On and off this semester, I’ve taken the giant leap of deleting Instagram from my phone. But it’s been a slow journey rewiring my brain — I find myself tapping at the App Store for a hit of something to refresh.
There are few thoughts more sobering than realizing you’re addicted to your phone. But as a recent landmark trial in California helped reassure me, it’s not my fault.
Last Wednesday, Meta and YouTube were found liable in a groundbreaking lawsuit claiming that Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms are deliberately engineered to harm children’s mental health, keeping kids hooked and swiping. The 20-year-old anonymous plaintiff argued that her social media addiction as a child materially worsened her mental health. The jury awarded her $3 million in damages, later recommending an additional $3 million in punitive damages, to which the judge has final say.
It’s a pretty bad time to be a social media mogul right now. A day before the aforementioned ruling, a New Mexico court reached the end of a similarly long-winded trial, ruling that Meta’s ecosystem of apps — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — enable child abuse. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s xAI is being sued by the city of Baltimore because they have allegedly allowed the platform’s proprietary AI chatbot, Grok, to freely generate sexualized images of real people, including minors, without consent.
These cases almost feel conspiratorial: Courts now recognize that social media addiction is not simply a matter of user choice, and that every minute detail of these apps — including the heightened sensitivity of scrolling a reel — has been insidiously designed to hook teens as much as possible.
The FX series “Social Studies” (2024) shone a light on this. Documentarian Lauren Greenfield followed a group of teens from LA over the course of a year, talking to them about how social media has adversely affected them. While every subject had taken unique damage from social media, each echoed a similar sentiment: “I hate it, but I feel like I need to be on it.”
That’s a feeling many people my age, myself included, are deeply familiar with. We didn’t need a court or an FX docuseries to prove it, but it’s nice for our feelings to be validated.
This social contractual obligation to be on social media resembles the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s conception of a disciplinary society, where citizens are wrangled into submission not by a single source of power, but through collective surveillance, where citizens hold power over one another. It may be cathartic to paint Meta or Google as a big bad watchtower — but their power is distributed evenly by their userbase, including every friend, coworker, and extended family member whose life you’re missing out on by being off the grid.
Though I’ve noticed that many of my friends are jumping ship from traditional social media apps.
A soft solution to this has come in the form of specialized hobby-based social platforms, with apps like Goodreads, Letterboxd, and Strava blowing up in recent years, allowing users to log books, movies, and runs, respectively. Unlike traditional social media apps, which are designed for cultivating as large a network as possible, these apps have limited discovery features, recalling the social media from the days of yore.
Things are looking pretty bleak across the board, and addressing social media addiction might be at the bottom of your to-do list. But as a new nightmarish AI trend becomes the latest fad every other week, and research affirms that short-form content is materially making you dumber, it’s not a bad idea to look at options for quitting.
If anything should give you hope, it’s that the California and New Mexico cases have led a charge on a full-blown legal revolution, where social media platforms can no longer plausibly hide behind the shield of “giving users what they want.”
