Wired Young: The Social Media Trial That Should Make Every Parent Pay Attention

A courtroom in the United States is currently hosting what may be one of the most consequential legal battles of our digital age. Meta, the corporation behind Facebook and Instagram, sits in the dock alongside YouTube, accused not of an accident or an oversight, but of something far more deliberate: knowingly engineering addiction in children. A 20-year-old, who has spent the better part of their conscious life scrolling, liking, and watching, is at the center of this case. Thousands more lawsuits wait in the wings. The charge sheet reads like a public health crisis: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, suicide. And the question hanging over all of it is one that every parent, teacher, and policymaker should be demanding an answer to: what exactly does social media do to a young brain?

The answer, increasingly, is that we know enough to be alarmed.

The adolescent brain is not a smaller adult brain. It is a fundamentally different organ, still under construction well into the mid-twenties, and uniquely vulnerable to the mechanics of reward and reinforcement. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for impulse control, long-term thinking, and the ability to weigh consequences, is the last region to fully develop. Meanwhile, the limbic system, the brain’s emotional and reward hub, is firing at full intensity. This is why teenagers take risks, crave peer validation, and feel emotions with an intensity that can seem incomprehensible to adults who have forgotten what it was like.

Social media platforms understand this architecture intimately, and they exploit it with surgical precision.

Every notification, every like, every comment triggers a small release of dopamine, the same neurotransmitter involved in the pleasurable effects of nicotine, alcohol, and gambling. The platforms are designed, and this is not metaphor but engineering, to maximize the frequency of these micro-rewards. Infinite scroll removes the natural stopping point. Algorithmic feeds are calibrated to serve content that provokes the strongest emotional response, keeping eyes glued to screens and engagement metrics rising. Variable reward schedules, the same mechanism that makes slot machines so compulsive, govern what content appears and when. These are not side effects. Internal documents from Meta, made public by whistleblowers, have shown that the company’s own researchers identified serious harms to young users and were overruled by commercial imperatives.

The parallels to substance addiction are not merely rhetorical. Brain imaging studies have shown similar patterns of activation in heavy social media users as in individuals with recognized substance use disorders. The hallmarks are familiar: tolerance, requiring more time online to achieve the same emotional effect; withdrawal, the anxiety and irritability that descends when the phone is taken away; and continued use despite known harm. The American Psychological Association and numerous international health bodies have now acknowledged that problematic social media use can meet clinical criteria for behavioral addiction. We do not hesitate to regulate cigarettes or alcohol because of their effect on developing minds. The question of why we treat algorithmically engineered compulsion any differently is one the courts are now beginning to force us to answer.

The mental health data is, by now, devastating in its consistency. Rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents began rising sharply around 2012, precisely when smartphone ownership and social media use became near-universal among teenagers in the developed world. Rates of self-harm among girls aged 10 to 14 have increased dramatically across multiple countries. Emergency department admissions for eating disorders in young people surged through the 2010s. Suicide rates among adolescents, which had been declining for decades, reversed course. Researchers including Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt have marshaled extensive evidence linking these trends to the proliferation of social media, while the platforms and some academics dispute the strength of the causal link. That debate has its place, but it should not be allowed to become a perpetual excuse for inaction. We do not demand absolute proof before acting on other public health threats.

The specific mechanisms of harm are varied and compounding. For girls in particular, image-based platforms like Instagram have been shown to worsen body image, fueling comparison culture that feeds eating disorders and chronic low self-esteem. For all young users, the displacement of sleep, with phones checked obsessively last thing at night and first thing in the morning, creates a chronic sleep deprivation that is itself a significant driver of depression and anxiety. The flattening of deep social connection into transactional digital interaction leaves many adolescents feeling paradoxically lonelier the more connected they appear. And the algorithmic amplification of extreme content means that a teenager researching diet tips or low mood can find themselves, within minutes, in a rabbit hole of pro-anorexia communities or content normalizing self-harm.

So where does this leave parents trying to navigate a world they did not grow up in?

The honest answer is that individual parental vigilance, while important, is not sufficient when the adversary is a trillion-dollar industry deploying behavioral psychologists and machine learning to capture attention. That said, the evidence does support several practical approaches. Delaying smartphone ownership until at least 14, and social media access until 16, is now recommended by a growing number of child health experts and is gaining legislative momentum in several jurisdictions. Keeping devices out of bedrooms overnight is one of the single most effective interventions for improving adolescent sleep and mental health. Creating genuine device-free time and spaces, at meals, in the mornings, and in the hour before bed, restores the kind of present, unhurried attention that human relationships and developing minds actually need. 

But the deeper conversation that this trial should prompt is a structural one. We have labored under the polite fiction that social media platforms are neutral tools, like roads or telephone lines. They are not. They are environments engineered for maximum engagement, and they have been allowed to conduct an uncontrolled experiment on an entire generation of children without meaningful consent, oversight, or accountability.

Whether Meta and YouTube are found legally liable in this case or not, the moral verdict is already becoming clear. We built these platforms. We let them into our children’s hands. And now we owe those children, and the ones still growing up, something far more serious than terms and conditions and a parental control toggle buried in a settings menu.

We owe them the truth, and the protections that follow from it.