US lawsuits target social media addiction claims

Thousands of plaintiffs in the United States are trying to convince courts that social media products were built to be addictive, turning design choices—endless scroll, personalised feeds, notification loops—into something closer to a product defect. Le Monde reports that executives including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri have recently faced questioning in Los Angeles, pushing back on the idea that “addiction” applies in a clinical sense.

The technical dispute is not about whether feeds can be compelling; it is about what, exactly, is being optimised and whether that optimisation can be tied to harm in a way a court can measure. Modern platforms run ranking systems that continuously learn from user behaviour: what you watch, what you skip, what you rewatch, what you share, and what makes you return tomorrow. The levers are familiar—recommendation algorithms, A/B tests, variable notification timing—but the output is probabilistic and personalised, which makes “causation” hard to pin down for any individual user.

That difficulty is likely to shape the remedy. When judges and regulators cannot reliably attribute harm to a particular model choice, they tend to demand process: documentation, audits, age-gating, risk assessments, and “safety” features that can be demonstrated on paper. The result is a compliance stack that favours the largest firms, which already have legal teams, data science governance, and the ability to build parallel systems for different jurisdictions. Smaller platforms, or new entrants with fewer engineers, inherit the same requirements without the same economies of scale.

The platforms, for their part, can respond by formalising what they already do: turning product iteration into regulated change management. That shifts the centre of gravity from engineering ingenuity to internal approvals—who signed off on a notification experiment, what metrics were tracked, and how quickly a feature can be rolled back. It also creates a new strategic asset: the ability to produce a convincing narrative of responsible development when something goes wrong.

In the Los Angeles courtroom, executives were asked to define “addiction.” The systems under scrutiny are better at measuring retention than anyone is at measuring harm.