Photograph by Andy Hall for The Observer
The crusading American lawyer whose suits against tech giants have the potential to permanently alter the way social media companies behave is to meet British government ministers to share what he has learned.
Matthew Bergman represented a 20-year-old woman who was awarded $6m in damages last month in a landmark case after a jury in Los Angeles found that Meta and YouTube had created addictive products that harmed her. Bergman is representing more than 1,000 other plaintiffs in future cases.
He is expected to meet Liz Kendall, the science and technology secretary, and Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, as well as backbenchers and peers who have helped the government to commit to a consultation on a social media ban.
Speaking to The Observer ahead of his visit this week, Bergman said he wanted to share his experience with MPs. “What I have learned about these platforms and their dangerous impact on kids, particularly through documents and testimony that we have unearthed, shows they know their platforms are addictive, designed them to be so and resisted efforts to change,” he said.
Documents that were submitted as part of the LA case and have been seen by The Observer show Meta staff discussing how Instagram, which is a Meta platform, “is a drug” and “we’re basically pushers”. Staff say also that “the top-down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more”. In another document, a Meta employee worries that teenagers “are hooked despite how it makes them feel. Instagram is addictive, and time-spend on platform is having a negative impact on mental health.”
Bergman believes this evidence helped swing the result in the LA case. “Their defence was almost entirely based on maligning KGM [the plaintiff] and her mother and suggesting that her mental health harms were not the result of their dangerously defective platforms, but rather the fact that she had a mean mum and had some challenges in her upbringing,” he said.
‘It was a turning point in negating the argument that these companies cannot be held accountable’
‘It was a turning point in negating the argument that these companies cannot be held accountable’
Matthew Bergman
“The clincher, as I perceived it, was Meta’s own documents showing that they know that children who have difficult upbringings, who have socioeconomic challenges, who might have difficult relationships with their parents, are more vulnerable to social media addiction and mental health harms.”
This allowed Mark Lanier, the trial lawyer, to argue that Meta and Google “were like cheetahs preying on gazelles”, he said. The trial was an emotional experience. Several bereaved parents attended on a daily basis, with some, such as Ellen Roome, camping outside the court overnight to ensure they had a space inside on key days. Roome, who is one of Bergman’s British clients, believes her son died while attempting a social media challenge that went wrong.
The jury took nine days to reach a verdict of 10-2 in favour of KGM. Bergman believes its impact will be felt far beyond California.
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“It's an incredible inflection point,” Bergman said. “This was the first battle of many, but it was certainly an important turning point in negating the argument that these companies cannot be held accountable. They can, and they were… We’re just putting one foot in front of the other.”
Bergman is preparing for a second bellwether trial as early as June, with another potentially a few weeks later. The Guardian has reported that 34 states are currently pursuing cases against Meta in federal court, and Bergman said “several” school districts in the US are seeking compensation for additional expenditures in social media-related mental health counselling.
Bergman and colleagues at his firm, the Social Media Victims Law Center, have also started filing lawsuits against AI companies.
“If you think about social media as an attention economy [then] chatbots, if they become an intimacy economy, that can be highly problematic. We represent the families of a number of individuals who have lost their lives after literally being encouraged to die by suicide,” he said.
He is broadly supportive of the social media ban in Australia, recognising that litigation is just one part of a process that also requires legislation and public awareness. While the timing is coincidental, his visit to parliament coincides with the return of the children’s wellbeing and schools bill to the Commons, which now includes an amendment banning certain social media for under-16s.
Lord John Nash, who tabled the amendment, said the impact of KGM’s lawsuit is like “a snowball coming down the mountain”.
“Given the prime minister has now said publicly that this is a game-changer, and that he will legislate to make harmful content that harms children illegal, why don't they adopt my amendment or come up with their own?” he asked. “It would show leadership to do it this side of locals, on something that is very popular with the electorate.”
Meta said it “respectfully disagree[s] with the verdict” in the LA case and that “teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app”.
Google, which owns YouTube, said the case “misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site”. Both companies are appealing against the ruling.