An interview with Texas trial lawyer Mark Lanier recounts how he and his 20-year-old client, known as Kaley or KGM, secured a landmark legal victory against Meta and Google in a Los Angeles courtroom earlier this year. The case, KGM v Meta et al, was the first to hold major social media firms accountable for the addictive design of their platforms — Instagram and YouTube — rather than for the content they host, with the jury accepting that the companies had knowingly built "addiction machines" that damaged young people's mental health. The outcome is described as a "big tobacco moment for big tech", potentially opening the door to thousands of similar claims.

Kaley alleged that a social media addiction, beginning with YouTube at age six and Instagram at age nine, had caused her to develop body dysmorphia, anxiety and depression; Snapchat and TikTok, also named originally, settled out of court for an undisclosed sum before trial. The article highlights dramatic courtroom moments, notably Mark Zuckerberg arriving on 18 February with an entourage wearing Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, which the prosecution feared could be used for facial recognition to identify the deliberately anonymous jury; the judge required them to swear no photographs had been taken, after which the glasses were removed. Lanier, a self-described "AI zealot" whose firm employs a dedicated AI team, framed the fight as beating the tech giants — and their AI tools, Gemini and Meta AI — at their own game.