If you, like many of us, spend most of your waking hours staring at screens—shuttling between work email, TikTok, YouTube, and group chats—you’ve probably wondered, at least half-jokingly, whether you’re “addicted” to your phone.
It’s a reasonable question, a Los Angeles jury just decided. In a closely watched landmark case, the court found in favor of a 20-year-old plaintiff known as KGM, who sued Meta and Google, alleging that design features like infinite scroll, filters, and autoplay on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube kept her online as much as 16 hours a day and helped fuel her depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, and self-harm. (TikTok and Snap settled in the same case earlier this year.) The verdict could open the door to thousands of similar lawsuits—and even end up limiting how far Big Tech can go in competing for our attention.
