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Adam Mosseri, the head of Meta’s Instagram, testified during a landmark social media trial in Los Angeles that he disagrees with the idea that people can be clinically addicted to social media platforms.
The question of addiction is a key pillar of the case, where plaintiffs seek to hold social media companies responsible for harms to children who use their platforms. Meta Platforms and Google’s YouTube are the two remaining defendants in the case, which TikTok and Snap have settled.
At the core of the Los Angeles case is a 20-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose lawsuit could determine how thousands of similar lawsuits against social media companies would play out. She and two other plaintiffs have been selected for bellwether trials—essentially test cases for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury.
Mosseri, who’s headed Instagram since 2018, said it’s important to differentiate between clinical addiction and what he called problematic use. The plaintiff’s lawyer, however, presented quotes directly from Mosseri in a podcast interview a few years ago, where he used the term addiction in relation to social media use, but he clarified that he was probably using the term “too casually,” as people tend to do.
Mosseri said he was not claiming to be a medical expert when questioned about his qualifications to comment on the legitimacy of social media addiction, but said someone “very close” to him has experienced serious clinical addiction, which is why he said he was “being careful with my words.”
He said he and his colleagues use the term “problematic use” to refer to “someone spending more time on Instagram than they feel good about, and that definitely happens.” It’s “not good for the company, over the long run, to make decisions that profit for us but are poor for people’s well-being,” Mosseri said.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.