I got my first social media app a decade ago. Being 13 is awkward and confusing for anyone, but growing up alongside the rise of social media was an experience that shaped me in ways I am still uncovering.
In many respects, I was learning who I was at a time when everything on these platforms was telling me who I should be, what I should enjoy, and most impactfully, what I should look like.
Social media handed me a window to look at the lives of people around the world who lived in a different reality than me. As a young teen, I did not have the nuanced perspective to process what I was seeing. I just wanted to fit in. And when the platforms flooded me with an endless stream of unrestricted images and videos of a standard I could not meet, each addictive swipe made it harder not to feel like I lived outside the box I so desperately wanted to fit into.
Working at Rebuttal PR has reframed how I think about that time. I was not naive or weak for being shaped by what I saw on the apps. The social media companies knew exactly who was scrolling. Every design choice they made was built to hold my attention and exploit my insecurities. I am one of far too many young people who became collateral damage to companies chasing profit while I was chasing an unreachable standard.
Protecting the mental health of young users was never a priority for these companies. Despite internal research showing the harm their platforms caused, they chose profit. They made their apps more addictive, not less. It took attorneys and courts to force the kind of accountability these companies were never going to demand of themselves.
That accountability is now playing out in real time. In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google’s YouTube liable in the first bellwether trial of the California state court proceedings, awarding $6 million in damages to a young woman whose mental health deteriorated after years on their platforms. TikTok and Snapchat settled before that trial even began. Her case represents something much larger. In the Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, Meta, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube reached settlements in the first bellwether case brought by a Kentucky County School District, with more bellwethers on the docket. The outcome of these trials will shape how hundreds of similar cases are resolved.
For those of us who grew up alongside social media, watching these cases move through the courts feels personal…because it is. These are not abstract corporate liability disputes. They are a reckoning for an entire generation that downloaded social media apps, were told they were harmless, and were left to figure out the damage on their own.
I am grateful to work with attorneys who saw what so many of us lived through and believed it was worth fighting for in court. The results of these cases will not undo the past, but it can change what the next generation inherits.
