An important jury trial has been underway in Los Angeles for weeks now but few know much about it.

Not only must it compete with the global havoc of the Trump administration, no filming or recording is allowed in the courtroom; the news reports tend to the repetitive and diluted.

We are stuck with snippets of video: a blank-faced Mark Zuckerberg surrounded by a posse of lawyers and bodyguards. A very few quotes.

The case is just one of 1600 civil lawsuits filed against the social media companies: TikTok, YouTube, SnapChat, Facebook, and Instagram. The claim is that they “deliberately embedded design features in their platforms to maximize youth engagement to drive advertising revenue.” 

The Los Angeles lawsuit, brought by a now-20-year-old identified as K.G.M. and her parents, has been selected as a “bellwether”: the outcome will set legal and legislative precedent, determining how the thousands of others will be decided.

The case now involves just Google’s YouTube and Meta’s Instagram and Facebook. The other named companies settled out of court for undisclosed sums.

One of the most important things about the lawsuits is that they have unveiled a trove of thousands of internal documents from each company named — emails, powerpoint presentations, internal messaging, research reports. There are conversations within PR teams about growing public criticism; and frank internal responses to university research detailing the corrosive effects of the platforms on a generation of children.

One 2020 conversation among members of a Facebook Exchange Admin Group, labelled “highly confidential” and “attorneys’ eyes only,” with participants’ names blacked out, reads as follows:

A: Oh my gosh yall IG is a drug

Privileged: Lol, I mean, all social media. We’re basically pushers.

A: Seriously it is! We are causing reward deficit disorder, because people are binging on IG so much they can’t feel reward anymore…like their reward tolerance is so high

Privileged: yeah, I was starting to think the same thing yesterday when you made the gambling reference. It’s kind of scary.

C: I know Adam [Mosseri, Instagram CEO] doesn’t want to hear it, he freaked out when I talked about dopamine in my teen fundamentals leads review but its undeniable!

A: Its biological and psychological

The conversation then considers research from Harvard that suggests the companies are deliberately addicting teens:

Privileged: I think all of us (employees) work tirelessly to make our products a positive experience for people but the top down directives drive it all toward making sure people come back for more

A: That would be fine it its productive but most of the time it isn’t…the majority is just mindless scrolling and ads

C: and superficial interactions

As each document is presented in court, it can be retrieved from a website called Court Listener. I have spent days reading these documents. I don’t recommend it. They are outraging, exhausting, and dispiriting. 

Much is censored. One Meta document called “Child Safety on Messenger” begins with the words: “Warning: This program contains descriptions of abuse that may be disturbing.” All of the following pages save one are blacked out.

A 2019 report called “Suicide & Self-Injury on Instagram” is completely blacked out.

Of an 83-page internal report on Instagram addiction, 17 pages are available. The rest are “highly confidential.”

Virtually every report hides pages from public view. But this is not the only way in which the Facebook Files remind of the Epstein Files. They expose the operations of the same global forces that allowed Epstein’s global child-trafficking ring to flourish, and enabled the men in charge of vast, flickering social media empires to accumulate trillions of dollars.

Everything rests on the flagrant, systematic exploitation of children: their innocence, the ease with which they can be seduced, their total helplessness in the face of bells and whistles.

Trafficking in and abusing children on an unprecedented scale. It is the untold story of our times.

The result is a generation that has been kneecapped. I teach English literature at a university. I can tell you this from direct experience. Over the past 15 years, I and my colleagues have witnessed an incredible erosion in student literacy skills. To put that in plain English: they cannot read. They simply haven’t the attention span or the patience or the time.

And that’s the English majors. 

One Facebook memo speaks directly to the distraction economy. Dedicated to Push notifications,it notes, “in academic experiments, smartphone notifications caused inattention and hyperactivity among teens, and they reduced productivity and well-being.”

“People who experience problematic use receive more push notifications per month, and respond to those notifications more often….Though they also respond more quickly,” it continues, ending on a hopeful note.

Observations like these are the tip of the iceberg: the widespread decline in the ability to think has created, of course, subpopulations incapable of detecting a rabbit hole before they’ve fallen into one.

Both outside and in the LA courthouse is a large group of parents who have lost children, mostly their teenaged girls, to suicide, anorexia, or drug-laced encounters with strange men — the consequences of an obsession with the endless scrolls of Instagram and TikTok that, the lawsuit alleges, was deliberately created by the engineers of these platforms and their algorithms.

An October 2023 Instagram paper called “Teen Support for SSI and ED” (Suicidal Self-Injury and Eating Disorders) also comes with a warning: “Note that this work contains sensitive (*potentially triggering) content materials. For internal use only, please do not distribute.” The images, selfies of starving children posted to Instagram, are indeed horrific.

The paper discusses the failure of this enormously sophisticated tech platform to block harmful content from circulating among children, and to block its tens of millions of underage (under 13) accounts in the first place.

There are myriad documents on the same theme.

The reasons come down to one word: profit. From the expense of the staff required to review accounts to the loss of advertising revenue. 

The ban on under-16s on social media platforms in Australia makes clear that nothing will change without legislation. Since it took effect, 4.7 million accounts have been shut down. When it comes to the calculation of harm to children versus revenues, children lose. Every single time.

We have all lost much more than we seem to know, even with the catastrophic consequences all around us, all the time, as though on an infinite loop.