Gender could play major role in L.A. social media addiction suit

Ladies of the jury dabbed their eyes, sniffling as the 20-year-old on the witness stand described the hours she’d spent trying to fix her face before appearing in court that morning — her view of herself irreparably warped by what she characterized as a decade of addiction to YouTube and Instagram.

“Whenever I got a bunch of likes I was really happy, and it made me feel really good about myself,” said the woman, known in court as Kaley G.M. “If I didn’t, I would feel insecure, like I looked ugly.”

One alternate juror wept openly during the testimony in Los Angeles County Superior Court, wiping her tears on her sweater.

Kaley’s lawsuit is a test case chosen from among hundreds alleging that social media apps were designed to snare young kids and keep them hooked. But it’s her Los Angeles jury that will set the stakes for thousands of suits still to come, making this one of the corporate world’s most closely watched legal battles.

And as the landmark trial closes out its first month, gender has emerged as a dividing — and perhaps decisive — factor in the case.

Kaley, the first plaintiff ever to reach trial in a case seeking to hold platforms liable for alleged harms to children, said she became addicted to social media as a grade-schooler and has struggled for more than a decade. She charges the apps left her with anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia — a pathologically distorted self-perception, most prevalent in girls, that a growing body of research has linked to social platforms.

“Every single day I was on it, all day long,” the Chico, Calif., woman said Thursday, her voice tremulous and her cheeks flushed to the color of her rose maxi dress. “I can’t [stop], it’s just too hard to be without it, and every time I’ve tried to stop I’ve just been unsuccessful.”

Women on the jury bristled when Meta attorney Andrew Stanner needled Kaley’s former therapist over her credentials during a tense cross examination on Wednesday — “You have a master’s degree, right?” Men in the gallery laughed at the barb.

Kaley’s testimony Thursday brought that division even more sharply into focus, as her attorney Mark Lanier walked jurors through a montage of her troubled childhood on social media, beginning with a video she uploaded to YouTube at age 8, and her first selfies on Meta-owned Instagram at age 9.

“I’m sorry about my ugly appearance,” a preteen Kaley said in a YouTube video played in court Thursday morning, urgently repeating, “I look so fat,” while panning the camera over her slender torso.

Female jurors watched with rapt attention, some gasping in shock. Several men on the jury looked away, one yawning.

Experts predicted that the composition of the jury could tip the scales of justice even before selection began in January. Most said Kaley’s team would want younger women hearing their case, while Instagram and YouTube would want to pack the jury box with older men. (Two other defendants, TikTok and Snap, settled with Kaley out of court for undisclosed sums before the trial.)

“This [verdict] is going to set the value of all social media addiction cases going forward,” said Jenny Kim, an attorney in a related lawsuit in federal court. “It’s going to set the bar.”

Mothers are still overwhelmingly the primary caregivers in American families, and tend to be more sensitive to the challenges of child-rearing than older men, who may have been less intimately involved in its daily struggles.

But that logic can also work in reverse, others warned.

“Sometimes those closest are the harshest critics,” said Ellen Leggett, a USC professor of psychology and a jury expert. “Parents could be assumed to sympathize with the plaintiff’s mother, but they may also be quicker to perceive lenient parenting.”

When the case began, the jury was evenly split between women and men of varying ages.

Meta Chief Executive and Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, center, leaves Los Angeles County Superior Court after testifying in the social media trial on Feb. 18.

(Apu Gomes /AFP via Getty Images)

But that balance shifted last week, just before Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg took the stand, when one of the box’s oldest members was hospitalized, and a much younger alternate moved up to take his seat.

That shift could prove decisive in a civil suit, where only nine out of 12 jurors have to agree to find the companies liable.

Perhaps in recognition of those sensitivities, both Meta and YouTube assigned Thursday’s delicate cross-examination to female attorneys, who took a decidedly softer tack with Kaley than Stanner had with her therapist.

The young woman told jurors Thursday she began using Instagram’s built-in beauty filters when she was 9 and soon found her unedited image repulsive.

According to therapy notes from when she was 13, seeing unfiltered photos a friend had taken on her phone caused her to have “a meltdown.”

But on cross-examination, Kaley also revealed her mother had obsessed over her appearance, sometimes leaving her at school while she went to the gym. She also testified that her older sister suffered from an eating disorder — details the defense sought to portray as the source of her body dysmorphia.

“It kind of affected me, but I already had body dysmorphia symptoms long before she started showing symptoms of an eating disorder,” Kaley said.

Attorneys for Meta and YouTube owner Google have sought to portray Kaley’s suffering as the natural outcome of a troubled childhood. They have pinned much of the blame on her mother, Karen, who raised Kaley and her siblings alone after splitting from Kaley’s violent father when she was 3.

Meta attorney Phyllis Jones showed jurors Instagram posts, text messages and ephemera from her high school years in which Kaley portrayed her home life as intolerable.

“I don’t feel safe in my home but I have nowhere to go and I don’t want to go into foster care,” Kaley wrote to her therapist in high school.

Jones also played two tapes in which Karen can be heard screaming and cursing at her daughter.

Supporters of “K.G.M.” pose with signs outside Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday.

(Frederic J. Brown /AFP via Getty Images)

“Sit there and cry because you didn’t get your way? F—ing pissing me off, I’m so fed up!” Karen howls in a video Kaley posted to Instagram as a teenager.

“You don’t even say thank you!” she shrieks in another.

“I posted this without the full context,” Kaley told Jones Thursday. “This was not a frequent thing whatsoever. It was her yelling about something that I did.”

YouTube attorney Melissa Mills also sought to distance the video platform from Instagram, emphasizing that Karen both knew and approved of Kaley’s YouTube use, and even posted videos of her on the app.

In the hallway during an afternoon break, two jurors — both mothers — could be overheard comparing their own less-than-stellar interactions with their children to an episode in which Karen pulled over on the side of the highway and told Kaley to get out of the car.

“I’ve definitely pulled over,” one confided in the other. “Not on the highway, but I did it.”