“Anxiety, depression, self-harm” — and total dependency: Those are the “serious emotional harms” a family claims affected their daughter, identified only as KGM, in a bombshell lawsuit filed in 2023 against platforms including Instagram and YouTube.
The trial began in Los Angeles Superior Court Tuesday and, already, Snapchat and TikTok have settled for undisclosed sums. The Chico, California, family claims KGM was unwittingly exposed to harmful content as well as strangers with nefarious intent, including one who sexually extorted her.
Both companies have denied wrongdoing in connection with the allegations.
The family is represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center which filed a complaint on behalf of KGM and several other plaintiffs — among them, a young woman who is, presumably, her older sister. KGM’s mother, Karen Glenn, is also listed as the mother of the second plaintiff, now 23, who allegedly suffered equally if not more extreme experiences, including a “near-fatal” eating disorder.
Now 20, the young woman the world knows only as KGM was just 9 when got her first iPhone and signed on to some of the apps that would allegedly change her life — all against her parents’ wishes.
“Her mother said no to social media,” according to the complaint.
At first, the mother tried using third-party software — there are apps, like Qustodio or Net Nanny, intended to help parents monitor their kids’ web activity and block certain sites — to prevent her daughter from using TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram.
But, the complaint suggests, that was like trying to stop a giant by throwing pebbles.
The social-media apps in question “design their products in a matter that enables children to evade parental consent,” the court filing alleges, and KGM “was able to access” the sites anyway.
She signed up for Snapchat at 13 and allegedly developed a “compulsion to engage with those products nonstop,” the complaint claims, fed by “constant notifications” pinged to her phone “24 hours a day.”
“When I was in middle school, I used to go and hide in the counselor’s office … just to go on my phone,” she said in a deposition last year.
What she encountered on the apps was, allegedly, a potentially dangerous world.
According to the complaint, “Meta [the parent company of Instagram and Facebook] and Snap’s Artificial Intelligence user recommendation and connection tools” — seemingly referring to Snapchat’s “Find Friends” and Instagram’s “Suggested for You” features — “facilitated … connections” between young KGM and “complete strangers, including predatory adults.”
She was then allegedly targeted with what the court filing calls “harmful and depressive content” that urged acts of self-harm.
TikTok, in particular, has been criticized for content dubbed “Skinnytok,” where young women swap unhealthy dieting tips, and many of the platforms have been criticized for circulating content that promotes self-harm — including imagery that glorifies cutting and romanticized pictures of scars.
An algorithm of notifications and content tailored to KGM to allegedly “prevent her from looking away at any cost.”
That wasn’t the only troubling behavior allegedly happening in the family’s Northern California home.
KGM, the complaint claims, also suffered “bullying and sextortion” on Instagram, though it was never clear if this was by someone she knew offline or a “random stranger” the app had connected her with.
Sextortion cases have been on the rise in the United States, as organized crime rings lure teens into sharing explicit photos — often by pretending to be flirtatious peers from the same area. They then threaten to send the pictures to the victim’s family and friends unless the victim sends money.
At least 38 American children have committed suicide after being sextorted in just five years. A 2024 report by the Network Contagion Research Institute found Instagram was the most common platform for sextortion schemes to take place, followed by Snapchat.
When KGM’s family reported her alleged sextortion to Meta — “as Meta instructs its users to do” — the company did nothing, the complaint claims, and instead allowed the person to continue committing harm via “explicit images of a minor child.”
According to the court filing, it took multiple family members and friends “spamming” Instagram’s moderation system in a coordinated two-week effort before Meta handled it.
“I believe that social media, her addiction to social media, has changed the way her brain works,” the plaintiff’s mother said in a related filing, according to the Los Angeles Times. “She has no long-term memory. She can’t live without a phone. She is willing to go to battle if you were even to touch her phone.”
“Whenever my mom would take her phone away … she would have a meltdown like someone had died,” KGM’s sister said in deposition. “She would have so many meltdowns anytime her phone was taken away, and it was because she wouldn’t be able to use Instagram.”
Glenn’s older daughter, meanwhile, allegedly developed such a severe addiction to social media that she couldn’t sleep at night, began skipping school, experienced suicidal thoughts and almost died.
She signed up for social media at age 12, despite her mother using software to prevent use, and was allegedly barraged with eating disorder-related content, ultimately developing an eating disorder herself.
She wound up in and out of hospitals “almost daily,” missing a year of school and going from being a straight-A student to needing books to be read out loud to her due to difficulty comprehending text on a page, according to the complaint. It also claims she suffers lasting hair loss and heart issues.
But when her mother would try to restrict access to her devices, she became “out of control even to the point of violence.”
The older daughter, the complaint claims, “thought she was safe behind a screen” as the apps connected her with strangers — believing that “the more of Meta and Snap’s recommended strangers she accepted, the more popular she would be,” with an increased Snap Score and more likes.
Snap Scores show the total number of Snapchats a user has sent and received, and are often considered a metric of popularity.
Glenn was “unable to work” as her daughter’s “treatment and survival became a full-time job.”
Jury selection in K.G.M.’s trial began on Tuesday, and executives including Mark Zuckerberg are expected to testify.
A spokesperson for Snapchat said that “the Parties are pleased to have been able to resolve this matter in an amicable manner.” And a spokesperson for Meta said, “We strongly disagree with these allegations and are confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people.”
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
The case “marks the beginning of the first trial in history seeking to hold social media companies accountable for the harms their products inflict on children,” Matthew P. Bergman, founding attorney at Social Media Victims Law Center, told The Post.
A victory for KGM could result in Big Tech giants paying damages or altering their platforms’ design, which the 2023 complaint claims have “rewired how our kids think, feel, and behave.”
