Two radically different first-hand accounts of what the Meta trial’s “social media addiction victim” said (and didn’t say)

Decerneat lector – let the reader decide.

I’d prefer a full transcript, but below is the most complete account I could find, by CNN on 2/27/2026, of the Los Angeles Superior Court Meta/YouTube civil trial’s 20-year-old victim (“Kaley” or “KGM”), which I edited to present only her case alleging social media platforms harmfully “addicted” her:

Kaley started using YouTube at the age of 6, downloading the app on her iPod Touch to watch videos about lip gloss collections and the online kids game Animal Jam. She posted her first video when she was 8 — in it, she played Animal Jam as an otter character, singing in a put-on British accent. A year later, she downloaded and began posting on Instagram, circumventing a guardrail her mom had tried to set up to block her from the app.

She says she became addicted. She started staying up late and sneaking out of class to scroll YouTube and Instagram. Within several years Kaley says she began cutting herself to cope with depression, one of a number of mental health challenges she claims were caused or exacerbated by an addiction to social media.

Kaley, now 20, described ongoing struggles with social media before a Los Angeles jury on Thursday, part of a lawsuit from her and her mother against Meta and YouTube. It marks the first time the public has gotten to hear directly from the young woman at the heart of a case that could set a precedent for hundreds of lawsuits accusing tech platforms of intentionally addicting and harming young users.

“Anytime I would try to set limits for myself, I couldn’t,” said Kaley, who is being referred to in court by only her first name because her claims relate to incidents that took place while she was a minor…. By the time she was 10, Kaley had uploaded 200 videos to YouTube. She also created multiple accounts so it would appear her videos had more likes and urged her mom and sister to like her videos, too. When her videos received little reaction, “it made me feel like I shouldn’t have posted or that it was stupid, or I looked bad,” she said. Losing subscribers made her feel “not worthy.”

Despite bullying Kaley said she experienced on YouTube, she didn’t leave the platform because the idea “bothered me more than the comments.” She once turned off notifications, but that didn’t last, saying, “I wanted to see what people were saying or who was liking my video.” YouTube’s autoplay feature also often kept Kaley on the app longer than she intended… Social media, she said, contributed to her struggles by coopting her attention and alienating her from friends, family and hobbies.

“I would say okay I’m going to get off after that, but then it would autoplay and I would be on for hours,” she said. She added, “I was on it from a young age and I would spend all my time on it,” and would often sneak onto YouTube on her phone in class.

…Kaley’s attorney, Mark Lanier, has argued that, like many kids, she spent much of her time using the platform logged out, including her first two years on YouTube. Lanier showed an undated YouTube video showing Kaley, who looked to be in her early teens, walking viewers through her “night routine.” In it, she scrolls her phone in bed, gets up to shower and take off her makeup, and then gets back in bed to scroll Instagram. Kaley testified her current nighttime routine still looks similar.

Kaley alleges that she used Instagram from age 9 to 13 without her mom knowing. She said she was using a hand-me-down phone that had already had Instagram downloaded once before, allowing her to bypass a restriction that required her mom to type a password before she could get a new app. She testified that she’d open the app “first when I woke up” and again before bed, sometimes sneaking to use it during the night.

Like on YouTube, Kaley set up multiple accounts to help feed her desire for more likes. She also used an app that promised to use bots to provide more likes on photos, she said. She also discussed her use of Instagram’s “beauty” filters — which can manipulate a user’s face to make it appear that they’re wearing makeup or, for example, that their eyes are bigger or nose is smaller. Kaley claims the filters contributed to body dysmorphia, a struggle that she said even today leads her to spend 3 to 4 hours on her appearance each morning. “At one point, almost all my photos had a filter on,” she said.

Lanier showed the jury an Instagram post of Kaley and her friends captioned: “We look horrible, just put a filter on it.” Earlier on Wednesday, Kaley’s former therapist, Victoria Burke, testified that she had once asked Kaley what her “miracle day” would be — what would have to happen for her to have her best-case-scenario life. Kaley responded that she would be prettier, no chubby cheeks, no lines. “I just felt like I wanted to be on it all the time and if I wasn’t on it, I felt like I was going to miss out on something,” she said of Instagram.

…Kaley contemplated suicide while “dealing with feeling insecure about myself, feeling socially withdrawn and just feeling really depressed and anxious,” she said. Ultimately, she said, her life would be better without social media. But the platforms continue to have a pull; Kaley told the jury she still sneaks to the bathroom during work to scroll on the apps and she’s considering a career in social media marketing.

I then searched media accounts of Kaley’s lengthy testimony about her abusive parents. These proved incredibly hard to find. Major media simply omitted them or presented only an isolated sentence or two. The most I could find:

From CNN’s lengthy account: “Kaley’s difficult childhood — an abusive father, a combative relationship with her mother,” including posts “in which she said her ‘mental health is so bad’ because of her mom. But while Kaley acknowledged that they once had a difficult relationship, she testified she now believes her mom was doing her best to raise her in a tough situation.”

AP, 2/26/2026: “During her cross-examination, Kaley agreed that her mother was being physically and emotionally abusive, including having ‘hit her.’”

ABC News, 2/26/2026: “Meta lawyers allege that ‘Kaley’s health records show a history of verbal and physical abuse and a fraught relationship with her parents, who divorced when she was three’.”

Reuters, 2/25/2026: “Kayley’s… own lawyer has pointed to a recent internal study by Meta where teens with difficult life circumstances more often said they used Instagram habitually or unintentionally.”

Cyber-journalist Taylor Lorenz posts a very different, detailed first-hand report, “What I saw at the social media addiction trial,” centering on Kayley’s testimony. I organized quotes I took from her YouTube video into categories:

This girl has had an atrocious life… Abused by her mother, physically, verbally, her father was abusive as well. She was beaten when she didn’t get math problems right, she was so upset that she physically self-harmed herself with a knife, her sister attempted to (take) her own life… her father abandoned her… she recorded videos of her mother abusing her, screaming at her, saying horrible things, her mother at one point was weighing her daily, making comments about her weight…

Notice how they (the media) sought to frame it (quoting AOL story, “Gender could play a decisive role”): “Attorneys for Meta and YouTube owner Google have sought to portray Kayley’s suffering as the natural outcome of a troubled childhood. They have pinned much of the blame on her mother, Karen, who raised Kayley and her siblings alone after splitting from Kayley’s violent father when she was 3. Meta attorney Phyllis Jones showed jurors Instagram posts, text messages, and ephemera from her high school years in which she portrays her home life as intolerable… ‘I don’t feel safe in my home and I have nowhere to go and I don’t want to go into foster care,’ Kayley wrote her therapist in high school.”

Does this sound like an Instagram problem? “Jones also played two tapes in which (Kayla’s mother) can be heard screaming and cursing at her daughter… Karen pulled over on the side of the highway and told Kayley to get out of the car.” These other parents (at the trial) said, “Oh, I’ve done that,” which is not good.

…What has more of an effect on a child’s mental health, do you think… their abusive and violent father abandoning them when they were 3, going on to further cause abandonment issues throughout childhood by treating them terribly, the girl is then forced to live in a home with a violent, abusive mother who fat-shamed her, who body-shamed her… I think her feeling horrible about her body might have something to do with her mother calling her fat all the time and weighing her daughter constantly… her sister had an eating disorder…and then the sister also tried to take her own life, do you think all that had an effect on her? Or was it going on Instagram?... It’s not an accurate representation of the… causes of her mental health issues… They’re letting a lot of abusive parents get rich off this stuff… it’s rewarding abusive parents.

…And what is really messed up as well is that now the mother is back in the picture, and now, after all that 20 years of abuse… she now has a good relationship with her mother because her mother is, like, payday is coming… this lawsuit itself is a form of abuse… her mother told her that testifying and being the social media victim in this case would get them rich… Now that the daughter is willing to participate in this dog and pony show that might make the mother rich, now the mother’s being nice to her daughter again? …The mother doesn’t deserve sympathy.

…Even the therapist said, this girl never even brought up social media at all as a harmful thing, other than to say, she has social anxiety… she’s also relentlessly bullied at school… it would hurt her to see on Instagram people having fun without her when she had a miserable life… it’s so obvious Meta is not the problem in her life…

Social media aps are designed to snare users and keep them hooked, yeah, that’s what they do. If we want to fix that problem, we should pass comprehensive data privacy reform, not allow them to harvest more data… I was a teenager in the 2000s, that was such a significantly more brutal time for women’s body images than today… wait’ll you find what teen girls were reading in magazines with airbrushed photos.

…The only thing that seems to have helped her was video editing she got into through social media… they’re trying to argue that her watching gaming videos and lip gloss review videos when she was 9 is what led to her poor mental health, and not everything else that happened to her.

…Banning Instagram would not have done anything to get this poor girl out of a violent and abusive household… it would have just cut her off further, it would have made her further isolated, she wouldn’t have had any outlet to express herself or talk to friends or … make a living in video editing management… Instagram enabled her to speak out and document some of the atrocities her mother was engaged in.

… This lawsuit could wind up affecting a lot… We know social media is such a lifeline, especially for abused children, it’s often how they get help, online communities save people’s lives, especially marginalized kids, and yet … … the outcome could be mass restrictions for all youth… and that could wind up leading to so much more devastation, so many more kids taking their own lives. It’s horrible.

I have my own opinions after reviewing these and other summaries of trial coverage, soon to come. What do you think?