Is social media addiction real? Law and science collide in blockbuster federal suit

A blockbuster court battle is set to open in Oakland this month, pitting Silicon Valley against attorneys for the state of California in a $1.4-trillion contest with existential stakes and potentially eye-watering payouts.

In true Hollywood fashion, the record-smashing, celebrity-studded legal drama is also a sequel.

At the heart of the fight is an essential, hotly contested question: Is social media addiction even real?

Meta’s answer, articulated across years of filings and months of litigation, is a resounding “no.”

Earlier this year, Meta lost a pair of groundbreaking civil suits in state courts, with juries in Santa Fe, N.M., and Los Angeles concluding its products were harmful to children in verdicts rendered just hours apart. The company is appealing both cases.

The damages were relatively small: $375 million to New Mexico for enabling child predators and $4.2 million to Kaley Glenn-Mills in Los Angeles for designing features to hook kids, figures well below Sandoz’s generic drug price-fixing settlement and L.A.’s most recent dog-bite payout, respectively.

But their impact was seismic.

On Thursday, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay an additional $567 million on top of the earlier damage judgment, ruling the company was a “public nuisance.” In a July 29 earnings report, Meta said that the 2026 trials could “significantly impact” its bottom line.

Now, attorneys general in California and three other states are hoping to parlay that success into an unprecedented verdict in federal court, one that could prove far more significant — and orders of magnitude more costly — than any civil suit before.

The states allege Meta intentionally designed its products to addict kids and repeatedly lied to the public about it, telling parents and politicians its apps were safe for children while mining underage users for valuable data. The lawsuit seeks a whopping $1.4 trillion in damages from the company.

The company’s lawyers have filed a motion to block the “staggering figure” from reaching jurors when the trial opens on Aug. 18, arguing it is unprecedented.

Meta argues it can’t keep very young kids off its apps, and that there’s equal evidence showing its products are good for older adolescents as to suggest they might be harmful.

To cast doubt on the existence of social media addiction, Meta’s lawyers have zeroed in on the absence of a formal diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often called the bible of psychiatry, or the DSM.

“Courts — including the U.S. Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit — routinely refer to the DSM as an authority to inform the definition and diagnosis of mental disorders,” attorneys for Meta wrote in a motion for summary judgment in April.

“The fact that neither of the two definitive authorities for diagnosing mental disorders recognizes the existence of social media addiction — after having studied the issue and the literature — is fatal to the AGs’ core claims, especially given the lack of admissible evidence to the contrary,” the filing said.

But the relationship between the manual and the courtroom is rarely so straightforward, experts argue.

“The DSM is medical in nature … so the language is typically medical,” said Dr. Michael MacIntyre, a forensic psychologist. “The law has a very different language, so anytime the DSM is used in court that has to be translated.”

Even disorders such as schizophrenia — one of the earliest identified forms of madness, with descriptions dating back to ancient Egypt — cannot in and of themselves meet the legal criteria for insanity, which is concerned with culpability, not suffering, the expert said.

Making the legal leap without a DSM diagnosis is even harder.

“The DSM is always catching up to the times,” said Carrie Goldberg, a plaintiff’s lawyer who helped pioneer the current style of social media litigation.

At the Glenn-Mills trial in Los Angeles, Meta attorneys repeatedly hammered witnesses about the lack of a listing — at times appearing to annoy jurors and test the patience of the court.

Despite losing that bellwether, Meta continued to press the DSM argument in its filings in federal court.

Then, in late June, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez struck a major blow to the company’s strategy, saying the term’s absence from the manual was “not dispositive” and could not settle the legal question of whether the ailment exists, or if ongoing scientific debate indemnifies statements about the apps’ safety.

“The scientific literature, and defendants’ own documents use a variety of terms interchangeably, referring to ‘addictive’, ‘excessive’, ‘problematic’, or ‘compulsive’ use,” she wrote in her June order. “The Court declines to draw lines between these terms.”

The existence of social media addiction is a “material dispute of fact” — one a jury should settle, not a judge, Gonzalez wrote.

As the judge noted in her ruling, the ongoing controversy has as much to do with when and how the diagnostic gospels were compiled as the scientific validity of the ailment.

That’s because social media apps and the latest version of the DSM are almost exactly the same age. When the manual hit shelves in May 2013, only about half of Americans had a smartphone. Facebook had just acquired Instagram, Snapchat was barely two and TikTok was years in the future.

Today, more than 95% of kids ages 13 to 17 are on the apps — about a third of them “almost constantly” — according to studies by the Pew Research Center and the National Institutes of Health.

A 2025 literature review in the medical journal Current Pediatric Reports showed almost two-thirds of 11 and 12-year-olds have social media accounts — a violation of the apps’ terms of service, which Meta and others argue they are all but powerless to prevent.

Science is still catching up to the shift, experts said.

“It’s not surprising that social media addiction is not in the DSM yet,” said Dr. Jason Nagata, a professor of pediatrics at UCSF who has published extensively on behavioral problems associated with children’s use of the platforms . “The process of developing diagnoses is not a fast one.”

Compared with chemical dependencies, which have been well understood since before the first DSM was compiled in 1952, the framework for describing so-called behavioral addictions is extremely new, he and others said.

Gambling is the only behavioral addiction currently listed in the DSM. Though it first appeared in the manual’s 1980 edition as “pathological gambling,” it was only classified as a form of addiction in 2013, despite having been observed and described that way for centuries — most famously by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Dr. Lara Ray, a professor of psychology who runs an addiction lab at UCLA, contrasted the way scholars were able to identify and address addiction to new street drugs by building on centuries of scientific knowledge about older chemical dependencies.

Alcoholism has been formally studied for generations, as have opioid-use disorder and cigarette smoking, Ray explained. But no comparable infrastructure exists to probe whether social media is addictive and how that addiction might be identified and treated, nor is there government funding to support it.

“A lot of this has yet to be systematically studied and documented,” the professor said. “The science is a little behind what’s really happening.”

Meanwhile, children increasingly describe their own experience of the apps in diagnostic terms.

“It’s relatively common for teenagers to be reporting symptoms of social media addiction whether or not you believe it’s a formal diagnosis,” Nagata said. “It’s important we make it a formal entry. If a diagnosis doesn’t exist, people can’t get treated for it.”

While they wait for the next edition of psychiatry’s bible, Nagata and others support many of the structural changes sought by the states’ lawsuit, separate from money damages. The state attorneys general have called for stricter age gates to keep out preteen users, stringent caps on the time that can be spent on the apps, notification and privacy limits for adolescent accounts, and stronger safeguards to stop the exploitation of children by adult users.

Many of those same changes were ordered by Judge Bryan Biedscheid in New Mexico on Thursday.

“People see these companies as nuisances that they tolerate,” Goldberg said. “What is scary to these companies is that juries have a lot of power.”