If you, like many of us, spend most of your waking hours staring at screens—shuttling between work email, TikTok, YouTube, and group chats—you’ve probably wondered, at least half-jokingly, whether you’re “addicted” to your phone.
It’s a reasonable question, a Los Angeles jury just decided. In a closely watched landmark case, the court found in favor of a 20-year-old plaintiff known as KGM, who sued Meta and Google, alleging that design features like infinite scroll, filters, and autoplay on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube kept her online as much as 16 hours a day and helped fuel her depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, and self-harm. (TikTok and Snap settled in the same case earlier this year.) The verdict could open the door to thousands of similar lawsuits—and even end up limiting how far Big Tech can go in competing for our attention.
The legal challenges, alongside a growing body of brain research and concerns raised by health organizations, are adding urgency to a question much discussed in academia and over dinner tables: Is “tech addiction” real? And if so, what does that mean for the business model that powers the world’s most valuable companies?
The answer is not simple. At one end of the spectrum is the kind of “addiction” most of us joke about: checking email before we’re out of bed; scrolling TikTok in the checkout line; refreshing Instagram when we’re bored. At the other end is a far smaller group: people like the plaintiff in the lawsuit and Sarah Hill, a young woman Fortune met at a residential treatment center for digital overuse outside of Seattle. Hill’s compulsive use of an AI chatbot app, Character AI, became so all-consuming she flunked out of college and ended up at reSTART, one of only a few such centers, in the U.S. or elsewhere.
