Landmark LA Trial Targets Social Media’s Impact on Teens (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: A landmark trial against Meta, TikTok, and YouTube kicks off here at the Spring Street Courthouse in Los Angeles this week. A 19-year-old identified by her initials, KGM, has sued the companies, accusing their platforms of addicting her and harming her mental health. Top executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are expected to testify. For many parents and advocates, this represents a moment of accountability for these companies that is years in the making.

[00:00:26] Speaker 2: These cases and these trials are so important to us because they're finally going to hold these tech companies accountable for their knowledge, their design, and their choices they made and the trade-offs they made at, you know, at the risk of our own children being harmed.

[00:00:42] Speaker 1: Juliana Arnold founded the non-profit Parents Rise after her daughter Coco died at the age of 17 in 2022. Juliana says Coco's social media addiction hurt her self-esteem and mental health. Instagram recommended as a friend an older man she didn't know, who offered to sell her Percocet for her anxiety. The pills were laced with fentanyl, and Coco never made it home.

[00:01:06] Speaker 2: And I limited the most I could, but they always find workarounds too. And I just couldn't keep up. As a parent, I couldn't keep up. Plus, we didn't really know what was going on. Like, we didn't even know how these platforms worked. We were told they were safe. But do we, anyone really know how these algorithms work?

[00:01:23] Speaker 1: Juliana's organization now supports other survivor parents advocating for changes to social media platforms. They've spent years calling for online safety regulations with little success, even after top CEOs apologized to families who say their children were hurt by their platforms. Thousands of parents and families, including Juliana, have sued Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap. The outcome in the KGM trial could impact how those other cases are resolved. Snap settled KGM's lawsuit days ahead of the trial. The tech giants deny harming young users' mental health and have rolled out parental control tools, youth safety features, and content restrictions to protect teens. Meta declined to comment on the specifics of Juliana's case, but pointed to a website detailing its teen safety efforts, including Instagram teen accounts, which launched in 2024. But many parents say those efforts aren't sufficient and still put too much burden on parents to manage their kids' online experience.

[00:02:24] Speaker 2: For so many families, we've gone unheard for so many years. And when we tell our stories, people discredit us, say it must have been your bad parenting, you weren't looking after your kid, you should do better. And this is the first time in a public forum at this level that we're going to actually get our opportunity to be vindicated.