like you could argue Spotify is addicting you to listening to hours and hours of music by suggesting songs and, you know, putting this endless scroll of music and

whatever's next. But of course we understand like that isn't in. apparently harmful. Yeah, novels. This is even going back like hundreds of years, people felt the same way when paperback novels first became a big thing, worrying that they were causing harm to young people in various ways. So, you know, yeah, you've seen this with so many kinds of media over time again and again and again. Well, you know what's so funny, too, as people would be like, well, novels don't have an endless scroll. You know what was used as proof that they were addicting that children were rereading the novels. Children would reread the novels endlessly because they were so addicted to them. And I mean,

I just think like people will be like, oh, well, there's design. features. Guess what? Have you ever heard of the concept of cliffhangers? There was so much drama and television shows as well. They would be like, you know, these these cartoons for children are addicting and they're intentionally are soap operas, you know, they're leaving people with cliffhangers or they're doing this to keep them watching and it's nefarious. And again, like, you know it's about the content because none of these other platforms that have the exact same design features as all of these other things you're using. I think also what is so upsetting about all this too, even if you took all these people at their word and social media was so

addicting and all these design features are so addicting and evil. They're able to target you effectively. They're able to produce these, you know, highly engaging feeds, et cetera, because they're harvesting massive amounts of data. And yet absolutely zero of these advocates that is, you know, launching these lawsuits or doing anything is fighting for data privacy. Like, they're not doing any of that. So you know that they only care about the content because they actually really thought

that these tech platforms were, you know, it was the design features and it was the way that they targeted you and the algorithms and stuff, then why wouldn't you fight for data privacy reform, which removes their ability to do all of that stuff, to make engagement-based algorithms? I think that's a good point. And I think also, you know, like you said, like, there are so many people that use these platforms every day and don't use them in a problematic way, too. No one ever mentions the fact that, like, the vast majority of people that are using social media are not, you know, saying that it's causing them great deals of harm. I think what's so insidious is that we know from an overwhelming amount of research, there is no correlation between social media use and mental health problems among children. That is definitive. In fact, not using social media being blocked from social media has a worse mental health effect than completely moderate social media use among children.

But so many young people and so many adults even are fed the narratives from the media and from the people pushing this moral panic that, oh, it's not, you know, all of these other world problems that we know are actually linked to mental health problems and depression and even disorders, et cetera, et cetera. It's social media that's causing all the problems in your life. And I see so many young people that believe these narratives. And when you talk to them, they blame like sort of all of the ills in their life or everything they didn't like about being a teenager, being a young adult on social media. And I'm like, guys, I grew up before most social media.

I guess we had Facebook and stuff. But like, these are age old problems. You know, this is a really tough time in your life for at any point. And let's not talk about all of the other problems, by the way, the school shootings, the economic collage. the like, like, we actually have a lot of really bad problems in this country. And we're, we have a lot of issues that we know are causing youth mental health problems. But because people and kids and adults even aren't being told that they blame it all on social media. I see this so much with younger people.

And it's, I don't blame them for it. I actually, like, do blame generally the media and the, the older adults who are pushing this narrative. But it's like, yeah, you'll hear people be like, oh, man, like, dating was so much easier before the internet. And now, like, you know, online dating is causing all my problems. or the fact that, like, you know, all the men are influenced by social media that's causing my problems. Do you think that there was some period where dating, especially as a teenager or 20-something, was really just, like, totally painless and easy?

Like, that has never been the case. So, yeah, I totally agree. I think people latch on to this idea because it's just out there and it gives a good scapegoat for them. One thing we know, actually, from people that study young adulthood and people like Alice Marwick or Candace Adjors, these people that study the effect of, like, digital systems on children. And we know the causes of a lot of these issues.

We know the fact that like significant amount of kids is growing up below the poverty line, you know, that they're forced into employment at younger and younger ages, you know, to have to work at McDonald's or to, you know, support their family economically. We know that there is this like precarity to the American way of living that these young people are growing up with and are growing up with in this dystopian world where like Trump is president and ICE is ripping people off the streets and like bad things are happening. And instead of fixing any of the problems with the world, they want to cut young people. off from it and cut pretty much everyone's access to free and open information and speech on it. And I think that's what's so insidious. And I think when people feed into these addiction narratives, they essentially manufacture consent for that level of censorship and surveillance. Yeah.

I mean, I think also we've become so safety obsessed that we don't think that even, you know, teenagers should go out by themselves. We don't let our young people do anything too. I think that's a big problem too. We don't let them do anything except for how very like tightly regulated and managed lives and be stuck inside and then we get mad at them for being on social media all the time when people don't want them to do these other things when they're connecting with friends the primary way that young people use social media is directly messaging their friends like yeah it's so bleak

i want to get back to this lawsuit so i mean i think part of the goal of this lawsuit and correct me if i'm wrong is also to kind of chip away at section 230 section 230 is effectively like the first amendment for the internet it protects people's ability to post online by ensuring that they are held legally responsible for their own speech and someone else like a platform or something isn't held responsible for the speech that they make it's a very important law and we've seen the Democrats and many Republicans want to dismantle it just the way that they there's a great article on tech dirt that's like your problem is not with section 230 your problem is with the first amendment can you explain a little bit about like how this lawsuit could threaten section 230 and kind of this legal campaign to attack this fundamental law without section 2 30 we would see a lot less free speech online. We would see a lot more censorship online, a lot more suppression, especially of controversial topics or controversial viewpoints and political speech online.

It would be really bad. And people have been trying to chip away at Section 230 by saying that they're going after platforms not for speech because they know that that is protected by both Section 230 and the First Amendment, but for design features. And we've been seeing this for at least a decade now. We've seen a lot of different lawsuits. And generally, judges keep projecting it.

They keep saying like, no, you're trying to pretend like these things things you're going after are not speech, they're the design, but they're actually speech. So this is actually an old strategy, but this seems to be the biggest concentrated effort to get it into the mainstream. And so far, it's failed, but that's what's at stake in this is, you know, are we going to let people pretend that things are actually about design features when they're really about free speech? Yeah, I think to do that, we have to focus on the fact, as you said, that it is the content. And fundamentally, people find this content very engaging and this content is addictive.

And like, I don't want to like minimize all the people in the comments that I know are going to get very outraged and say, but I'm addicted to social media. I mean, you're watching this video. So maybe. But I think like what I would stress to them is like, yes, media is meant to be engaging. And we can all, you know, change our habits, our media consumption habits. But it's important to recognize this is a habit. And you are finding information that you may be like or finding, you know, find interesting or maybe unhelpful. You could also go to the library. I mean, I went to the library in high school and checked out a lot of really crazy. books that were probably really harmful, actually, ultimately, that had a lot of really wild beliefs in them. But I think that's part of being a young person, too, is experimenting and learning and exposing yourself to different ideas and figuring out kind of what works and what doesn't. And when we try to mass censor the internet or remove any content that could be, quote, unquote, harmful, like someone, I don't know, making a cucumber salad because that might trigger someone. What are we even doing?

Like, it, that is, it's just a direct assault on our right to free. access information and express ourselves. Someone is going to be triggered by everything, right? Like every piece of content out there might be triggering for someone based on their own personal experiences or circumstances or things like that. You can't make the internet so that no one is ever triggered by anything or feeling, you know, threatened by anything because yeah, you wouldn't, you wouldn't have anything left to have online.

You can also advocate for user controls. Like, again, I think you can tell that these people with their addiction stuff are so bad faith because again, not only are they not arguing for privacy protections, data privacy reforms, they're also not arguing for meaningful user controls where I have always said this with Twitter. I get a huge amount of hate and harassment on Twitter, as we all do. It's a toxic hellhole. But, you know, Twitter now has the ability to limit replies. You can limit what you see.

You know, I wish they had even more ability to limit the content that I saw. I would probably put certain things in place. I certainly use the like mute topic button or whatever a lot. I think all those things are great. Those are ways to empower users to have more control over their online experience. But that's not what these people are arguing for. They are arguing for top-down government-mandated controls that will mass censor content in the ways that they like, which actually gives users far less control over their online experience

and the information they're consuming. I think, yeah, you also know it's bad faith because a lot of times they're arguing against versions of these platforms that existed a decade ago and not today. Like, we have made progress. I don't think any of them are perfect. at giving users control and giving parents control and things like that. But we have seen a lot of strides made from these platforms in letting people, you know, have more control over the content they see, letting parents have control over more content

that their children see. So the tech companies are moving in that direction. And they're moving in that direction in response to people speaking out about it, to people pressuring them about it. We don't need these, like you said, top-down mandates in order to make these things happen. I think everyone should go read your article. But there is one paragraph that I thought was really good, just also on this notion of addiction. You said decades of awareness raising around depression have told us that it stems from a complicated interplay of environmental factors, biological factors, and more.

So much of the moral panic around social media and mental health seems to ignore these lessons in favor of simplistic cause and effect narratives. And then you have this quote from this woman, Tamar Mendelson, professor at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, who said, quote, research doesn't show that all digital media use is bad or addictive. And she actually says that it shows that kids who seem to have the most mental health problems were actually the ones who used almost no digital media, as well as those who used it excessively, again, like if you're sitting in your room for 19 hours a day, only listening to the Beatles on repeats, you know, on a record or something like that's unhealthy behavior. But I really think it's so worrisome when you see this whole like digital detox movement or whatever, I'm all for people

taking control. But I think it's really scary that a lot of parents are willing to completely cut their children off from the world and isolate them and not expose them to any ideas outside, I guess government approved narratives. And we know that that actually has a worst effect on their mental health. Because again, kids just want to message their friends on Instagram. They want connection. But these adults are making it harder for them to get that. And I think that's going to make more kids depressed.

What's the next step in this lawsuit? Where do you see this going? Yeah. So this is just the jury trial this week. And then the case itself was supposed to play out for several weeks. There's another trial in one of these cases scheduled for April. There's another one scheduled for June. There's a third one scheduled for June.

So this is going to be going on for a while now. this child phase of things. It's so terrifying. I'm so glad to have people like you covering it. I highly suggest everyone follow Liz Nolan Brown. She's amazing. Cannot recommend you and your work more highly. So thank you so much for coming on and chatting.

Thank you. All right. That's it for the show. If you like my work, please, please subscribe to me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my substack newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.com, where I send a biweekly roundup of everything that I'm reading and following online.

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