Meta and Snapchat are in the dock. Two young people took technology giants to court

Two young people who disappear for hours in front of the screens of the smartphones they received when they were children, put the technology giants in the defendant's chair in the courtroom.

Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, and Snapchat's parent company, Snap, are going before a jury in Los Angeles, California, USA, on charges that they deliberately designed their platforms to be addictive and harmed the mental health of young people.

According to the Reuters news agency, one of the two plaintiffs whose names are kept secret in the case files is S.J., who is only 16 years old from Illinois, and the other is 18-year-old K.D.B. from Mississippi. Stating that they started watching YouTube when they were 3-4 years old and stepped into other social networks around the age of 9, young people say that features such as endless streams and automatic video playback turned them into compulsive users.

Allegedly, this digital addiction has caused serious psychological wounds such as depression, severe anxiety and eating disorders in young people.

The top names of Silicon Valley will testify directly in the case, which is expected to last several weeks.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram President Adam Mosseri and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel are expected to take the witness stand in person.

In fact, the process started by targeting four major platforms.

Young people initially added TikTok and YouTube, which is part of Google, to Meta and Snap.

However, before proceeding to the trial stage, TikTok and YouTube chose to compromise with the parties; 16-year-old S.J. It also closed its file with Meta with an agreement.

Thus, at the hearing in Los Angeles, the accusations of two young girls against Snap and the allegations made against Meta by K.D.B. from Mississippi are discussed.

Before the hearing, Meta and Snap appealed to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl and requested that the two cases be separated.

Although the companies argued that combining two different cases into one would confuse the jury and pit the evidence against each other, Judge Kuhl has not yet made a final decision on this request.

On the company side, there is an objection to all the accusations.

Speaking to Reuters, an unnamed Meta spokesperson pointed out that there are numerous factors that shape the mental health of young people and stated that they have been taking protective measures on their platforms for more than a decade.

The spokesperson said that the young woman, who is the plaintiff from Mississippi, spent her time on TikTok rather than Instagram or Facebook, and that her personal circumstances played a determining role in the psychological problems she experienced.

In his defense, the Snap spokesperson claimed that Snapchat's architecture is completely different from classical social networks.

Noting that the platform does not provide a direct flow to the user or a ranking that scores others' shares, the spokesperson stated that they put community safety above all else and that the allegations distort the working logic of the platform.

Emily Jeffcott, the lawyer of K.D.B., one of the young plaintiffs, enters the courtroom with a very clear strategy.

Jeffcott emphasized that they will explain to the jury one by one the damage caused by endless content streams, consecutively opened videos and friendship chain features such as "streak" on Snapchat in the minds of young people.