Kaley would look at Instagram until she fell asleep. She would wake up in the middle of the night to check her notifications. She would open the app as soon as she woke up. One day, she spent 16 hours on Instagram.
"I stopped engaging with my family because I was spending all my time on social media," Kaley told a jury in Los Angeles during a landmark lawsuit against Meta and Google, two of the biggest companies in the world.
TikTok and Snapchat, who were also named in her original suit, settled out of court.
Known only by her first name or initials to protect her privacy, Kaley's story has become the test case for more than 2,000 similar lawsuits looking to hold social-media companies to account for their alleged harm to the mental health of their youngest users.
As the first of its kind, the five-week trial is being watched closely by legal experts and parents who believe their children were damaged, even pushed to suicide, by social media.
