Woman Testifies Social Media Triggered Mental Health Issues

In a landmark trial unfolding in Los Angeles Superior Court, a 20-year-old woman from Chico, California, testified this week that her early and excessive use of Instagram and YouTube triggered severe mental health struggles, including addiction, depression, and body image issues. Known in court documents as Kaley G.M., the plaintiff began using YouTube at age six and Instagram at age nine, alleging that the platforms' design features hooked her into patterns of behavior that derailed her childhood and adolescence.

Kaley described her initial casual engagement with the apps evolving into an uncontrollable dependency. She told jurors that features like YouTube's autoplay and Instagram's infinite scrolling kept her online for hours, far beyond her intentions. "I just felt like I wanted to be on it all the time," she said. "If I wasn’t on it, I was going to miss out on something." The constant pursuit of likes and notifications fueled her anxiety, while exposure to curated images and beauty filters worsened her self-perception, leading to diagnoses of depression, anxiety, body dysmorphic disorder, and social phobia by 2019. She recounted instances of self-harm as a coping...