By the Chico News & Review staff
A 19-year-old woman from Chico remains at the center of a civil trial against two of the biggest tech platforms in the world this week.
Known in court documents and testimony as Kaley GM, the plaintiff’s trial began in Los Angeles County at the end of January. Witnesses are still being called this week before a civil jury begins its deliberations.
Kaley GM claims that Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, intentionally ratcheted-up harmful algorithms that it knew were both addicting and decimating to teenagers’ mental health. She also asserts that the company recklessly exposed her to predatory actors, one of whom sexually extorted her.
Youtube is an additional respondent in the suit.
Kaley GM’s attorney, Mark Lanier, is attempting to prove that Meta willfully sank digital dopamine hooks into the brains of teens and children, knowing the damage they would cause, all because it was highly profitable. Lanier also argues that Meta failed in its duty to warm parents about the dangers intrinsic to its platform.
Meta’s attorney, Paul Schmidt, is count-arguing that the plaintiff had personal and real-world challenges that she’s now blaming Instagram for.
Meta and Youtube, which are both valued at over $500 billion, have more broadly maintained that they did nothing wrong.
But Kaley GM and her attorney are not the only ones making these specific allegations. The top law enforcement officials for more than 40 states are separately charging Meta with nearly identical transgressions, writ large.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is among those AGs who are pulling Meta into civil court.
The attorney generals’ lawsuit has been available for journalists to read since 2023, a massive investigative document alleging that Meta purposefully invented “dopamine-manipulating” effects within its algorithms, and then refined those neurological tentacles so that they’d net billions of users – even as they caused an emerging mental health crisis with youth.
Kris Mayes, the Attorney General of Arizona, is the main prosecutor who organized the lawsuit. The complaint’s first paragraph was arguably a masterclass in direct, economic and powerful writing.
“Over the past decade, Meta – itself and through its flagship social media platforms Facebook and Instagram – has profoundly altered the psychological and social realities of a generation of young Americans,” it reads. “Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Its motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize its financial gains, Meta has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its social media platforms. It has concealed the ways in which these platforms exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable users.”
Throughout the complaint, the AGs repeatedly refer to Meta’s “scheme” against the public. They break this stratagem down into four components: Meta developing a business model based on maximizing young peoples’ attention; Meta designing its platforms to elicit “compulsive” behavior from those same youngsters; Meta hiding internal data regarding the dire impact of its tech on kids; and Meta intentionally deceiving lawmakers and the public as it continued with these highly profitable practices, knowing it was to the determent of everyone else.
In a way, the suit was reminiscent of another civil action launched in 2018, one brought against Big Pharma by 31 California counties. Attorneys and investigators working on that case asserted that five of the world’s largest pill manufacturers engaged in a willful conspiracy to hook vast swaths of the public on opioid painkillers, all while concealing just how addictive and deadly those drugs actually were. The plaintiffs were attempting to charge these pharmaceutical companies, on a civil level, with the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as the RICO Act – i.e. the same law that was used to decimate the power of the American mafia.
N&R covered that suit extensively in our piece, “Corporate Cartel Logic.”
The AGs’ current legal action reads as if Meta and other social media companies have been operating as a cartel in the online attention economy.
So far, no corrective actions have been taken by the federal government against Meta or Youtube. Both still net billions of dollars while being wholly unregulated by the nation’s capital.
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