EMILY KWONG, HOST:
A landmark trial over social media addiction is playing out in Los Angeles. The case is being brought against Meta and Google, the parent company of YouTube, by a plaintiff who says her excessive use of social media harmed her mental health. This has brought a rare spotlight to the question of whether social media causes addiction. Both Meta and Google say the allegations are baseless, with Meta saying the lawsuits, quote, "misportray (ph) our company and the work we do every day to provide young people with safe, valuable experiences online," while a Google spokesperson said that YouTube works with experts to provide, quote, "robust parental controls." Now, watching this trial closely are safety groups and families, including Julianna Arnold, a founding member of Parents RISE! That's a parent-led group seeking stricter regulation for social media and AI tools. Julianna Arnold joins us now. Welcome to the program.
JULIANNA ARNOLD: Thank you very much, Emily. I'm glad to be here.
KWONG: How did you get involved in this advocacy?
ARNOLD: I came to this work - I wasn't ever planning to be an advocate, but when I lost my daughter a couple weeks after her 17th birthday to online harms - specifically, a man who approached her unsolicited and was able to reach her on Instagram. And she answered back, and he groomed her, got him - lured her to come down and meet him. And he gave her what she thought was going to be a Percocet for her anxiety, and it turned out to be fentanyl.
KWONG: Oh.
ARNOLD: And she left that morning, and she never came home. You know, when you go through that loss of a child, I mean, your whole world changes. Everything changes. And I didn't know what to do with myself. And I knew I wanted to do something. It just felt so wrong to me, and I wanted to make it right, and I didn't want other people, other children having the same fate as my daughter.
KWONG: Thinking back to your daughter Coco's (ph) use of social media, did you see her getting really hooked on it?
ARNOLD: Oh, yes. You know, she struggled a little bit with self-esteem, and she also had ADHD. So the social media didn't cause that, but it really amplified it. And I saw her from 12, 13 on start to go into a downward spiral. You know, she spent more and more time on her phone, and I was really trying to put on limitations and making sure that I was - when the parental controls became available, I started, you know, using those. And - but it was like playing Whac-A-Mole, to be quite honest, because they're on multiple platforms, and these kids do things that we don't even know about. So she just stopped her sports, more time at home. Her school, life, work, you know, suffered. And it also caused a lot of agitation in the family, you know, because I was constantly having to be on her to get off her phone, put it away, you know? And we really struggled. And it just - I saw her go - you know, just change into a different person.
KWONG: Social media companies have talked about some of the safety features they've rolled out for kids. You took advantage of those, but are those controls enough?
ARNOLD: I mean, unfortunately, not. There are easily ways to get around them, which start to circulate within the kids, among the kids, and they get around them. It's a workaround. It's a Band-Aid.
KWONG: What would true responsibility from the tech companies look like to you?
ARNOLD: True responsibilities would be to fix their platforms and take responsibility and accountability for the way that they design their platforms. And what we're finding now, which is so distressing - I mean, I sat in the courtroom, and I heard from, you know, the head of Instagram how they design their platforms for safety, and that's their biggest concern. And they knew there were issues, and so they put out the parental controls. And, you know - and what we're seeing from the internal documents is that they show that the executives were warned about the risk to children. And they knew, and they still went forward and released these new features in these platforms, you know, like the continuous scroll, like the notifications. You know, everything they did was to make these kids addicted to these platforms, and they had to go back again and again.
KWONG: Do you think this moment is different from previous attempts to drive stronger regulation for these platforms?
ARNOLD: I really do because we've never gotten this far, right? No parent has ever gotten to go into discovery. And that's what's the difference here is that we now have internal documents that show this from - you know, in emails, studies, all these things that are coming to light where they actually did a study. They realized they had a problem, and then they chose not to address it.
KWONG: What do you want other parents to understand about these apps?
ARNOLD: We lost our kids, and there's nothing we can do about that. But what we can do is inform other parents and families about these harms and that these platforms are dangerous and that we need to put guardrails on these companies. And they cannot just do whatever they want when they want, how they want. And I want parents to know that these are not safe platforms for their children.
KWONG: Julianna Arnold is a founding member of Parents RISE! Thank you so much for coming on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
ARNOLD: Thank you very much, Emily. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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