They Knew and They Profited Anyway with Matthew Bergman

welcome to Mental Health Evolution, a podcast about what's changing in mental health and why it matters. I'm your host Rachel Harrison, inviting you into honest conversations with people from all perspectives in the field. Clinicians, tech founders, investors, insurance companies and all the folks in between. Let's explore what's working, what's not, and what's next. Welcome back everyone to the Mental Health Evolution podcast where we talk about how the landscape is rapidly evolving in the mental health industry. Today we are joined by Matthew Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center. Social media is everywhere in our clients lives and the mental health consequences are impossible to ignore. Rates of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation among young people have climbed alongside the rise of these platforms and for years the companies behind them have faced almost no legal accountability. That is starting to change. This Past March, a Los Angeles jury made history by finding meta and YouTube negligent in the design of their platforms and a rewarding 6 million in damages to a young woman whose mental health was seriously harmed by her use of Instagram and YouTube starting at age 6. It was the first verdict of its kind in the United States and it opens the door to thousands of similar cases still pending across the country. Matthew has spent the last four years building the legal case that made this moment possible. And today we are going to talk about what happened, why it matters, and what it means for young people and families that clinicians work with every day. As always, before we talk to our guests, we would like to bring up some relevant articles related to our topic today. These may be helpful for listeners who want to learn more and dive deeper. As usual, they will be linked in our show notes. And the first article is from npr. It's called Research Points to How Companies Could Make Social Media Less Addictive for Teens. This is from March of 2026 and it was published just days after the verdict. And it looks at the the research, what it actually shows about how social media platforms are designed to keep young people hooked. It covers the science behind compulsive use and documents the mental health consequences, including higher rates of depression, suicidal behavior and sleep disruption in kids who develop addictive patterns of use. It also looks at what design changes companies could realistically make to reduce harm, which gets at the heart of what the KGM case was about. The second article from NBC News is titled Jury finds Meta and YouTube negligent in landmark lawsuit on social media safety from March 2026. And this is the main news report on the KGM verdict. The jury found Both Meta and YouTube negligent in the design of their platforms and ruled that this negligence was a substantial factor in harming the plaintiff's mental health. The 6 million award included punitive damages, meaning the jury found the companies acted with reckless disregard. It also includes Matthew's statement on what the verdict means for thousands of other cases still working their way through the courts across the country. And lastly, the article we'd like to talk about is called Social Media Victims Law Center. It's from the Social Media Victims Law Center, Social Media Addiction Lawsuit Update. And this is talking about the case again and includes Matthew's full statement after the verdict and lays out in plain language the legal theory his firm has built over the past four years that social media companies should be held accountable not for what people post, but for how the platform themselves were designed to maximize engagement at the expense of user safety. It's a useful primer to take a look at before hearing from him directly. All of these pieces point to the same fundamental question. When a company builds a product it knows can harm children and profits from it anyway, who is responsible? Matthew has spent the last four years making the case in courtrooms that the answer is the company. So, Matthew, thank you so much for being here.

It's a pleasure to be here.

I'd love to hear a little bit about you and how you got interested in this work. Specifically, what led you here?

I have been a product liability lawyer for the last 30 years, primarily representing asbestos victims. And I learned a lot from that representation. From that experience, I had a lot of success and I also had a lot of defeats and learned equally from both and was interested in approaching something that was more. That would really change the world. It would not simply provide redress for past wrongs, but actually do something proactive. That coincided with the Francis Haugen revelations on social media and what the platforms know their products are doing to kids. It coincided with the Surgeon General's first report on the youth mental health crisis. And finally, we saw a little glimmer of hope in a 9th Circuit opinion that suggested that perhaps we could use product liability as a way to bring these cases forward. Up until. And this was In October of 2021, virtually every attempt to hold social media companies accountable legally was dismissed out of hand under section 230. And some of the most egregious situations, like Backpage, promoting child prostitution, was held to be immune from any liability, sale of drugs, violence, and bullying, and things like that. So there was really no way to move forward against these companies. We decided to apply our experience as product liability lawyers and take a different approach. And that's how we started.

Awesome. Thanks for that. And can you explain a little bit about what the Social Media Victims Law center does?

Yeah, we represent mostly parents of children who are injured, either through a severe mental health injury, a suicide, children that have been sexually abused, and children that have attempted to take their lives. And we represent them in product liability actions in states and federal courts around the country. We have approximately 2,000 families that we are currently representing.

That's a big number.

Yeah, well, there are a lot of. Unfortunately, that's true, because the impacts of social media on young people in particularly, have been cataclysmic.

Mm. Yeah, they certainly have. You mentioned this section 230 as a near impenetrable legal shield for tech companies. Can you explain more about that? And how that came to be?

Yeah, Section 230 was enacted in 1996 with the express purpose of protecting kids and providing a very kind of narrow window of immunity for social media companies. There wasn't social media back then, but for Internet companies, because they wanted to grow the Internet. It. And essentially it provided that a Internet service provider back then, they were called bulletin boards, can't be held liable if somebody posts defamatory material on the platform, which is, you know, which seemed like a fairly reasonable step at the time.

Right.

This was at a time when Netscape was the largest browser, social media didn't exist, there was no Google. And it was really thought that, you know, no one envisioned that this statute would be interpreted so broadly by courts well beyond the language or the congressional intent, and, you know, essentially provide carte blanche immunity to social media companies for just about anything they did. And to be clear, this was immunity that no other company has. Every other company in America has a duty of reasonable care. Social media companies did not. So in the absence of any legal liability, they were unconstrained to design social media apps for the sole intention of maximizing engagement and resulting advertising revenue by deliberately designing them to be addictive.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's certainly been exposed at this point, but it sounds like this has been the law that has been difficult to get any kind of legal action around.

That's very true. I mean, you know, the. As I said, some of the most egregious situations involving, you know, children that were sexually abused by predators that were connected to them on social media or victims of terrorism were held to have no rights whatsoever against social media companies, even when the companies knew that the material that was being posted was so dangerous. So we adopted a different approach. We said, okay, well, you know, you can't sue them for bad content moderation, but you can sue them for negligent design and product liability. So it's not the content that is hosted, it's the design that is designed to be addictive. Doesn't matter what content is shown to a kid. The algorithm picks whatever content is most likely to trigger a dopamine response in that child's adolescent cortex, and doesn't matter what it is. Now, we know from the standpoint of neurology and psychology, that material that is discordant, psychologically shocking, disturbing, triggers a greater dopamine response than material that is benign or uplifting. And so the algorithm selects material to show kids not what they. Not, not what they want to see, but what they can't look Away from. And the platforms also utilize gamification and other techniques to exploit adolescents need for, you know, social acclimation with features like the likes and the streaks and the hearts and these. These features that just become so benevolent in spurring this addictive relationship with social media that kids have.

Yeah, yeah. So can you walk us through the KGM case a little bit about who this young woman is and what happened to her and why this was the right case to take to trial.

KGM is a. Now she's a 20 year old young woman from northern California. She got on social media when she was nine years old and developed an addictive relationship with social media that manifested in body dysmorphia and mental health harms. The case was picked by the court as representative. It was not the worst outcome that we have. Thank God Kaylee's still with us and, you know, hanging in there. But it was specifically picked by the court with the idea that it be representative of so many others. So, you know, Kaylee could have been any of our daughters or any of our nieces. And the trial proceeded against YouTube and meta under the, you know, the entire defense was basically blame the victim and blame her mom. And, you know, the fact that Kaylee's parents separated when she was very young, that she had a difficult upbringing, she had some mental health challenges. All these were used as alternative causes by the companies to blame the victim, blame the mom. And it didn't work because we were able to, for the first time, make public exhibits and internal documents that show that the companies know not only that their platforms are addictive, not only that they have adverse mental health consequences on adolescents, but that kids like Caylee, particularly kids who are more vulnerable, more infirm, are more likely to develop addictive and mental health harms from social media than kids from a more or less challenged upbringing. So that enabled Mark Lanier, who tried the case so brilliantly, to be able to argue in closing that just like the cheetah that preys on the sick and the weak gazelles, these social media companies prey on vulnerable kids. And they do.

I mean, that just. That sits heavy, right?

Yeah, yeah, it does. And, you know, it's not surprising. You know, in the law we have a concept of, you know, it's called the thin skull plaintiff or the eggshell plaintiff. You know, that if somebody is vulnerable, you. It doesn't mean that a person has a lower duty of care. If somebody drives drunk and plows into an individual who's a hemophiliac and that person bleeds to death, the person is no less responsible than if the person had not been hematiliac and had just broken their femur. And we know that vulnerable people, vulnerable kids, are always the most likely to be hurt. You know, most sex abuse victims are vulnerable kids. The incidence of sickness and disease among people of low SES is higher. And so this is not a surprise and it's not an excuse.

Yes. Yeah, I think, I mean, that sat heavy with me that the victim blaming was not ultimately upheld. Right. Because we have a long history of that.

We do, we do. And, you know, somebody is sexually abused and, you know, it's her fault because she provoked the person, she shouldn't have worn a short dress or some other obnoxious argument. You know, they say, well, you know, most kids on social media don't have adverse mental health harms. That's probably true. You know, if a airplane only crashes one flight out of a thousand, it's a dangerous airplane. If car breaks don't only seize up one time out of a hundred, there's a recall of the car. The test on whether the majority of kids on social media are not suffering severe mental health harms is not the appropriate test. The test is, is it reasonably safe? And is the risk of harm outweighed by the utility that the platform provides? That's a basic principle of product liability. So, you know, if, you know, I always think, you know, if you had a cancer drug that, you know, that you'd give to people who were terminally ill, and, you know, in five cases, 50% of the people got better, you know, 40% of the people stayed the same, and 1 10% of the people got worse. On a risk utility test, we might very well decide from a societal benefit that the, that the, that the, that the benefit of a medication that can, you know, save five people justifies that risk because the benefit is so high with respect to social media, I think we all have to ask, what's the real benefit here? I mean, why is that? You know, why, you know, I mean, sure, there's some good things that can happen with social media, but is it really that essential, that beneficial to young people that we're willing to accept, you know, the carnage that is being inflicted on them? Oh, yeah. As a cost of doing business, you know, I would say no.

Well, and I think about, you know, as a clinician, it's clear, I think, to all of us that we see higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicidality, all of that in kids and teens than ever before. Like, it just, you know, and that is a. An introduction of social media has been a piece of that for sure. And a new thing that being a kid. I know sometimes I say I'm really glad I didn't have to navigate that at a young age, you know, Me too. Yeah.

You know, you're absolutely right. I mean, the mental health crisis started among young people, started in 2012. That's when the front facing cell phone came out.

Yeah.

And significantly, there was a lot of bad stuff on the Internet that kids could get into prior to 2012. It just wasn't being fed to them algorithmically. And so we hear from our friends on the other side, well, correlation is not causation. That's all well and good, but every reputable research study that has come out since then has established a very strong cause and effect relationship between social media and this youth mental health crisis. And the research is now establishing not only is a social media addiction behavioral, but it has pronounced neurologic components in that brain development among adolescents varies based upon frequency of social media use. So it is really much more an addiction like nicotine than we had previously thought.

Yeah, yeah. You have described this verdict as a watershed moment. And I'm curious, for people who are seeking care, for clinicians, people who work with the teen mental health crisis, what does this verdict change in practical terms? What does it allow?

It's the beginning, you know, I mean, paraphrase Winston Churchill. It's, you know, it's not the beginning, it's not the end. It's not the beginning of the end. Maybe it's the end of the beginning. It is, I think, the beginning of a new dialogue, kind of recognizing, hopefully, that it is now irrefutable that social media has a pernicious impact on kids. I think we're seeing among clinicians, you know, simply more and more focus on social media. You know, when we started doing this work, there were, you know, a lot of treaters were not asking about social media. A kid would come in with, you know, a mental health outcome, and it just wasn't on the list of things to ask. And that was an issue in the KGM trial. Even the treater hadn't charted it. And they called the treater back and the treater said, of course I knew it was social media. And so it was kind of an impactful moment. But I think treaters need to always ask about it, always inquire about it, frequency of social media use, what platforms are being used, and particularly now with respect to AI. But, you know, when everyone seeks, you know, Anxiety, depression, eating disorder, suicidality. I think a very important question to ask early on is social media. The extent to which social media platforms actively promote suicide is appalling. And the addictive relationship that kids have with social media, I think from a treater standpoint is highly problematic because, you know, if kids are spending seven hours a day online, that's time they're not exercising, hanging out with their friends, talking on the phone, going for a walk, doing their homework, watching tv. You know, I mean, you know, we used to think watching TV was so

bad for us, right?

And so, you know, we really, you know, I think it really needs to be front and center of what any, anybody treating adolescents is aware of.

I love that. I love that.

One of our treaters is a specialist in adolescent medicine and she says, yeah, we call it TikTok Instagram anorexia. That's what we call it in the office among the practitioners.

So yeah, yeah, that's a very inspirational thought and I think a good thing for anyone in this industry to be thinking about. We are just about out of time. And so with this case, with the work that you do, I'm curious for our listeners, is there any last, maybe word of wisdom, thoughts that you'd like to share with the audience before we sign off for the day?

Simply be afraid and be very afraid of what kids are encountering online. Recognize that not because they're bad kids, but because they're kids. They're not going to tell parents or treaters everything that they're encountering online. I don't think that, you know, there's kind of contrary strategies. One, you know, you want parents and treaters need to be an open book so that they can their kids feel comfortable talking about unpleasant, undifficult, embarrassing things that are happening online. On the other hand, I don't think that parents and treaters can trust these platforms that are explicitly designed to thwart parental authority to protect their kids and that can't really trust that their kids are going to share with them the full extent of what they're confronting online.

I agree. Thank you for that. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for finding a workaround and I look forward to seeing how this impacts not just the mental health industry, but our society and maybe some of these companies having to take a little more accountability for what's happening. So I really appreciate you coming on today.

Well, I'm happy to be part of your program and look forward to talking some point in the future.

Sounds good for our listeners. If you want more information or to dig in? We'll have all the articles and information about this law firm in our show notes and we will be back next week to talk about more about the changing landscape in the mental health field on the Mental Health Evolution Podcast. Thanks for being here.