Social Media Plaintiff Spent 16 Hours Scrolling in a Day (1)

Using a filter that surrounded her face with rays of light, the girl said she’d been crying tears of joy. She’d reached 102 subscribers on her YouTube channel, where she’d been uploading videos since she was eight.

Then, the video’s tone shifted as Kaley G.M. panned the camera to her stomach and apologized for “my ugly appearance.”

“I don’t know why I look so fat in this shirt,” she said in the video shown to a Los Angeles jury Thursday. “I don’t know, seriously, I look so fat in this shirt. I look so ugly.”

Now 20 years old, Kaley, who is the heart of the landmark first trial against tech giants over social media addiction, testified Thursday in California Superior Court. She told jurors that her life would be better without social media, but every time she’s tried to stop, it hasn’t worked.

One day, she spent more than 16 hours on Instagram, she said.

Kaley alleges her years of addiction to Instagram and YouTube caused her anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia. TikTok Inc. and Snap Inc. settled her claims before the start of the Los Angeles trial but remain involved in thousands of similar lawsuits.

Meta and YouTube deny wrongdoing and say they’ve imposed robust safety measures to protect kids and teenagers online. They have have said in court filings her mental health conditions were caused not by social media, but other factors in her life, like bullying at school and a tumultuous relationship with her mother, which the companies say veered into abuse.

The companies could face billions of dollars in liabilities and have to overhaul their platforms if juries side against them in early bellwether trials.

“Do you want to change this world?” plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Lanier of Lanier Law Firm asked Kaley at the end of her direct testimony that lasted an hour and a half.

“Yes,” she said.

‘my small way of coping’

Kaley said she started using Instagram when she was nine, behind her mom’s back. She’d wait until her mom fell asleep to sneak to the living room and scroll late into the night, replacing the phone before she slept so her mother wouldn’t become suspicious. Kaley is identified in court using her first name because she was a minor when the case was filed. Most of Kaley’s testimony came as she confirmed her own experiences, as described by Lanier.

Her phone pinging with alerts, she’d scroll at school, sometimes drawing reprimands from her teachers, she said. She made several accounts to like her own posts, asking family and friends to help boost the numbers. She almost never posted a photograph of herself without a filter changing her appearance. She was bullied online but she couldn’t look away because she felt she’d miss something, she said.

Later, if her mom tried to take her phone away, Kaley said she would threaten to hurt herself. She’d grow worried, depressed, irritable. She would crave her phone.

Deposition testimony showed Kaley’s mom would sometimes scream and curse at her, hit her when she didn’t understand her homework, one time pulling over on the freeway and telling her to get out of the car.

She felt isolated at school, and her attention deficit disorder, which went undiagnosed for years, made her feel “that people around me were speaking a different language,” as she wrote for a public speaking class.

“sorry a lot of my edits have been sad lately, i’ve been going through hell and that’s my small way of coping,” said an all-lowercase Instagram textpost written by Kaley.

Kaley said she’s worked as a social media editor and plans to incorporate social media into her career.

At trial she said specific incidents, like when her mother would call her “dumb” and “stupid,” would upset her but wouldn’t impact her mental health overall. Other times, she said her social media posts describing her home life were overdramatic.

Jones asked Kaley nearly 30 times to review her deposition testimony, when Kaley’s answers downplayed or contradicted what she said under oath a year prior.

After about 20 conflicting responses, mostly involving the role her family and school played in her mental health, Jones said, “When you had your deposition taken in February, you told me you testified truthfully to the best of your ability and you understood you took an oath to testify truthfully, right?”

Kaley’s Therapist

Kaley’s former therapist saw in her client’s social media use “benefits and areas of where it was getting in the way as well,” she said on the witness stand the day before Kaley spoke in court.

“Social media addiction” isn’t recognized in the DSM-5, a standard guide for diagnosing mental disorders. It can map onto other official diagnoses, such as OCD, social anxiety, and body dysmorphia, the therapist, Victoria Burke said.

Her accounts were a “creative outlet” where she could share her digital art and film edits, Burke said.

But Kaley was also reliant on her phone to a degree that Burke said could be problematic. Burke, who met with Kaley regularly in 2019, said she was working to reduce her use of social media, not to cut it out of her life completely. That would be like “pulling the rug out” from under her, Burke said.

Meta’s attorney Andrew Stanner of Covington & Burling LLP pressed Burke on a disparity between her deposition testimony and statements before the jury.

During deposition testimony “you said under oath you had encountered adolescents in your practice and you concluded they were addicted to social media,” Stanner said.

Burke denied making those conclusions.

The case is Social Media Cases JCCP, Cal. Super. Ct., No. 5255, 2/26/26.