The plaintiff in a landmark lawsuit against the major social media companies just revealed her identity to Bloomberg Business Week. Her full name and several magazine style photos are included in the article. (Her first name had been revealed months earlier.)
Personally,I’m going to skip using her name. The details of her life as revealed in the Bloomberg profile left this reader unsettled.
To be clear, social media “addiction” may be real (though there are good arguments that “addiction” is the wrong term), and at first blush, nothing about her account at trial comes across as disingenuous or false. She genuinely sounds like someone whose mental health was damaged by technology that has been allegedly wielded irresponsibly for profit.
But this plaintiff herself stands to profit significantly from the legal payouts expected to come her way soon—although two of the companies involved could still prevail in their appeals—and she’ll profit intangibly as gratitude and approbation flow in from supporters and other alleged victims believing themselves to have been harmed.
With that in mind, the article paints a painful picture of a young person’s life lived within the “attention economy.” It seems like common sense, then, to suggest that privacy was a wiser choice than exposing her name and face. At 20-years-old, she is, of course, well into adulthood, and free to become a public figure if she wants. For the moment, though, I’d rather not help too much.
Here’s what makes the whole case so disturbing:
The basic facts of the case are shocking at face value
K.G.M. sued YouTube parent Alphabet, Inc., TikTok’s ByteDance, Snapchat’s Snap, and the big kahuna, Meta, alleging they intentionally designed platforms to be addictive, despite (or perhaps because of) their alleged ability to worsen mental health issues. These issues include not just depression and anxiety, but—importantly it turns out, in the case of K.G.M.—body dysmorphia and self-harm.
Those who settled were Snap and ByteDance. Google and Meta went to court, but lost. A jury found them liable, and ordered them to pay $6 million. Meta and Google have now appealed, though it hasn’t gone well so far.
So a jury has determined that powerful tech juggernauts harmed this person immensely. It’s even uglier when you zoom in.
“By the time [K.G.M.] was 10, she had uploaded 200 videos to YouTube”
Bloomberg Business Week says she actually started using YouTube when she was six, which would be roughly 2012. Back then, YouTube was less a part of the discourse around social media. If you’re old enough to remember what the internet was like during the first Obama Administration, kids being on YouTube was seen as cute and quirky—just kids being kids—not alarming.
But by the time she was ten, Bloomberg says she had uploaded 200 videos on her own. This was about 2016—a time when social media addiction was already part of the national conversation, although at the time, it was mostly conservatives seeking to crack down on figures like Mark Zuckerberg.
K.G.M., the profile says, was a working class child of a fairly recent divorce when she started using YouTube, and was obsessed with her older sister who was careening toward an eating disorder. She was struggling in school.
It’s familiar, and so is the idea of coping with heavy use of YouTube. “She loved watching videos and soon taught herself how to film, edit and upload,” the profile says. I have known people exactly like this, haven’t you?
“In 2022, when [K.G.M.] was 16, she was spending as many as 16 hours a day on Instagram”
From 2016 to 2022, it sounds like things got completely out of control, with K.G.M. largely switching, by the sound of it, from YouTube to Instagram, which she used up to 16 hours per day. I don’t know how much you sleep, but if it’s a healthy amount, 16 hours is… your whole day.
K.G.M.’s particular flavor of heavy Instagram use sounds, again, queasily familiar. Her posting style sounds like it leaned heavily toward selfies, and Bloomberg says in addition to posting on her main account, she had “15 different Instagram accounts so she could like and comment on her own posts.” She modified her appearance significantly in photos and came to “hate” her actual reflection. Most disturbing of all, Bloomberg says, at this point she started practicing self-harm.
She says “When I look back on my life, this will be one of the things I am most proud of.”
It certainly took bravery to get through this legal process, and succeeding is, without a doubt, an achievement. I might slightly push back on the idea that anything you do when you’re 20 will be one of the things you’re most proud of. It certainly might, but at 20, most of your life is still ahead of you, including plenty of adversity—for most people anyway.
She says, “Even now, even after the lawsuit, I’m still addicted,” and “I’m still scrolling my life away.”
This quote is the ending of Bloomberg’s piece, and it’s devastating. The story says K.G.M. lives in her own two bedroom house, a few miles away from her mom, who pays her rent. In that house, she apparently spends most of her time in the dark, on her phone, scrolling.
Not to be all “as a parent,” but… as a parent I’m going to have nightmares about this part. This is a person who had enough awareness of what her behavior was doing to her that she took a long enough look at that behavior, figured out what she believed caused it, and went to court over it. A jury agreed, tacitly agreeing with her that scrolling one’s “life away” is so grim that it merits recompense.
The tragic tale of K.G.M. makes it feel like there’s nothing in the world with more power over the emotions of young people than the apps on the ubiquitous devices with screens that our lives revolve around—in fact, it feels like nothing else even comes close. Maybe you’re reading this blog post on such a device because of one such app. Maybe K.G.M. is too. It’s almost too bleak for words.
Read the full article here
