Last month, a California judge ruled that Meta and Google had endangered a young woman by knowingly creating addictive features in their platforms. This landmark case opens the way for others who are waiting for their day in court to argue that social media has caused significant harms in the lives of teens. The Bulletin’s Clarissa Moll sat down with Mark, Rachel, and Sarah Lanier, attorneys for the plaintiff, for a discussion about social media addiction and how the gospel informs their work. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation in episode 268.
Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan to a lawyer. From your seat in the courtroom and your experience as a Bible teacher, unpack that for me. What does it mean for a lawyer to hear the parable of the Good Samaritan?
Mark Lanier: I find it engaging that a lawyer is debating the law with the Lord, the one who wrote the law and gave it to Moses. I never want to be that lawyer who’s so arrogant that I’m in those shoes. I want to be a student.
I love this story because it presents the question of “Who’s your neighbor?” The answer apparent from the story is the person before you, who you see on the road of life that needs help you can give. It causes me to focus on my road of life, while I’m walking from Jerusalem to Jericho, figuratively. Who has God put in my path with needs that I can help address?
In the practice of law, for example, lots of cases come my way, but which case particularly needs me because the others have passed it by or will pass it by? That certainly seemed to be the case with the lawsuit that my daughters and I just finished trying together.
Many of us have seen this trial against Meta in the news. What are the key points for us to understand?
Rachel Lanier: This case was about one plaintiff, Kayley, who is now 20 years old. She is one of thousands of young adults who have grown up in a world where social media accounts are the norm for their friend groups and for their socialization.
We went to trial against Meta for Instagram and Google for YouTube. These companies targeted kids like Kayley, and they didn’t care how young kids were when they used these apps. These companies didn’t care if they communicated about certain risks. They didn’t warn parents, and they set out to make their apps addictive. It caused mental health harm and damage to Kayley and thousands of other children like her.
Mark: The platform changes your concept of what’s normal. Filters allow young ladies to get on and give themselves the perfect cheekbones, erase teenage acne, smooth the skin out with a glowing tan, and fix their eyes so they’re symmetrical.
Other features get you on the app at all hours. They’ll send you notifications so that you’ll hear a ding and think, Somebody’s commented on something I’ve done. A kid wakes up in the middle of the night and gets on to check. Pretty soon, their fingers are scrolling, and, before long, it’s three in the morning and this preteen has missed four hours of sleep. The next day, there are behavior and education problems at school, and it snowballs.
A third of the young children and teenagers on these apps have not just distorted perceptions of self-image but poor sleep, increased depression, anxiety, and social phobia.
Kayley was under the age of 13 when she first got onto these platforms. Is this akin to underage drinking, like having her first beer before she turned 21? She was clearly violating the app’s terms of service. Right?
Sarah Lanier: Where the distinction would lie is in terms of accessibility. For example, you don’t have to input an age when you get into YouTube. It would be the equivalent of young Kayley going to a “serve yourself” bar where they don’t check IDs. Maybe you aren’t placing an order, but you can get whatever you want. While you can’t upload a video unless you say that you’re 13 or older, you can get on YouTube.com without logging into any account, and you can watch any video that you want.
A lot of platforms like Instagram didn’t ask for people’s ages until relatively recently, so a lot of people who were underage got on the platforms at a time where they weren’t being asked their age. By the time they’re already addicted to it, they know just lying about your age is how you can stay on the app. In some cases, people are never asked at all.
Kaley’s mom was aware of dangers on Facebook, so she never let her daughter on Facebook. She didn’t want her daughter downloading any apps on her phone that she didn’t know about, so she gave Kaley an old hand-me-down phone from Kayley’s older sister and installed some software on it so Kayley couldn’t download new apps without her mom’s approval. Her mom also put time limits on the phone, so it would shut off after a certain amount of use per day. But Kayley was able to get the apps because her older sister had downloaded them, and even though her mom wiped her phone, Kayley was still able to download the app without needing her mom’s approval. In her mom’s mind, she’s trying her best to prevent access to the phone.
We’re all sitting here in 2026 where we know a lot about these apps, but we have to think in the minds of these parents. Back in 2012, YouTube was telling parents, Let us be your digital babysitter. Parents need time to cook dinner for their kids. Parents need time to do laundry and clean up after the day. Let us be your babysitter. There was a big misconception around the safety of these apps, but there were also a lot of unknowns. Back in 2012, people thought, What a good way to connect.
How can you parse this out to identify the platform as the problem?
Rachel: Nobody comes from a life without any sort of difficulty. Even if a teen’s life was like a dry wilderness with dry branches, that in and of itself doesn’t start a big wildfire. You have to have some sort of spark. For Kayley, the spark was YouTube and social media. Social media just continued to pour gasoline, and it set fire to her life.
The impact on kids and kids’ brains has been studied and now confirmed: Social media changes the pathways in the brain, and these super-personalized algorithms completely alter the way a child develops. The use of it actually makes it harder for a kid to deal with normal life experiences. Almost every kid has had a negative social interaction with somebody. Sometimes it’s more severe than others—bullying and things like that. Social media actually makes it harder to deal with those types of interactions.
Mark: We were privileged to see early YouTube documents because the judge ordered this as part of the lawsuit. In these confidential documents, they wrote, Our goal is not viewership, it’s addiction. That’s what they were after. Their engineers would go to work on those goals, working to get a certain percentage bump each year. Adding an endless scroll where all you have to do is finger swipe and you can scroll, changing the algorithm so that about every tenth scroll you get a video that artificial intelligence says is one you might find enticing and that’ll make you stay on longer. The artificial intelligence would analyze your activity and send you more. All of these are purposely engineered by some of the smartest people on the planet to trap, entice, and addict.
Sarah: Once I saw the internal documents, that’s when it hit me what it means to target teens. If they can hook somebody at that age, they turn that person into a lifelong user and that person then gives them more and more revenue over time.
Teens also are much more susceptible to social validation and following the crowd. If you get one teen hooked on the platform, their whole friend group’s going to want to get on the platform. That’s where accessibility comes into play as well. As much as you can limit one kid’s access to a device, if somebody at school has a device and they’re on these apps, these companies are able to get into the friend groups, essentially.
This is a very unique age group that’s been specifically targeted not just in ads and content but algorithms. Look, for example, at the way likes and notifications are distributed in batches on the platforms. When you look at your phone, you see that ten people liked your post. It makes you want to look at your post, at your phone.
When I tell other Gen Zers we’re arguing about how social media is addictive, their response is always Well, of course it is. Younger generations are very knowledgeable, not only of how it all works, but of the fact that it is addictive and it was designed to be addictive.
I have seen a reference to the 1996 Communications Decency Act, Section 230, in news related to this ruling. Can you explain its relevance here?
Rachel: Section 230 was originally supposed to be for publications like The New York Times or The Houston Chronicle, so that if they published certain content they wouldn’t be held liable for harm. The goal was freedom of speech and to protect publishers.
In the internet age and in the age of these platforms, Section 230 has been warped in a way that advantages these companies. They have fought tooth and nail and lobbied to hide behind Section 230 and not be held accountable for any harmful content on their platforms, content like self-harm, suicide, or eating disorders. The companies say they’re just publishers, even though they’ve created an algorithm that elevates that type of content.
In our case, we focused on the features themselves, because even if you have a kid that’s staring at good content, it’s still not healthy for the developing brain. If a kid’s looking at and scrolling videos of sunshine, rainbows, and butterflies for three hours, it keeps them from playing outside or getting real-life social interaction. There is a lot of science just about that too.
Mark: We live in a society where there’s little to no regulation if you want to funnel money to politicians for their elections, their campaigns, or their inaugural balls. A lot of people need to own up to the fact they’re not handling business the way they ought to, and I put some responsibility at the feet of the politicians who refuse to change Section 230. I hold up politicians like Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri and Senator Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee, who have fought for these changes, who recognize we need to change Section 230. But how do you get enough votes?
Luke ends the parable of the Good Samaritan saying, “The expert in the law replied, ‘The one who had mercy on him’” is the neighbor (Luke 10:37). In that single sentence, we see the tug and pull of mercy and justice.
What do justice and mercy look like for the parent who discovers a child’s social media addiction? And, maybe more difficult, what do justice and mercy look like for tech companies? We want to blame them as though they’re inanimate objects, but they are populated and empowered by humans who are also made in the image of God.
Mark: Micah 6:8 puts those two terms into one verse. “What does the Lord require of you?” To do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. Those three aren’t opposites. They all fit together quite well for the believer.
We live in a world where the greatest mercy we can be for the families, and the greatest mercy we can ultimately be for the companies, is to enforce some measure of justice and accountability so that everybody’s aware of what’s going on and so that people are not allowed to take advantage of others. That extends mercy where it should be, including correction where correction needs to be.
The parent who never corrects a child is not merciful to that child. They’re actually the opposite. Justice and mercy go hand in hand, and the humility that’s added in Micah 6:8 is our posture under the authority, the control, and the glory of the Lord.
Rachel: Justice requires an actual scale if there’s an imbalance. God commands us to help the marginalized, to help people who have been hurt. Part of justice and mercy and that balance is righting a wrong. When it comes to these companies and the harm that they’ve caused, justice is not just a concept for the courtroom. It’s a reflection of God’s character. The goal of justice is to restore what was imbalanced and right the wrong that took place.
