YouTube employees admitted that their goal was “viewer addiction” and killed proposed safety tools for kids because they wouldn’t provide a sufficient “ROI” — financial lingo for “return on investment,” according to bombshell court documents reviewed by The Post.
The explosive records, which include internal chat logs and presentations from YouTube employees, were unsealed ahead of a series of landmark trials slated for this summer in Oakland, Calif. in the US District Court of Northern California. Google-owned YouTube, Meta, Snap and TikTok are listed as defendants.
In a deposition in the case last March, John Harding, a longtime vice president of engineering at YouTube, was confronted by plaintiffs attorneys with an internal email from June 7, 2012, in which a YouTube employee, whose name was redacted, stated the “goal is not viewership, it’s viewer addiction.”
Harding confirmed that the email was authentic but dodged responsibility, claiming that staffers were discussing a “video creation app” that “wasn’t event built for viewers.” The next portion of the exchange between Harding and the attorney is redacted.
The federal case is part of what legal experts and critics have called a “Big Tobacco” moment for Google and Meta. Both companies were found liable last week for fueling social media addiction in a separate landmark case brought in California state court on behalf of a 20-year-old woman known as KGM.
The shock revelations from the Oakland federal case contradict public statements from executives who have claimed the app was never meant to be addictive and any harmful outcomes for kids are due to third-party content rather than its intentional app design choices.
During the state trial last month, YouTube executive Cristos Goodrow testified that the app was “not designed to maximize time” and the company doesn’t “want anybody to be addicted.”
This summer’s federal case in Oakland, however, includes an internal YouTube presentation from April 2018 recounting study findings that “excessive video watching is related to addiction” and that it results in a “’quick fix’ of dopamine.’”
The presentation even includes a colorful flow chart labeled “addiction cycle,” complete with arrows showing how “guilt” is an “emotional trigger” that leads to “craving, ritual and using.”
“Researchers feel that YT is built with the intention of being addictive,” the document said. “Designed with tricks to encourage binge-watching (i.e., autoplay, recommendations, etc.”
US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is presiding over a case that centralizes more than 2,000 pending lawsuits against social media firms that make similar allegations. A group of school districts has a trial date in June, while a coalition of state attorneys general will face off against Big Tech’s attorneys beginning in August.
“These cherry-picked, decade-old excerpts mischaracterize our responsible product design work. In fact, they prove our teams proactively identify challenges to ensure our products prioritize high-quality, age-appropriate experiences,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement.
The company’s own research from 2018, however, estimated that an eye-popping 32 million users aged 13 to 24 years old were classified as “habitual heavy use” and watched more than two hours of videos per day, while 36 million users aged 18 to 24 said they regretted how much time they spent on YouTube in the past week.
In an internal presentation slide featuring a screenshot of a silly cat video, YouTube employees said survey research showed that video watching “is a common technique for mood management” but it is “difficult to stop watching.”
“Ultimately, viewers experience feelings of guilt for spending so much time doing non-meaningful tasks,” the researchers wrote.
More recently in August 2024, an internal presentation titled “Teen (Unsupervised) Viewer Wellbeing and Safety,” YouTube employees admitted that the app’s “infinite feed” was a big part of the problem.
Employees wrote that the app’s “two biggest challenges” were video recommendations that “normalize unhealthy beliefs or behaviors” and “prolonged” use that was “displacing valuable activities like time with friends or sleep.”
“These concerns are loudest on short form content (more popular with teens) due to its lack of depth and infinite feed experience,” the document said.
The documents, which range from 2012 through 2025, were unsealed in late February and compiled by the Tech Oversight Project, an online watchdog group that has emerged as one of Big Tech’s most vocal critics.
“YouTube’s posture in court is that they aren’t a social media platform but their own executives don’t even buy that theory,” said the group’s executive director, Sacha Haworth.
“These explosive documents show that YouTube set out to deliberately addict children and teens because it produced more screen time to deliver ads and more data to funnel into Google’s surveillance business,” Haworth said in a statement. “They see our kids as pawns to make their next trillion dollars, and it’s past time that we break this noxious status quo.”
While discussing an internal presentation about YouTube’s autoplay feature dated Sept. 14, 2021, one employee asked if the team had explored tools aimed at “helping users fall asleep.”
“It was something we looked into…but it generally just wasn’t as high a ROI compared to some of the other projects,” a YouTube project manager replied.
Elsewhere, in a 2019 “strategy offsite” presentation, employees wrote that YouTube’s goal of “driving more frequent daily usage is not well aligned with our efforts to improve digital wellbeing.”
Another document reveals that YouTube executives took steps to cover their tracks and prevent future scrutiny of its practices.
During an April 2, 2025 deposition, James Beser, a senior YouTube executive focused on child safety, admitted that his team would keep “history off” in internal chatrooms – a move he claimed was intended to assist “junior folks” who would sometimes reread them and “take things out of context.”
A plaintiffs’ attorney pressed Beser on whether “anybody senior” at YouTube had ever instructed him to turn off history on his chats.
“I don’t recall ever being told that,” Beser replied.
The “history off” issue had popped up in other high-profile lawsuits involving Google. Multiple federal judges have ripped Google for destroying chat logs that should have been preserved, including US District Judge James Donato, who furiously condemned the practice during a 2023 antitrust case as “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice” that “undercuts due process.”
A Los Angeles jury ordered Google and fellow defendant Meta last week to pay a combined $6 million in damages, with the YouTube parent responsible for 30% of the penalty and the Facebook and Instagram parent responsible for the other 70%.
