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Los Angeles (USA).- Mark Zuckerberg has been called to testify this Wednesday in a historic trial about social media addiction taking place in Los Angeles, which is the first time that the founder of Meta must respond before a jury for the designs of his products.
The trial that entered its second week this Tuesday responds to an accusation against the big tech companies Meta and Google in the case of a young woman who accuses Instagram and YouTube of having harmed her mental health due to the addictive design of these applications.You may be interested in: Mark Zuckerberg announces he will be a father again
It is expected that Zuckerberg will appear in the courtroom of a Los Angeles Superior Court in the first of a series of landmark cases against Meta's social networks, which argue that technology can be as harmful and create addiction as casinos and cigarettes. The plaintiff, 20 years old, identified in the civil complaint as K.G.M., accuses Meta, the parent company of Instagram, and Google, of Alphabet, owner of YouTube, of creating an addiction to social media during her childhood and adolescence that, as a consequence, she suffered from depression, self-esteem problems, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. The young woman would have started using these networks when she was less than 10 years old. The legal complaint points to the design of the platforms that aim to capture users' attention by creating a dependency. "She became obsessed with these platforms; her mental health deteriorated. Her childhood, and therefore her adulthood, deviated from normal development," said Mark Lanier, KGM's lawyer, in the trial according to information cited by CNN. Zuckerberg is one of the tech executives on the list to testify in the trial, the first of a series of lawsuits that hope to hold big social media companies accountable. The outcome of KGM's lawsuit could set a precedent for the resolution of around 1,500 similar lawsuits against social media companies in the U.S. The trial is scheduled to last at least six weeks. The young woman also sued Snapchat and TikTok. But both companies reached an out-of-court settlement before the trial last month. Meta also faces a trial in New Mexico that is in its second week. The lawsuit, filed by the state, alleges that the platforms of the company founded by Zuckerberg provided "a market" for child predators and did not filter harmful content for minors.
