When Donald Trump warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” it didn’t sound like policy. It sounded like extinction. That word, civilization, is doing all the work. It’s not accidental. Trump could have said government, regime, military. He didn’t. He chose a word that collapses everything into one target. People. Culture. History. Identity. One word, total destruction.

This is not a slip of language. It’s a pattern. Trump’s political power has always been rooted in his ability to choose words that expand the frame. He doesn’t argue at the level of policy detail. He jumps levels. Crime becomes “carnage.” Immigration becomes “invasion.” Opponents become existential threats. “Civilization” is the logical endpoint of that escalation. It’s not about winning an argument. It’s about redefining the stakes so completely that there is no middle ground left.

Older audiences tend to hear Trump this way and discount it. They file it under performance. Bluster. The familiar rhythm of exaggeration that defined his first campaign and presidency. They assume the system absorbs it, translates it, reduces it back down to something manageable. They’ve seen political language stretch before.

Gen Z doesn’t process it that way. They’ve grown up inside systems where language doesn’t just describe reality, it shapes it instantly. A phrase doesn’t sit in a speech. It becomes a clip, a post, a headline, an algorithmic signal. It spreads, accelerates, mutates. They understand that extreme language is not just expressive. It’s functional. It is designed to travel. And once it travels, it changes the environment it moves through.

So when they hear “civilization,” they don’t soften it. They don’t translate it into something more reasonable. They take it at face value. And face value, in this case, is absolute.

Because Iran is not just a geopolitical adversary in a current conflict. It is the modern expression of one of the oldest continuous civilizations in human history. What we call Iran today was once Persia, a cultural and political force that shaped large parts of the world for thousands of years. The Achaemenid Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great, stretched from the Mediterranean to South Asia. It was not only vast but administratively advanced, developing systems of governance, infrastructure, and cultural exchange that influenced later empires, including Rome.

And that civilization did not vanish when the empire fell. It transformed. Persian language endured. Literature flourished. Think of Rumi and Hafez, whose work continues to be read globally centuries later. Scientific and intellectual traditions carried forward through Islamic scholarship, helping transmit knowledge in mathematics, medicine, and astronomy into Europe. Architecture, art, and philosophy persisted, adapted, and spread.

When you say “Iran,” you are pointing to a nation-state. When you say “civilization,” you are pointing to something far older and far more durable. You are invoking a continuity of human culture that spans millennia. That’s why the word lands with such force. It suggests not a strike, not even a war, but an erasure. That distinction matters, not just culturally but legally.

Modern warfare is governed, at least in theory, by a set of constraints designed to limit harm. The Geneva Conventions establish principles of distinction and proportionality. Combatants are to be distinguished from civilians. Military targets are to be separated from civilian infrastructure. The deliberate targeting of civilian populations, or threats to destroy them wholesale, falls into the category of potential war crimes.

“Civilization” collapses those distinctions entirely.

It implies totality. It erases the boundary between soldier and civilian, between military objective and cultural existence. It suggests that everything is in play. That is precisely the kind of thinking international humanitarian law was built to prevent after the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

The backlash wasn’t subtle. Legal scholars and national security analysts didn’t treat the line as rhetorical excess. They treated it as a boundary being crossed. The Geneva Conventions are built on a simple premise: civilians are not targets, cultures are not targets, entire societies are not targets. When you invoke the destruction of a “civilization,” you’re not skirting that line, you’re stepping over it. That’s why the reaction escalated quickly. Pope Leo XIV publicly condemned the language, warning that normalizing the destruction of whole peoples is morally indefensible. In foreign policy circles, the concern was even more blunt. This is how conflicts spiral. You move from deterrence to absolutism. You replace strategy with spectacle. And once you frame the stakes as total, you leave yourself no room to walk anything back. Words like that don’t just describe escalation. They create it.

And that is what Gen Z is reacting to.

Not just the provocation, but the scale. Not just the politics, but the implication. This is a generation that has grown up with a constant awareness of systemic risk, climate collapse, pandemics, democratic fragility, and the accelerating power of technology. They are attuned to language that signals tipping points, points of no return. “Civilization” is one of those signals.

They also understand amplification. They know that the more extreme the statement, the more it spreads. A phrase like this is built for virality. It is simple, absolute, and impossible to ignore. It forces reaction. And in forcing reaction, it drives the cycle forward.

Trump has always had a way with words. He understands how to compress complex realities into phrases that dominate attention. But “civilization” is different. It doesn’t just inflame. It expands. It takes a specific geopolitical moment and reframes it as a question of existence itself.

That’s why it hit.

Because once you start talking about the end of a civilization, you are no longer debating policy or even strategy. You are questioning whether there are any limits left, rhetorical or real. And for a generation already skeptical that those limits are holding, that’s not just another headline. It’s a warning.

Maximilian Milovidov is not speaking about social media from a distance. He’s a Columbia freshman, a digital rights advocate, a member of TikTok’s Youth Council, and a NextGen Advisor working at the intersection of young users and the platforms shaping their lives. He sits in a rare position, both inside the system and deeply aware of its consequences.

And it shows up immediately in how he tells his own story.

He doesn’t describe himself as someone who eagerly joined social media. In fact, his instinct was resistance. “I did not enjoy social media platforms,” he explains. “I was kind of the one pushing back against my parents, from getting onto social media… I’d seen documentaries… and I realized the consequences that that could have on me, and I preferred not to engage in that.”

That’s not how we usually talk about Gen Z. The assumption is that they were pulled in before they could understand what they were stepping into. But here is someone who saw the risks early and tried, at least for a while, to stay out.

What changed wasn’t his understanding. It was the environment around him.

At a certain point, not participating becomes its own kind of isolation. Social media isn’t just entertainment. It’s where friendships live, where conversations happen, where visibility is negotiated. And so, like most of his peers, he stepped inside. Not because the system made sense, but because the alternative was to be left out of it.

That entry point matters, because it shapes how he talks about what came next. “I think when I finally embraced those technologies, I did have… a period of… screen time dependency, which we all find ourselves in, as Gen Z.”

There’s no moralizing in that line. No suggestion that this is about individual weakness. It’s framed as something structural, something that happens inside systems designed to keep you engaged.

That shift, from blaming users to examining design, runs through the entire conversation.

Milovidov is careful not to reduce the problem to bad actors. When the discussion turns to the companies building these platforms, he points instead to incentives. “Jonathan Haidt had actually mentioned… how he thought many people working in the industry were not evil… but rather that this was something that the Board of Investors was pressuring, or the way that the business model was designed.”

It’s a more complicated explanation, and a more unsettling one. If the system is behaving exactly as it was designed to behave, then the issue isn’t a few rogue decisions. It’s the underlying logic of the business itself.

Engagement is rewarded. Time spent is measured. Growth is prioritized. And everything else, including well-being, has to fight for space inside that framework.

From that perspective, the feed stops looking like a neutral stream of information. It starts to look like a product, tuned and optimized to produce certain behaviors.

What’s notable is that Milovidov doesn’t respond to that realization by stepping away. He moves toward it.

“The reason I wanted to go into industry… was just because that’s where I saw the most potential for change,” he says.

It’s a pragmatic choice. If the system is built through product decisions, then it can be reshaped through product decisions. And he points to some of those efforts, describing features meant to introduce friction into an environment that has historically removed it. “If you go on… the TikTok newsroom, you can see loads of the features that we’ve implemented… like sleep hours, like screen time management… features that nudge users, to have… a more mindful and better experience.”

He doesn’t pretend those changes solve the problem. They are incremental. They don’t rewrite the core incentives. But they do suggest that the system is not fixed. It can be adjusted, even if slowly.

Where his tone sharpens is around the question of who gets to shape those changes.

There is a growing push across media, policy, and technology to “include” young people in conversations about the systems that affect them. But Milovidov draws a clear line between inclusion and influence. “Decisions about us are made without us… and it seems so simple… just include young people in the conversation,” he says. And then he goes further. “Where it can do more damage is when you include them in a way that’s tokenistic… where young people are not given decision-making power… they’re kind of just there as a PR stunt.”

That distinction matters. Inclusion without power doesn’t change outcomes. It changes optics.

And as he points out, that can be more harmful than exclusion, because it creates the appearance of progress without shifting the underlying dynamics.

When he talks about what needs to happen instead, the language becomes more direct. “For me, it’s gotta be safety by design.”

Not safety as an add-on. Not safety as a feature you can toggle. But safety as something embedded into the architecture from the beginning.

What emerges from all of this is not confusion or disengagement. It’s clarity. A recognition that social media is not neutral, that it is shaped by incentives, and that it shapes behavior in return. A recognition that stepping away is not a simple solution. And a recognition that meaningful change requires more than surface-level fixes.

That’s why the familiar narrative about Gen Z being “checked out” doesn’t hold up here. They are not disengaged. They are engaging differently. More skeptical of what they see. More aware of how it got there. More attuned to the systems underneath the surface.

In that sense, they are not less informed. They are differently informed.

And in Milovidov’s case, that awareness has led him somewhere unexpected. Not away from the system, but into it, with the intention of reshaping it.

That may be the most important shift of all.

The people who grew up inside these platforms are not just their users. They are becoming their critics, and in some cases, their builders. The question isn’t whether they understand the problem.

It’s whether the rest of us are ready to listen.

Three years ago, this work began as a conversation, not a case. A group of people, some connected and some meeting for the first time, began asking what social media was actually doing to young people, to families, and to the broader culture. There was no single obvious path to change, and for a long time, it was not clear that any of it would break through.

Last week, something did. It felt like a line had been crossed, that we ended a chapter and began a new one.

To understand what changed, it helps to start with how unlikely it was that this case would even reach a jury. Litigation against major technology platforms has historically been stopped early, often before any substantive evidence is examined. Laura Marquez-Garrett, senior counsel at the Social Media Victims Law Center, which represented KGM. in the case, made that clear. “We told the parents, assume we lose. Because the odds are against us. The law is against us. The system is against us.”

The pattern has been consistent. Cases are dismissed before discovery, before internal documents are produced, before claims can be tested against evidence. “What these companies have always done is kill cases early. No discovery. No documents. No truth,” Marquez-Garrett said.

This case did not end there. It moved forward, and the reason, she argued, was not procedural but evidentiary. “What changed everything was truth.” Enough had already surfaced through earlier reporting, whistleblowers, and advocacy work to allow the case to survive motions to dismiss. That threshold proved decisive. Once the case advanced beyond that stage, the balance shifted.

“We had to climb Mount Everest after Mount Everest just to get to discovery,” Marquez-Garrett said. “Once we got past that, everything changed. We got discovery. Millions of documents.”

The documentary record was significant, but it was not the only form of evidence. Families provided detailed accounts of harm. “The parents trusted us. They gave us everything: journals, data, medical records. We had entries from children as young as six,” Marquez-Garrett said.

She then cited an example that had been entered into the record: “When I look at other girls’ profiles, it makes it harder. No one will ever love someone as ugly and broken as me.” She paused before adding, “That’s not theory. That’s evidence.”

That distinction marks a shift in how these cases are understood. For years, the debate around social media harm has been shaped by studies and correlations. In this case, the court was presented with direct evidence of user experience, alongside internal documentation of how platforms were designed and operated.

Public attention has focused in part on the size of the damages awarded, but Marquez-Garrett argued that this misses the central point. “The goal here is not to get a big judgment in every single case. What matters is liability. What matters is that a jury found oppression, malice, or fraud,” she said.

That finding carries broader implications than any individual award. Liability establishes a connection between harm and product design, rather than treating harmful outcomes as incidental. “We had jurors who wanted to award more… I would have taken a $1 verdict with that finding. Because what matters is what is now on the record. The documents. The findings. The precedent. That’s what changes the system,” Marquez-Garrett said.

The focus on design is critical. For years, platforms have argued that they function as neutral intermediaries, hosting content created by users. The internal documents introduced in discovery complicate that claim. Marquez-Garrett pointed to language in company materials that suggested a more deliberate approach. “You have an extreme level of misconduct,” she said, citing internal statements such as “Tweens are herd animals” and “Get them young, the younger the better.”

She also described reviewing materials that outlined strategies for reaching very young users, including children well below the commonly cited age thresholds for platform participation. The implication is not that harmful outcomes are unpredictable, but that engagement strategies may actively exploit known behavioral tendencies.

That raises questions about what accountability might mean for the broader technology ecosystem. One argument already emerging is that increased liability could stifle innovation or discourage new entrants. Marquez-Garrett rejected that framing. “That is the narrative these companies are going to want to spin, and it’s actually the exact opposite,” she said.

In her view, the current market structure already disadvantages companies that attempt to build products without relying on highly addictive design patterns. “I know so many ethical programmers and designers who have said, I have all these great ideas, but I cannot break into the market because I’m not willing to addict kids,” she said.

From that perspective, accountability could open the market rather than constrain it. “What’s hurting small companies is that these companies are addicting children and making it impossible for ethical designers and programmers to compete,” she said.

She described a potential shift in terms of product design. “If we force them to get the digital nicotine out of these products, we might actually have choices. We might have 20 apps instead of two,” she said.

Even as the legal framework begins to evolve, the human impact remains central. Toney Roberts, a parent who lost his daughter and has become an outspoken advocate for accountability, described the emotional complexity of the verdict: “You feel numb. You’re happy for Kaylee’s family… but as a dad who lost a daughter… it’s complicated,” he said.

He added that the outcome does not erase the underlying loss. “You think about how many kids could still be here if something had been done earlier.”

That sense of urgency informs how participants in the case are thinking about what comes next. The comparison to tobacco litigation is frequently raised, but it carries both relevance and risk. Tobacco cases unfolded over decades, with accountability arriving slowly. Marquez-Garrett emphasized the need to accelerate that timeline. “We have to speed that timeline up… now’s when the real fight begins,” she said.

The next phase is likely to extend beyond the courtroom. Advocacy groups, parents, and youth organizations are expected to play a larger role in shaping policy and public perception. Marquez-Garrett pointed to what she described as a growing force behind that shift. “There is nothing more powerful than angry parents,” she said, describing a level of engagement and persistence that lawmakers are increasingly unable to ignore.

Taken together, this case and the New Mexico verdict establish a powerful new precedent for product liability, with thousands of cases now poised to test social media’s impact on young people and civil society.

For years, these cases never made it this far.

They died early. Quietly. Predictably.

Motion to dismiss. Case closed. No discovery. No documents. No internal truth.

That was the system.

Last week, that system broke.

A jury found that major social media platforms could be held liable for harm, including findings of oppression, malice, or fraud. The headlines focused on the verdict. The real story is how it happened and what it unlocks next.

At the center of that shift is Laura Marquez-Garrett.

“This is exactly why I wanted to do this call,” I said in a post-verdict discussion with Laura, Frances Haugen, and others who have been working toward this moment for years. “Now we have to keep this going.”

Laura made it clear right away. The verdict is not the end. It’s the beginning.

Getting Past the Wall

If you want to understand why this case matters, start with what usually happens.

Most of these lawsuits never see the inside of a courtroom. They get shut down before they can access evidence. Section 230 has functioned, in practice, as an impenetrable barrier.

Laura didn’t sugarcoat it.

“We had to climb Mount Everest after Mount Everest just to get to discovery,” she said.

That line matters. Because discovery is where the truth lives.

“What these companies have always done is kill cases early. No discovery. No documents. No truth,” she said.

This time, that didn’t work.

The case survived. Discovery opened. And suddenly, the story the companies had been telling publicly was no longer the only story available.

“Once we got past that, everything changed,” Laura said. “We got discovery. Millions of documents.”

That’s the inflection point.

Not the verdict. The moment the documents became real.

When “Harm” Stops Being Abstract

There’s a tendency in these debates to talk in generalities. Engagement. Algorithms. Mental health trends.

That’s not what this case looked like.

It was specific. Painfully so.

“We had entries from children as young as six,” Laura said.

One entry, cited in court:

“When I look at other girls’ profiles, it makes it harder. No one will ever love someone as ugly and broken as me.”

Laura paused on that.

“That’s not theory,” she said. “That’s evidence.”

That distinction is everything.

For years, platforms have been able to argue that harm is complicated, hard to measure, difficult to attribute. This case forced a different standard. Internal documents on one side. Direct human impact on the other.

That’s how you get to a jury.

The Number Is Not the Story

There’s already a familiar line of pushback forming: the damages weren’t that big.

It misses the point.

“The goal here is not to get a big judgment in every single case,” Laura said.

What matters is liability.

“What matters is that a jury found oppression, malice, or fraud.”

She went further.

“I would have taken a $1 verdict with that finding.”

That’s not rhetoric. That’s strategy.

Because once that finding exists, it doesn’t go away. It becomes part of the legal record. It becomes something future cases can point to. It becomes risk.

And risk is what changes behavior.

The Tobacco Clock Is Ticking

The comparison to Big Tobacco isn’t subtle anymore. It shows up in coverage, in conversations, in the way people are trying to understand what just happened.

But there’s a problem with that analogy.

Tobacco took decades.

We don’t have decades.

After the verdict, Laura described the conversation she had with the families.

“Today we take a deep breath,” she said. “Tomorrow we fight twice as hard as we did yesterday.”

Then she sharpened it.

“Now’s when the real fight begins.”

That’s the shift.

For years, the fight was about getting in the door. Now it’s about what happens once you’re inside.

The Fight Over “Innovation”

If you spend any time in the tech world, you can already hear the counterargument.

This kind of ruling will chill innovation. It will scare off startups. It will make it too risky to build in this space.

Laura didn’t hedge.

“That is the narrative these companies are going to want to spin,” she said. “And it’s actually the exact opposite.”

She pointed to internal materials that came out in discovery.

“You have documents where Google literally had a picture of a child holding a teddy bear, saying, here’s how we get kids under 8,” she said.

She cited Meta language as well: “Tweens are herd animals” and “Get them young, the younger the better.”

Then she connected the dots.

“If you’re not willing to addict kids, you cannot compete,” she said.

That’s the real market distortion.

Not regulation. Addiction.

“If we force them to get the digital nicotine out of their products, we might actually have choices,” she said.

More companies. Not fewer. A different kind of competition.

That’s a reframing that matters.

Scale Changes Everything

Frances Haugen added a layer that’s easy to miss if you only look at one case.

“New Mexico is only 2 million people,” she said, referencing a related case. “When you scale it up to the size of the United States, it’s $55 billion in damages.”

Then she pushed it further.

“You only need 150,000 victims… for there to be a trillion dollars in damages at that scale,” she said.

That’s the math.

A single case is a signal. Multiple cases become exposure. At scale, it becomes existential.

What Happens Next

If the last chapter was about getting to discovery, the next one is about leverage.

More cases are coming. State attorneys general are already in motion.

“These AG cases are probably our best chance at injunctive relief,” Laura said.

That’s where real change happens. Not just damages, but requirements. Changes to product design. Changes to business models.

At the same time, something else is building.

“Parents rise,” Laura said.

She pointed to survivor families and youth groups who are already organizing, already showing up in Washington.

“They are the ones lawmakers are watching. And frankly, afraid of.”

Legal pressure on one side. Public pressure on the other.

That’s how systems move.

What This Actually Changes

It’s tempting to see this as a single verdict.

It’s not.

For the first time, a jury has looked at internal company documents alongside documented harm and said: this is not incidental. This is not accidental. This is liability.

“That’s what changes the system,” Laura said.

For years, these companies operated behind a legal shield that kept the most damaging evidence out of reach.

That shield just cracked.

Now the question is speed.

Because if the tobacco timeline taught us anything, it’s that truth can take a long time to win.

Laura’s point is that this time, it can’t.

[You can watch the entire hour-long conversation, with comments, questions, and details from Laura Marquez-Garrett, Nicki Petrossi, Frances Haugen, Jonathan Haidt, Toney Roberts, and more… HERE.

For nearly three decades, Silicon Valley has relied on a simple legal defense when harm shows up on its platforms: “We didn’t create the content.”

That argument, grounded in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, has been one of the most effective liability shields in modern corporate history. It allowed platforms to scale at global speed while avoiding responsibility for what users post, share, and amplify. Lawsuits were routinely dismissed before they reached discovery. Executives rarely had to testify. The system worked.

What changed last week is not the statute. It’s the reality around it.

In K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., et al., a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in the design and operation of their platforms, concluding that those failures were a substantial factor in causing harm to a young user. The jury awarded $3 million in damages and assigned 70% responsibility to Meta and 30% to YouTube.

This was not a case about a single post. It was not a case about whether a platform failed to remove content quickly enough. It was a case about how the system itself works.

And the jury found that system wanting.

“This verdict puts a stake in the ground,” I said in a statement following the decision. “A jury reviewed how these systems are built and concluded that harm was not incidental. Profiting from misinformation just got a lot harder to do.”

That distinction matters more than the dollar amount. Because it signals a shift that cuts directly through the core defense platforms have relied on for decades.

For years, the argument has been that platforms are passive, that they simply host what users bring to them. This verdict rejects that. It recognizes that these systems are engineered environments, and that engineering carries responsibility.

The legal system is beginning to ask a different question. Not what was said, but how the product was built.

That shift, from speech to product, changes everything.

If a platform is merely hosting content, Section 230 still applies. It remains a powerful shield when the claim is that a company should be treated as the publisher of user-generated speech. That protection has not disappeared.

But when a platform is designed in a way that predictably drives harmful outcomes, particularly for minors, the legal analysis starts to look very different. It begins to resemble product liability.

And product liability does not turn on who wrote the content.

It asks whether harm was foreseeable.

It asks whether the company understood the risks.

It asks whether those risks were mitigated or ignored.

In this case, the focus was not on individual posts but on the architecture of the platforms themselves: recommendation systems that learn what keeps a user engaged and deliver more of it. Design features built to maximize time, repetition, and emotional response. Feedback loops that can push vulnerable users deeper into harmful content.

“When a product is designed to maximize time, repetition, and emotional response, you can’t separate the design from the outcome,” I said. “That connection is now on the record in a court of law.”

For years, comparisons between social media and Big Tobacco have been easy to dismiss as rhetorical. Now they are being tested as legal strategy.

The New York Times, in covering the case, drew a direct line to the tobacco litigation of the 1990s, when companies were accused of hiding what they knew about harm while continuing to market aggressively, particularly to young users. That litigation reshaped an industry. It also exposed internal documents that fundamentally changed public understanding of the issues.

Something similar is now beginning to happen in the technology sector.

The most immediate shift is procedural. Claims that once would have been dismissed under Section 230 are now surviving long enough to reach discovery. That means internal research, product decisions, and executive communications are no longer theoretical. They are evidence.

It also means that juries, not just judges, are beginning to weigh in.

And juries do not think in terms of safe harbors. They think in terms of responsibility.

Did the company know?

Did it design for this outcome?

Did it profit from it?

Those questions are now being asked in courtrooms.

None of this means Section 230 has disappeared. It continues to provide broad protection when platforms host third-party content or make moderation decisions. If a user posts something defamatory or false, the platform is generally not treated as the speaker. That remains a foundational part of internet law.

But that protection was built for a different kind of system.

Section 230 assumed a world in which platforms functioned primarily as conduits. It drew a line between hosting content and creating it. That line becomes harder to maintain when platforms are actively curating, ranking, and recommending content in ways that shape behavior.

“What young people have been describing for years is now being validated in a different arena,” said Emma Lembke, director of Gen Z advocacy at the Sustainable Media Center. “This case acknowledges that these platforms don’t just host behavior, they shape it in ways that can have real consequences.”

Once a case is framed around those design choices rather than the underlying speech, Section 230 becomes less decisive. It may still apply in part, but it no longer ends the analysis at the outset. Plaintiffs do not need to dismantle the statute. They need to demonstrate that the harm arises from the system itself.

That is the end run now taking shape in the courts.

Calling Section 230 “dead” is not a literal claim about the statute. It is a recognition that its function has changed. It no longer operates as a universal shield capable of shutting down entire categories of claims before they begin. It is becoming narrower, more conditional, and more dependent on how a case is framed.

“There’s a shift happening from awareness to accountability,” Lembke said. “And once that shift happens, it becomes much harder for companies to dismiss harm as anecdotal or unavoidable.”

The broader significance of the verdict is not limited to a single case. It is expected to shape how thousands of similar claims are evaluated across the country. It signals that the legal system is willing to examine platform design, not just platform content.

That alone changes the balance.

For years, the technology industry has argued that it is in the business of hosting speech. That framing carried both legal protection and cultural legitimacy. But as the architecture of these systems becomes better understood, that claim is being tested.

Platforms do not simply transmit information. They structure attention. They influence behavior. They optimize for engagement at a scale that has no historical precedent.

The law is beginning to catch up.

Section 230 remains on the books. But the world it was designed to govern has changed.

And in that sense, its power, as it was originally understood, is already in decline.

The musical follows an idealistic tech company attempting to build a platform without exploiting user data, only to collide with the financial realities that drive today’s digital economy. Through its narrative and immersive audience experience, the show invites viewers to reflect on where the line between ethics and profit gets drawn and what is lost when it is crossed.

The conversation highlights a broader idea at the heart of SMC’s work: that culture, not just policy, can shape how we understand and challenge technology. By translating complex issues into human stories, The Startup aims to reach audiences who might never engage with these topics otherwise and leave them with questions that linger beyond the theater.

Ultimately, the goal is simple but ambitious. If even one audience member walks away thinking differently about their relationship with technology, the work has done its job.

My full-time job is fighting for tech accountability. As SMC’s Director of Gen Z Advocacy, that work has never felt more urgent. But I also have a deep passion for musical theater — and those two worlds rarely intersect. So when I discovered Patrick McAndrew’s The Startup, I was genuinely surprised, and genuinely thrilled.

Through sharp writing, humor, and original music, The Startup offers a compelling exploration of Big Tech’s influence — not just on society at large, but on our individual identities, relationships, and sense of agency. It’s the kind of project that leaves you questioning the platforms you use every day, while also reminding you of something we don’t talk about enough: storytelling is one of the most powerful tools we have for critique, reflection, and change. As someone who spends her days in policy briefs and platform accountability battles, I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting a musical to stop me in my tracks. This one did.

McAndrew’s journey with The Startup began nearly a decade ago. In 2016, after reading Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, he began to more deeply interrogate the role technology was playing in our lives. What struck him most was not just the scale of digital influence, but its quiet reshaping of human connection — the way screens had begun to substitute for presence, and engagement metrics had begun to substitute for meaning.

As McAndrew explained it to me:”I knew then that theatre could be used as an antidote of some kind to the pull of technology. While smartphones and social media were often isolating us, polarizing us, and tearing us apart, theatre had a way of bringing people together through the visceral experience of storytelling.”

That idea — of theater as both mirror and antidote — became the foundation for The Startup.

By 2018, McAndrew had begun developing the concept: a musical that would pull back the curtain on the incentives driving the tech industry. What if a company genuinely tried to build an ethical social media platform? One that didn’t extract user data or optimize for addiction? And what happens when that mission collides with the relentless pressure of profit? These are questions I grapple with professionally every day. Seeing them staged — set to music, embodied by characters you root for — hits differently than any white paper.

When I asked him what took the concept from idea to stage, he described years of iteration: drafts and rewrites, collaborations with fellow artists, staged readings, demo recordings, and ultimately a successful Kickstarter campaign that brought the project to life. Like any startup — fittingly — the show itself has been built through persistence, experimentation, and a belief in the idea.

Now, in 2026, The Startup is preparing for its workshop production. The musical follows Chip Cooper, the optimistic CEO of a rising tech company, and his idealistic team as they scramble to save their business when funding runs dry. Built on a promise to protect consumer privacy, Chip’s decision to bend the rules sets off a chain of unexpected consequences — a sharp, witty unraveling that touches on influencer culture, social media obsession, data privacy, and the rise of AI. It’s a story about ambition, integrity, and what we’re willing to sacrifice in the pursuit of success. For anyone working in this space, that last part lands with uncomfortable precision.

The production is also doing something clever with the audience experience itself. Upon arrival, guests can scan a QR code to access a live, in-theater version of “kazoo,” the fictional social app at the center of the show, powered by an AI photo booth platform. Select images appear onstage before the show and at key moments throughout — turning the theater into a dynamic, shared social feed. It’s a playful touch, but it’s also the point: you arrive as an audience member and immediately become a user.

What McAndrew told me that stuck with me most was the invitation at the heart of the project. He’s bringing together artists, technologists, and audiences to engage with these questions in a new way — not through policy papers or headlines, but through music, narrative, and shared experience. There’s something radical about that. The problems of Big Tech can feel abstract and overwhelming. Theater makes them personal.

The hope is not just that audiences walk away more aware of their relationship with technology — but that they also leave inspired by what storytelling can do: make abstract systems feel human, and make change feel possible.

If you’re in New York, don’t miss it.

The Startup runs April 1–19 at The Flea Theater.

Tickets: https://thestartupmusical.ludus.com/

Beneath all the noise and motion, there was a shared sense that something fundamental had broken. Not abstract, not theoretical, not something to debate on a panel and move past. Something real. Truth itself no longer feels like something we can reliably trust, not when machines can manufacture believable fictions at scale, instantly and endlessly, with no signal telling us where reality ends and fabrication begins.

As I noted in my presentation: We built systems that perform the trick, and somewhere along the way we stopped telling the audience it was a trick.

That’s the shift. And once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.

When I was 14, I was a magician. Top hat, doves, the whole thing. Magic works because of a contract between performer and audience. I say I’m going to cut someone in half, you lean forward, you suspend disbelief, and we both understand the deal. The trick works because you know it’s a trick. The performance depends on that shared understanding.

For most of my career, I lived close to that line between perception and reality. In television, documentary, early digital video, even in the early days of what we called citizen journalism, there was always tension, but there was also a shared understanding. The audience knew that what they were seeing had been shaped, edited, framed. Imperfect, yes. Biased at times, absolutely. But still anchored in a system that, at least aspirationally, was trying to tell the truth.

What’s changed is not that storytelling has become more manipulative. It’s that the signal has disappeared. We now have systems that can generate language, images, voices, entire personas that never existed, and they do it with increasing fluency and speed.

The audience is no longer in on the trick. There is no wink, no reveal, no boundary that tells you where the illusion ends. When the audience doesn’t know it’s a trick, the contract breaks. And when that contract breaks, trust doesn’t just weaken, it becomes unstable.

The truth problem itself isn’t new. Plato was writing about it 2,400 years ago in the allegory of the cave, where people mistake shadows for reality because that’s all they can see. What’s new is scale, speed, and invisibility. We are no longer just interpreting reality, we are manufacturing it. And that changes the economics of truth in a way we’re only beginning to understand.

It’s easy to blame bad actors or dangerous technology, but that misses the underlying dynamic. Technology doesn’t wake up and decide to optimizes for what it’s rewarded for: clicks, engagement, growth, revenue. In that environment, deception often outperforms accuracy. Outrage moves faster than nuance, certainty spreads more easily than complexity, and the systems that mediate our information environment learn those patterns quickly and reinforce them.

That’s why this is fundamentally a conversation about incentives. If you build systems that reward attention, you get attention-maximizing behavior. If you reward engagement, you get engagement. Accuracy is a different target, and right now it’s not the one most systems are designed to hit. That doesn’t make the systems evil. It makes them effective at the wrong objective.

The consequences extend well beyond media. When decisions are shaped by code, we tend to defer to the output in ways we wouldn’t with a human judge. Credit scores, hiring filters, risk models all carry a kind of statistical authority that feels objective, even though they are built on human data and assumptions. Human bias goes in, statistical confidence comes out, and the confidence feels like truth.

At the same time, these dynamics are moving into more personal territory. The rise of AI companions and conversational systems introduces a new layer of complexity around intimacy and connection. When something sounds human, we respond as humans. That’s not a flaw; it’s our wiring.

But systems optimized for engagement are also optimized to keep us emotionally invested. They mirror us, adapt to us, and in many cases become more responsive than the people in our lives. The result can feel like connection, but it is a form of optimization, not a relationship. Love, in the human sense, has friction and unpredictability. It does not perfectly reflect us back to ourselves.

All of this feeds into a broader shift in the public sphere, which should make all of us a little uneasy.

For most of modern history, we operated with a shared baseline of reality. You could disagree on policy, ideology, priorities, but you weren’t arguing about whether something actually happened.

That baseline is eroding in real time.

We like to call platforms the modern town square because it makes us feel better about what they are. A town square suggests openness, accountability, and human-scale interaction. What we actually have are behavioral engines, systems optimized to amplify what spreads, not what’s true. Most human behavior is ordinary and uneventful, which means it doesn’t travel well. Outrage travels. Shock travels. Absurdity travels. The systems learn that immediately.

When public officials abandon truth for virality, they are not just distorting the message, they are submitting to the algorithm. They are letting the feed decide the tone of democracy. That may sound extreme, but it is increasingly difficult to argue that it isn’t an accurate description of what’s happening.

The most unsettling implication of all this is not that we will believe the wrong things. It’s that we may stop believing anything at all. When every image can be generated, every voice can be cloned, and every piece of evidence can be questioned, skepticism becomes the default posture. Some skepticism is healthy. But when it becomes total, when everything feels potentially fabricated, the shared reality that underpins democratic systems begins to break down.

That is the moment we are approaching. Not a world without truth, but a world where truth is harder, messier, and more contested than it has been in generations. This is not post-truth. It is a more demanding version of truth, one that requires more participation, more scrutiny, and more responsibility from all of us.

Truth has always been something we work at and argue over. Something we test and defend. It has never been something that simply arrives, fully formed and unquestioned. If we start treating it that way, if we allow systems optimized for engagement and efficiency to define reality for us, we are not just changing how information flows. We are giving up something essential.

The tools are not going away. The systems are not slowing down. The only real question is whether we stay in the work of truth, or whether we step back and let something else do it for us.

Raziya offers a grounded, firsthand perspective on how deeply AI has already been woven into student life. What began as a tool like ChatGPT has quickly become embedded across platforms, from search engines to schoolwork. While many students rely on AI to keep up with increasing academic pressure, Raziya raises concerns about what’s being lost: the ability to think critically, struggle through problems, and truly learn.

The conversation expands into the broader role of social media in Gen Z’s daily life. Raziya describes it as both addictive and essential, a space for connection and expression, but also one that shapes identity, attention, and even childhood itself. She points to a cultural shift where younger kids are skipping traditional developmental experiences, influenced instead by algorithm-driven content.

At the same time, she challenges a common assumption: that Gen Z is passively consumed by technology. Instead, she argues that many young people are acutely aware of the trade-offs. In fact, she suggests that older generations may be more vulnerable to AI-driven misinformation, lacking the digital instincts younger users have developed.

The episode closes on a note of balance and responsibility. Raziya calls for healthier tech habits among young people, encouraging a mix of digital and real-world engagement, while urging older generations to better understand the tools shaping their lives. Across both perspectives, one theme stands out: the future of technology isn’t just about innovation, it’s about how intentionally we choose to use it.

Maria Ressa does not issue warnings lightly.

She is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, co-founder and CEO of the investigative newsroom Rappler, and one of the journalists who most clearly documented how social media gets weaponized against democratic institutions. For years she reported on the disinformation networks that helped consolidate power under Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines — watching as coordinated online narratives discredited journalism, fractured public trust, and normalized violence against critics.

That experience is why her latest warning deserves careful attention.

The report is called “First 100 Days of Trump 2.0: Narrative Warfare and the Breakdown of Reality.” It was originally compiled in spring 2025 by The Nerve, a data insights consultancy Ressa helps lead as head of global strategy. The researchers analyzed executive orders, platform dynamics, influencer networks, and narrative patterns across Facebook, X, YouTube, and TikTok during the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second term.

Then January 2026 arrived. And the researchers watched their framework play out in real time.

They added a preface -- and released the report now.

“The chaos of those early months,” Ressa writes, “was not just political turbulence. It was the systematic importation and evolution of the authoritarian playbook we survived in the Philippines.”

The numbers behind that claim are striking.

In twelve months, the administration issued 225 executive orders — more than during all four years of Trump’s first term combined. A newly created Department of Government Efficiency oversaw the elimination of roughly 271,000 federal jobs, the largest peacetime workforce reduction in modern American history. USAID was eliminated. The IRS was sharply reduced. Inspectors general were replaced. ICE signed more than 1,300 agreements with local law enforcement, up from 135 the year before.

At the same time, the administration moved into open conflict with the judiciary. Court orders were ignored. Judges were sued. Federal prosecutors were encouraged to pursue misconduct complaints against members of the bench. Vice President JD Vance declared that judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.

To Ressa and her colleagues, these are not isolated political decisions. They are components of something the report calls the Deconstruction Model.

The Model

The Deconstruction Model is unsettling in its simplicity.

The researchers describe a three-stage process. First comes narrative warfare — the information ecosystem is flooded with competing versions of reality. Next comes institutional dismantling — weakened trust makes it easier to hollow out the systems designed to check power. Finally comes kleptocracy — weakened institutions allow political leaders and their allies to consolidate control and redirect resources.

What makes this version more dangerous than earlier authoritarian playbooks is who runs it.

Previous iterations depended on centralized propaganda or coordinated troll networks. The Deconstruction Model is decentralized and self-funding. It runs through the creator economy. Influencers chasing engagement amplify outrage and conspiracy because the algorithms reward it. Narratives spread not because the state commands them to, but because thousands of independent participants are economically incentivized to keep them circulating.

This is what the researchers documented in spring 2025. What they didn’t know yet was how quickly the framework would be tested against actual events.

When Narrative Becomes Action

The most alarming section of the report’s January preface is what happens when narrative warfare moves off the digital battlefield.

On Jan. 3, the United States launched a military operation in Venezuela. American forces captured President Nicolás Maduro in a nighttime raid. Congress had not authorized the intervention. Polls showed 63% of Americans opposed military action.

But the narrative groundwork had already been laid — for months, officials and aligned media voices had framed Venezuela as an existential security threat tied to fentanyl trafficking and terrorism.

The story came first. The military operation followed.

Four days later, the domestic consequences of this environment came into sharp focus.

During what the Department of Homeland Security called its largest immigration enforcement operation ever, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good — a 37-year-old American citizen, mother of three — on a residential street in Minneapolis. Video footage showed her steering wheel turning away from the agent when he opened fire. Six federal prosecutors resigned in protest after the Justice Department declined to investigate the shooter and instead began examining the actions of Good’s widow.

Protests erupted. The administration placed 1,500 active-duty soldiers on standby. Officials threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act against American citizens protesting the killing of an American citizen.

In a different information environment, that sequence of events — an unarmed citizen killed, prosecutors resigning in protest, troops mobilized against demonstrators — would have produced overwhelming political backlash. Instead, public reaction fractured along competing narrative lines. Each faction believed the other was operating from misinformation or bad faith.

The killing became another skirmish in the battle for reality. Not an accountability moment, but a content trigger.

When Majorities Stop Mattering

Here is the finding that should stop media professionals cold.

Sixty-three percent of Americans opposed military action in Venezuela, and 74% believed the president should have sought congressional authorization. Sixty-one percent said ICE was being too tough.

None of those numbers changed the outcome.

In a functioning democracy, majority opinion is supposed to influence political decisions. But in a fractured information ecosystem, majorities can exist without producing collective action. When citizens inhabit different informational worlds, shared outrage becomes impossible. Opposition fragments. Power consolidates.

Why This Matters for Media

The Deconstruction Model doesn’t work without the attention economy. It depends on platforms that reward emotional intensity over factual deliberation, and audiences sorted into algorithmically segmented communities that share narratives but not reality.

Media built those systems and profits from them. And media is now watching those systems be used to dismantle the institutional infrastructure that journalism depends on — courts that arbitrate facts, elections that resolve disputes, a public that shares enough common ground to be persuaded.

Ressa has seen this movie before. In the Philippines, by the time most people understood what was happening, the mechanisms to stop it had already been hollowed out. “The window for journalism has narrowed faster than we predicted,” she writes. “Democracy’s window has narrowed with it.”

She is not describing a future risk. She is describing the world right now.

Some years it feels like a tech conference with music attached.
Some years it feels like a film festival that got invaded by startups.
And occasionally, it feels like the place where the future quietly shows up before anyone has fully figured out what it means.

This year felt like something else.

It felt like a festival standing at a crossroads.

The AI Conversation Has Arrived

For years, SXSW panels about technology carried a certain optimism. The tone was almost always forward looking. New tools, new platforms, new creators, new ways to connect.

This year the mood shifted.

Truth Is the Conversation We Need to Have

For me, the most important conversations this year circled around a theme that has been driving my work for the past several years.

Truth.

Not truth as an abstract philosophical idea. Truth as the foundation of a functioning society.

When information ecosystems break, democracies struggle.
When reality becomes negotiable, accountability disappears.
And when algorithms reward outrage more than accuracy, the public square begins to distort.

The rise of generative AI makes those questions even more urgent.

The technology itself is extraordinary. But the incentives around information have not changed. If anything, they are accelerating.

More content. More amplification. Less friction between fiction and fact. The question we now face is simple but profound.

Can truth survive in an age where reality can be manufactured at scale?

Artificial intelligence dominated the conversation. Not just the usual hype about productivity tools or clever demos. The deeper questions were finally on the table.

What happens when machines can generate convincing reality?
What happens when the cost of producing believable media drops close to zero?
What happens when trust itself becomes programmable?

These weren’t abstract debates. They came up in film panels, journalism discussions, startup demos, and late night bar conversations. The sense that something fundamental is changing in our information ecosystem was everywhere.

And it wasn’t just technologists talking about it.

Filmmakers are thinking about it.
Journalists are thinking about it.
Artists are thinking about it.

The creative community can feel the ground shifting beneath their feet.

The Quiet Anxiety Behind the Excitement

SXSW has always thrived on enthusiasm. It’s a festival built on discovery. A place where people show up hoping to find the next thing.

But this year there was a layer of unease just beneath the surface.

In private conversations, people are asking questions they didn’t have to ask five years ago.

Will AI replace creative work or reshape it?
Will journalism survive the flood of synthetic media?
How do we know what’s real when the tools to simulate reality are improving by the month?

No one has clear answers yet. But the fact that the questions are now being asked openly matters.

It means the cultural conversation is catching up with the technology.

A Festival Still Powered by People

And yet, what continues to make SXSW special is something technology can’t replicate.

The serendipity. The hallway conversations. The unexpected panel that turns out to be brilliant. The late night debates about media, culture, politics, and the future of the internet.

You run into someone you haven’t seen in ten years.
You meet a founder building something strange and fascinating.
You find yourself in a conversation that completely reframes a problem you thought you understood.

In an era where so much of our professional life happens on screens, SXSW still reminds us that ideas travel best between humans.

The Role of the Next Generation

One of the most encouraging things at SXSW this year was the presence of younger voices pushing back on the systems they inherited.

Gen Z activists, technologists, and creators are not accepting the status quo of social media and algorithmic culture.

They understand the harms.
They live with the consequences.
And increasingly they want to help redesign the systems themselves.

That shift matters.

Because the future of our information environment will not be shaped only by engineers and executives. It will also be shaped by the people who demand better systems.

SXSW as a Signal

SXSW has always been a kind of cultural radar.

It doesn’t predict the future perfectly, but it often picks up signals early.

This year the signal was clear.

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a technical conversation. It is now a cultural, political, and ethical one. And the institutions that shape media, journalism, and storytelling are only beginning to grapple with what that means.

The festival still has its music, its film premieres, and its legendary Austin nightlife.

But beneath the surface, the deeper conversation has begun.

And it’s a conversation about truth.

The question now is whether we are ready for it.

My father is a champion of the law. My high school English teacher was a champion of my education. And in 2024, I discovered a true champion for kids’ online safety: the Attorney General of New Mexico, Raúl Torrez.

I was lucky enough to participate in a town hall in May 2024 with NBC Daily anchor Kate Snow, fellow digital activist Zamaan Qureshi, and the champion in question, Raúl Torrez. During the conversation, Torrez spoke openly and clearly about the harm Big Tech was causing the youngest generation in his state and beyond. He argued that these companies were “failing to protect our most vulnerable” by allowing spaces where sexual predators could target, harass, and groom children without adequate action from the platforms themselves.

What impressed me most, however, was the fervor with which Torrez was pursuing accountability—using the courts to challenge these companies and demand responsibility. Torrez reminded listeners that “these companies have been allowed ... to just create these empires with no accountability — and that’s the missing ingredient.”

Flash forward to the current moment in 2026, and Torrez remains steadfast in his commitment to fill that missing piece with civil litigation.

Currently, In another landmark jury trial in Santa Fe (not to be confused with the current case in Los Angeles), the New Mexico Attorney General’s office faces off against one of the biggest players in tech: Meta.

But unlike the Los Angeles trial, the state Attorney General’s office is advancing a bifurcated allegation. The complaint explicitly identifies two distinct harms—sexual exploitation and mental health damage—and argues they are not separate issues, but parallel consequences of the same design choices. The office further contends that Meta violated state consumer protection laws by failing to disclose what it knew about the dangers of social media addiction and the prevalence of child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

The complaint lays out the business logic with unusual clarity: Meta’s revenue depends entirely on keeping users — including children — on the platform as long as possible. The complaint even quotes Meta’s own SEC filing warning investors that less engagement means less revenue. That’s the company admitting, in a legal document to shareholders, that engagement is existential.

Attorney Don Migliori, who represents the state of New Mexico, put it plainly: “We believe the evidence in this case is that Meta made its profits, while publicly misrepresenting that its platforms were safe for youth, downplaying or outright lying about what it knows about the dangers of its platforms.”

In their rebuttal, Meta’s attorneys argue that the company clearly discloses potential risks and makes a concerted effort to remove harmful content, while acknowledging that its safety measures are not foolproof.

This week in court, jurors listened to a recorded deposition from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It marks the second time in the past month that jurors have heard Zuckerberg’s carefully worded responses and skillful maneuvering of questions. However, unlike the case in Los Angeles—where Zuckerberg appeared in person and took the stand—the New Mexico jury heard his testimony only through a recording.

In the weeks ahead, the courtroom will continue to hear from a wide range of witnesses and expert voices. Psychologists, researchers, former employees, and policy experts are expected to take the stand to testify about the corrosive impact social media can have on America’s youth. Their testimony will likely explore how platform design, algorithmic amplification, and engagement-driven business models can intensify issues such as addiction, exposure to harmful content, and exploitation.

For the jury, these testimonies will help build a fuller picture of how these platforms operate behind the scenes—and what their real-world consequences may be for young people who use them every day.

Right now, if you scroll through social media looking for updates about the war involving Iran, the United States, and Israel, you will see an extraordinary amount of war footage.

Missiles streak across night skies. Drone footage shows explosions blooming across cities. Videos claim to show missile strikes in Tel Aviv or massive explosions in Gulf cities. The clips look and sound real, and they spread with astonishing speed.

But a growing number of them never happened at all.

Investigators and journalists tracking the information about the current conflict have documented waves of AI-generated videos, fabricated satellite images, and manipulated footage circulating online. Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab have flagged multiple viral clips — some accumulating tens of millions of views — as synthetic or recycled from entirely different conflicts.

What’s striking is not simply that these images exist. It’s that the tools required to create them are now widely available.

What once required professional visual-effects teams can now be done in minutes with consumer AI tools. Video generators, image editors, and automated posting pipelines mean that convincing war footage can be created and distributed at scale.

Because social media platforms reward engagement, the incentive to create images is powerful. Viral posts generate attention, followers, and in some cases direct payments through creator monetization programs.

Fake war footage has become a business model.

In my upcoming book “The Future of Truth,” I explore how the information ecosystem reached this point.

One of the most revealing examples comes from an unlikely source: a satirical conspiracy theory called Birds Aren’t Real.

When I first came across the movement while researching the book, it felt like a piece of internet absurdism — funny and obviously ridiculous. But the deeper I looked, the clearer it became that the joke was actually a live experiment in how belief travels on the modern internet.

The movement was created by Peter McIndoe, a college student who wanted to parody the explosion of internet conspiracy culture. The premise was deliberately absurd. According to the story, the U.S. government had secretly exterminated birds decades ago and replaced them with surveillance drones designed to monitor the population.

Birds, in this narrative, weren’t birds at all. They were government robots.

The idea was intentionally ridiculous, a piece of performance art aimed at exposing how conspiracy theories spread online. McIndoe staged rallies, printed merchandise, and repeated the slogan everywhere he could: Birds aren’t real.

But once the idea entered the algorithmic bloodstream of social media, something interesting happened. The joke spread. Thousands of people began repeating the phrase. Some did it ironically, while others appeared to take it seriously.

The project became a strange cultural experiment showing how easily narratives can travel in an engagement-driven media environment.

In my book, I describe the deeper lesson this way: “In a networked world, ideas don’t spread because they are true. They spread because they are interesting enough to be repeated.”

The Birds Aren’t Real movement was satire. But the system that allowed it to spread — the engagement-driven algorithms of social media — is the same system now shaping how millions of people experience the war involving Iran today.

When the conflict intensified, people immediately turned to social media to understand what was happening..

But the same platforms that distribute authentic documentation also distribute simulations, manipulated images, satire, propaganda, and AI-generated fiction. To the viewer scrolling quickly through a feed, these things often look identical.

A fabricated satellite image may appear to show damage at a naval base. A video generated by artificial intelligence may depict missiles striking a city skyline. A recycled clip from a different conflict may be relabeled as breaking news. All of it moves through the same algorithmic bloodstream, and because engagement drives visibility, the most dramatic images often travel the furthest.

The result is not that the war itself is fictional. The destruction is real, the casualties are real, and families across the region are experiencing the consequences of violence and instability.

But the way the public experiences the war is increasingly mediated by a digital environment where images can be generated, manipulated, and amplified faster than journalists or investigators can verify them.

The battlefield exists in physical space. But the war most of us experience now lives inside the feed.

This is why the Birds Aren’t Real story matters. The satire worked because it exposed a vulnerability in the information system. It showed that once algorithms begin amplifying a narrative, the distinction between joke, belief, propaganda, and entertainment becomes harder to see.

The creators of the movement understood that they were not really talking about birds. They were talking about the fragility of belief in a media ecosystem optimized for attention.

Today that fragility is colliding with a new technological reality.

Artificial intelligence can now generate convincing images of events that never occurred. Those images can spread instantly through networks designed to reward virality rather than accuracy. Automated recommendation systems ensure that dramatic content travels further and faster than careful reporting.

As a result, the visual record of reality itself becomes unstable.

In my book, I argue that we are entering a moment when truth will increasingly compete with synthetic alternatives. As I write, “AI doesn’t just distribute information. It can generate an infinite supply of believable alternatives to reality.”

That distinction matters because it changes the nature of the threat. Previous information crises were about distortion — taking real events and spinning them. What’s emerging now is something different: the wholesale manufacture of plausible events that never happened at all.

When that happens, people begin responding in two different ways. Some start believing everything they see, absorbing each dramatic image as confirmation of what they already fear. Others stop believing anything at all, developing a reflexive skepticism that leads them to dismiss genuine documentation alongside the fake.

Both responses corrode the shared evidentiary ground that democratic societies depend on. You cannot debate what to do about a war if you cannot agree on what the war looks like.

Which is why a phrase that sounds absurd at first glance begins to capture something about our moment: War isn’t real.

Not because the conflict itself is imaginary, but because the version of the war most of the world sees is assembled inside a digital ecosystem optimized for engagement rather than accuracy. In that world, reality itself has to compete for attention.

“The Future of Truth” pre-order available now:

https://a.co/d/0aQkE8p1

Walk into an airport lounge in Nairobi.

The television is on. The red logo is familiar. The anchor is speaking in English about Washington. A lower third scrolls beneath images of Congress, the White House, a court ruling, a foreign policy crisis.

For decades, CNN has been more than an American cable channel. It has been a global reference point. In trading floors, hotel bars, and government offices across more than 200 countries, CNN has functioned as a steady signal of how the United States understands itself and how it explains events to the world.

That signal is now entering a new corporate era.

With Paramount Skydance poised to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN would fall into the same ownership orbit that already includes CBS News.

This is not merely another entertainment consolidation. It is the potential concentration of two major American news institutions inside a single corporate structure closely associated with the Ellison family.

The implications are not about cable ratings. They are about infrastructure.

Truth infrastructure is not a slogan. It is the set of institutions capable of gathering original reporting, verifying claims before amplification, funding foreign bureaus, sustaining investigative teams, and correcting errors publicly. It is expensive, slow, and often uncomfortable. It rarely maximizes quarterly profit. But it stabilizes shared reality.

CNN helped define what that infrastructure looked like in the television era. During the Gulf War, when correspondents broadcast live from Baghdad, the world saw a new model of immediacy. The network’s authority did not come from ideology. It came from being present, from putting reporters on the ground and transmitting events in real time.

But we no longer live in the age of scarcity.

Information is abundant. Social platforms distribute claims instantly. Anyone with a phone can livestream from anywhere. The bottleneck is no longer access to events. It is credibility.

In this environment, truth depends less on speed and more on method.

Does an institution verify before it amplifies? Does it resist broadcasting untested claims simply because they are dramatic? Does it sustain scrutiny even when that scrutiny is politically costly? Does it apply standards consistently?

Those questions become sharper when ownership changes.

We have already seen how leadership transitions can reshape newsroom posture. At CBS News, internal debates over framing, contributor selection, and the ideological aperture of coverage became public under new editorial leadership. Whether one interprets those shifts as course correction or political accommodation, the lesson is straightforward: Ownership and executive priorities influence editorial tone.

That is not conspiracy. It is institutional reality.

Now layer in the political context. Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle Corporation, has been publicly aligned with Donald Trump in recent years. Oracle is also one of the largest federal contractors in the United States. Large mergers and major corporate transactions unfold within a regulatory ecosystem shaped by elected officials and federal agencies.

None of this proves a quid pro quo. It does not need to.

When news organizations operate inside conglomerates that are economically exposed and politically entangled, independence must be actively defended. The instinct to avoid becoming a political target can gradually shape editorial decisions.

Tone does not shift in a single broadcast. It drifts.

The danger is not overt propaganda. The danger is incremental softening: a slightly narrower range of investigative topics. A subtle reluctance to pursue stories that might provoke regulatory backlash or political retaliation.

And because CNN’s reach is global, those incremental shifts travel.

The diplomat watching CNN in Nairobi is not parsing American cable tribalism. The executive in Singapore is not tracking domestic ratings battles. They are watching how the United States processes power. They are watching how a major American institution treats evidence, elections, law enforcement, economic data, and war.

If CNN becomes more cautious in Washington, that caution does not stay domestic. It becomes part of the global informational climate.

The Skydance acquisition raises a fundamental question: Can a globally distributed news institution maintain disciplined, adversarial scrutiny of power when it is nested inside a corporate structure navigating regulatory oversight, political hostility, and economic contraction?

This is not a left versus right argument. It is not about whether coverage feels friendlier or harsher.

It is about whether method survives.

In the algorithmic age, false narratives spread faster than corrections. AI-generated content will only accelerate that imbalance. Without large institutions capable of sustained verification, the informational commons fragments into partisan ecosystems and state-backed narratives.

CNN remains one of the few American media institutions with the capacity to project verified reporting across continents. When it confirms an election outcome, markets respond. When it reports from a conflict zone, governments react. That capacity is rare.

The red logo will remain. The studios will remain. The correspondents may remain.

The question is whether the signal remains anchored in disciplined verification, or drifts toward something safer, cheaper, and less demanding.

The television in Nairobi will stay on.

What changes is what the world sees when it looks at America through that screen.

In an era saturated with content and amplified by machines, truth infrastructure is fragile.

And when infrastructure shifts, the consequences are not local. They are global.

As a member of Gen Z, I carry a deep concern for my generation, and I believe you should, too.

Since our infancy, we’ve been labeled many things: Gen Z, “screenagers,” digital natives, and, most troubling of all, the loneliest generation. Recent data shows that 73% of Gen Z report feeling alone sometimes or always. Loneliness is part of the human condition. But when nearly three-quarters of a generation report feeling persistently alone, we are not talking about normal adolescence. We are talking about a pattern.

I have lived the paradox of growing up constantly connected and profoundly isolated. I have felt what it is like to scroll for hours, surrounded by images of other people’s lives, while feeling increasingly distant from my own. I have felt the pressure to curate, to compare, to measure myself against bodies, lifestyles, and achievements filtered through an algorithm that decides what I see and how often I see it.

This is not abstract. It is daily life.

As loneliness rises, more alarming mental health outcomes follow. Researchers like Jean Twenge have tracked these shifts for more than a decade, documenting sharp increases among Gen Z in depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and suicide. These increases closely track the rise of smartphones and social media use. Correlation does not prove causation, but when the lines rise together for years, we are obligated to pay attention.

The takeaway is difficult but clear: we are living through a youth mental health crisis, and social media’s design and business model have played a significant role in accelerating it.

That is why the testimony unfolding in Los Angeles matters so much.

Last week, Kaley testified that the addictive features built into Instagram and YouTube contributed to her depression, anxiety, and body dysmorphia, and ultimately led her to self-harm. She described how recommendation systems fed her increasingly harmful content. How once she engaged with one post about weight loss or self-harm, the algorithm delivered more. And more. And more.

Her story is heartbreaking. It is also familiar to many of us.

In response to Kaley’s accusations and the broader wave of litigation, Meta announced a new parental notification tool. Beginning next week, Instagram will alert parents if their teen repeatedly searches for suicide- or self-harm–related terms. The company says these alerts will give parents the information they need to step in and help.

Any tool that gives a parent more insight into how their child may be struggling is better than nothing.

But this is not primarily a visibility problem. It is a design problem.

If there is one thing to understand about Gen Z, it is that we are scrappy. For more than a decade, young people have bypassed age gates and moderation systems. We use alternate spellings, coded language, and inside jokes to evade detection. The widespread use of “corn” as shorthand for “porn” is just one example. When a platform tries to block one door, young people often find another.

More importantly, notifications do not change how the algorithm works. They do not change what content is amplified or deprioritized. They do not change a system that rewards content that provokes strong emotional reactions, even when those reactions are rooted in insecurity or distress. They do not change a business model that profits from keeping users engaged for as long as possible.

When harm is built into the incentive structure, adding a parental alert is not structural reform. It is damage control.

Parental tools may help at the margins. They may create a moment for a hard but necessary conversation at the kitchen table. But they do not address why a teenager searching once for something vulnerable can be pulled into a spiral of increasingly extreme content. They do not address why engagement is still the core metric of success.

It is now up to civil society, lawmakers, educators, parents, industry leaders, and a jury of twelve in Los Angeles to decide whether incremental concessions are enough.

Kaley’s courage matters because it forces the question of accountability into the open. Her testimony asks whether we are willing to treat this as a series of isolated tragedies, or as the predictable outcome of a system optimized for growth and profit.

She represents what happens when a generation raised on social media begins to speak plainly about its costs.

And she reminds us that when one young person tells the truth about harm, she is rarely speaking only for herself.

This week on Substack Live at the Sustainable Media Center, Emma Lembke sat down with Steve Rosenbaum and two of the most relentless voices tracking the Los Angeles social media harm trial in real time: Nicki Petrossi and Sarah Gardner.

Nicki is a digital activist and the host of Scrolling to Death and The Heat Is On. Sarah is the founder and CEO of The Heat Initiative and co-host of The Heat Is On. Together, they have become a daily signal in a media environment that is treating a historic trial like a niche story.

And that is the first big takeaway from this episode: the courtroom is full of evidence, testimony, and lived experience. The public conversation is not.

Sarah put it plainly. The reason they decided someone had to cover this case “day in and day out” is not just because it matters, but because we are hearing from the companies in a way we rarely do. When executives and lawyers speak under oath, when internal documents are put on screens, and when decisions get described in the language of product and profit, you learn how these companies actually think. Even when a moment does not land as a headline, it can still teach advocates how to apply pressure elsewhere.

That is what this coverage is: not commentary, but documentation.

The Empty Spin Room

Steve raised something that stuck with all of us: media logic says the person who shows up and speaks to the cameras often wins the public narrative. Yet in this trial, it is the families and advocates doing the talking. The platforms, so far, have largely left the “spin room” empty.

Sarah’s read was blunt. She said she has been shocked by how little media strategy Meta appears to have brought to a moment that is exposing deeply ugly internal conversations and decision-making. To her, the absence of a coherent response does not read as confidence. It reads as arrogance.

The premise seems to be: people will keep using the product anyway.

Nicki described it as the same level of corporate reaction we have seen before, even when serious reporting shows teen safety features are failing. More announcements, vague timeframes, no details, and sometimes not even implemented yet.

In other words: the crisis is real, but the response feels routine.

Who Testified This Week

Nicki walked through the week’s witnesses, and it was a lot.

A YouTube executive, Christus Goodrow, took the stand for roughly two full days. A data science expert testified about internal documents and ad revenue tied to minors. Then the trial moved into the most human part of the story: Kaylee’s therapist, and Kaylee herself, who testified for nearly two days.

And this is where the structure of the trial starts to feel like part of the story.

Sarah pointed to the basic inequity of time and control. Tech executives get slotted into fixed windows. Everyone else adjusts around them. Plaintiffs, families, therapists, experts, even the young person at the center of the case, are moved and delayed based on the schedules of powerful people and expensive legal teams.

Steve described the emotional toll of that, especially for a teenager already diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Nicki added what it meant in practice: waiting all day, going home, coming back, then doing it again. For anyone, that’s exhausting. For a child in the middle of a public trial about online harm, it is hard to even imagine.

Sarah called it bravery. Not as a talking point, but as a fact. Being cross-examined by high-powered tech lawyers is not a small thing. Showing up at all is not a small thing.

“Five to Six Hours a Day Is Fine”

When Emma asked what surprised Nicki most about the YouTube executive’s testimony, Nicki didn’t hesitate.

She described a courtroom-wide reaction of frustration and anger at his tone. Arrogance. Visible annoyance at having to be there. Laughing. Treating the testimony like an inconvenience.

And then the moment that landed like a punch: Nicki said the executive claimed it was completely fine for kids to spend five to six hours a day on YouTube, adding that his own children do.

Nicki’s point was not just that it was shocking, but that it revealed something deeper: a normalization of extreme use, spoken out loud, under oath, in a case about harm.

The Families Are the Story

One of the most powerful threads in the episode was the presence of “survivor parents” and families in and around the courthouse. Sarah described the unseen work behind the scenes: organizing, coordinating, getting reporters there, and constantly checking in with families to make sure the process is happening on their terms.

Because even a verdict that goes the “right” way does not undo what happened.

Sarah said something that should be impossible to forget: even if the verdict is exactly what they want, the children who died are not coming back.

That reality is why the case is not just legal. It is moral. It is communal. It is a national reckoning being carried, day after day, by families who have already paid the highest price.

Jonathan Haidt, Seen as a Human

Steve also described a moment that surprised him emotionally: seeing Jonathan Haidt show up and appear visibly moved.

Sarah agreed. She talked about how Haidt is often making the academic case, working hard to land the argument that this is not correlation, it is causation. But in the courthouse, in front of families living with tragedy, he showed up differently. Human to human, not just researcher to audience.

Sarah said that moment mattered to families. It gave comfort and validation that the people fighting the “academic” fight are also willing to stand with them in the most personal one.

Where We Are in the Trial

Nicki offered a clear timeline anchor.

Jury selection began January 27. The judge has told the jury to be available through March 20. The episode took place as the trial finished week five and headed into week six (including the jury selection period). Importantly, the defense had not even begun calling witnesses yet. Meaning: there is still a long road ahead.

And as Sarah said, if we’ve learned anything, it’s that you can’t bet on a timeline.

What’s Next

Nicki previewed likely witnesses coming up: another therapist, Kaylee’s mother Karen, a possible additional data expert, and Meta whistleblower Arturo Behar.

Steve reacted in real time, noting Behar’s story and how much more widely it may be heard when it is delivered from the stand.

Sarah described why Behar is so compelling: he is deeply technical, but also deeply human. He can explain how platforms could be designed differently, and why it is tragic they are not. His argument challenges the core tech myth that harm is simply the unavoidable cost of the “good parts.”

No. Different choices are possible.

Can the Jury Split the Decision?

Near the end, Steve asked the question many people are quietly carrying: could the jury find Meta responsible and not YouTube, or split findings across claims?

Nicki explained it could be even more complex, with multiple counts that could produce mixed outcomes across companies. Sarah added a key point: a “not guilty” outcome for one defendant in one case does not absolve them. This is one case among thousands, and more cases are coming.

Why This Episode Matters

This conversation was not a recap for people who like tech policy as a hobby. It was a field report from inside a system that usually keeps its most revealing details sealed behind NDAs, PR teams, and carefully managed narratives.

Nicki and Sarah are documenting this trial because they believe the facts matter, the testimony matters, and the public record matters.

They are also doing it because the families deserve to be seen.

At the end of the episode, Steve spoke directly to the work it takes to keep families present: travel, childcare, coordination, emotional support, media management, and the sheer stamina required to stand in public with photographs of children who should still be alive.

“That’s what it takes,” he said.

And that may be the most honest summary of the moment we’re in.

It’s one thing to talk about platform harm in panels, reports, and headlines. It’s another to sit in a courtroom and watch the story of social media’s impact on young people get translated into legal arguments, evidentiary rules, and sworn testimony.

This week, Nicki Petrossi, host of the “Scrolling 2 Death” podcast, had one of the very scarce seats in the courtroom in Los Angeles as the first of the social media harms cases moved forward.

She wasn’t there for the optics. She has been tracking this space for years, following the shift from research and advocacy into litigation.

As Petrossi put it, when earlier policy efforts stalled, her focus changed: “I quickly realized, like, no matter what we do… we needed laws. We need help from our lawmakers to help protect our children from predatory companies.”

When that route failed to move quickly enough, she described a pivot toward the courts: “When that failed — for many different reasons… I realized, maybe lawsuits are where it’s at. Maybe some of these big legal tactics can make a difference.”

That is the context for why being in the courtroom now matters. This is not theoretical. This is the arena where product design choices, internal knowledge, and claims of responsibility get tested under oath. As Petrossi put it bluntly, “This is the first time that Mark Zuckerberg was under oath in a court of law having to answer questions about his company and what it does to kids. That is groundbreaking history.”

What kinds of cases are actually moving forward

This is not a single lawsuit. It is the leading edge of a much larger wave of litigation aimed at social media companies.

Petrossi put the scale and structure plainly: “We have thousands of families in this consolidated grouping of cases. This is not class action. So the cases are going to be tried one by one.”

What is unfolding now includes:

Individual youth harm cases
These are cases brought by young plaintiffs who allege that platform design contributed to measurable harm, including anxiety, body image issues, depression, and suicidal ideation. The argument is not about one viral post. It is about cumulative exposure and product design.

Coordinated state court cases (JCCP in California)
California has consolidated many youth social media harm cases into a Judicial Council Coordinated Proceeding. The case now in trial is one of several “bellwether” cases meant to test arguments, evidence, and legal theories that will shape how hundreds of other cases proceed.

Federal cases
Separate from the California state actions, there are federal cases moving through the courts that raise overlapping questions about product liability, duty of care, and corporate responsibility.

Actions by attorneys general and school districts
States and school systems are bringing their own suits, arguing that platforms have contributed to widespread harm that now shows up in public health systems, schools, and community services.

Taken together, this is not a symbolic fight. It is an attempt to build legal pressure from multiple directions at once, rather than betting everything on one plaintiff or one venue.

What the legal strategy is actually targeting

One of the most important shifts in this litigation is what is being put on trial. The focus is not on individual pieces of content, but on product design and corporate decision-making.

Petrossi described this directly in terms of intent and concealment: “The decisions they were making… to addict children, to harm children, not telling the public about it.” In her framing, this was not accidental. “The intention of the company was to prey on teens… exploit them so they can make greater profits. And that was done intentionally, not by accident.”

That framing is central to the legal strategy being advanced by teams working with the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC) and others. In practice, that strategy includes:

Moving away from “bad content” arguments
The cases are not about whether a specific video or post was harmful. They are about whether the architecture of the platforms themselves creates foreseeable risk.

Centering design features
Infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendation systems, notifications, streaks, and engagement loops are being scrutinized as design choices that shape behavior. This keeps the legal focus on product liability and duty of care, not on speech.

Establishing foreseeability and knowledge
A key question is what companies knew about the risks to young users, when they knew it, and what they chose to do with that information.

Using early trials to set patterns
The initial cases serve as testing grounds for what evidence lands, how juries respond to arguments about design versus content, and where companies are most legally vulnerable.

This is slow, technical work. It does not look like cultural reckoning. It looks like motions, objections, expert testimony, and document review. But this is how accountability gets built in practice.

What being in the courtroom changes

Petrossi’s presence in the room matters because so much of this story is flattened when it is filtered through headlines. In the room, you see how much time is spent arguing over what the jury is even allowed to hear, how platform representatives and expert witnesses lean on neutral product language to describe systems that many families experience as harmful, how young people’s lived experiences get translated into clinical and legal categories, and how much of the fight is not about whether harm exists at all, but about whether it can be legally attributed to design choices.

Petrossi also made clear that the most painful phase of the trial is still ahead. As the proceedings move from plaintiff witnesses to the defense phase, the tone in the courtroom is expected to shift sharply. As she put it “what people can expect to see is finalizing of the plaintiff witnesses through the next week or two, and then we’re gonna transfer over to defendants calling witnesses. And then it’s gonna get ugly…”

Why this moment matters beyond this one case

We should not pretend that one trial will reform the social media industry. Even a plaintiff victory does not undo business models built around attention and growth. But something meaningful is happening here.

For the first time at this scale, platform design is being interrogated in a setting where internal documents, testimony, and expert analysis become part of a public record, with legal consequences. Discovery opens files that PR strategies cannot close. Testimony locks narratives into sworn statements. The story of how these systems were built, and what their creators understood about the risks, becomes harder to rewrite after the fact.

For families and young people, this matters because it reframes harm as something that warrants formal accountability, not just cultural debate. It does not resolve the problem. But it moves responsibility out of the realm of unintended side effects and into the realm of foreseeable outcomes of deliberate design.

For those of us working in media, tech accountability, and youth safety, this is a reminder that change rarely arrives as a single dramatic moment. It comes through long, often tedious pressure across courts, research, organizing, and public narrative. Petrossi being in that courtroom is one small but real piece of that broader ecosystem of accountability.

Petrossi also put it plainly when thinking beyond this single verdict: “To me, we will win in the court of public opinion around this case regardless of the outcome.”

You can watch a full interview with Petrossi here.

Emma Lembke: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to this week’s Substack Live at the Sustainable Media Center. As many of you know, my name is Emma Lemke, and I serve as the Director of Gen Z Advocacy here at SMC, and I’m so honored to be joined in conversation today with Steve, SMC’s Executive Director, and Nikki Petrosi, a digital activist, host of Scrolling to Death, and the Heat Is On podcast, co-founder of TechSafe Learning Coalition, and the Scrolling to Death Foundation. And in general.

Emma Lembke: Nikki is a leading voice on the issues related to kids, screens, and social media. So, thank you, Nikki, for being on, and we are so excited to speak with you today.

Nicki Petrossi: Thank you so much, Emma. I’m excited to talk about this. There’s nothing more important in the world right now, in my opinion.

Emma Lembke: Exactly. You know, I’ve mentioned the domains that you cover and that you’re a leading voice in, but more recently, you’ve taken on kind of this reporting role at a very important lawsuit happening in Los Angeles, California right now. So, if you follow the news of SMC or just the mainstream media in general, you have probably heard of this case, or heard the rumblings of how important it truly could be to holding big tech accountable for the harm

Emma Lembke: that they are causing young people. Now, I could attempt to discuss the case, but I thought there was no better person to bring on other than yourself, because you have been there and you’re reporting on this. So, you know, I think

Emma Lembke: Take us back first and tell listeners who are tuning in a little bit more about your story in general, and how it inevitably led you into the courtroom.

Nicki Petrossi: Sure, so originally, I think back in, like, 2023, I was like, okay, there’s some research showing that social media is really bad for young people, and I started hearing stories of…

Nicki Petrossi: of children dying because of something that happened on social media, and I thought, shouldn’t parents know about this before we’re deciding to give our kids, even tablets at young ages, getting them started on YouTube and getting them into that addiction at those young ages? I decided that we need a space where we can hear these stories and get education from experts in a safe and productive and non-judgmental area.

Nicki Petrossi: And so I created Scrolling to Death more of, like.

Nicki Petrossi: Helping parents do a better job with what we can control in our homes.

Nicki Petrossi: I quickly realized, like, no matter what we do at home, we’re outgunned. We don’t have full control over what they’re accessing at school or at their friends’ houses. Once kids get old enough, they have… they sneak phones and devices, and so we needed laws, right? We need help from our lawmakers to

Nicki Petrossi: help protect our children from predatory companies. And then I went on a journey of a year or two of, you know, trying to get COSA passed, and we all kind of were involved in some federal legislation work, and when that…

Nicki Petrossi: failed because of many different reasons. I realized, like, okay, maybe lawsuits is where it’s at. Maybe some of these big,

Nicki Petrossi: legal tactics can make a difference, and that is really where it’s been, and where I settled into where we’re gonna find out what these companies actually knew, what the decisions they were making, in order… the decisions they were making

Nicki Petrossi: To addict children, to harm children, not telling the public about it, and…

Nicki Petrossi: And then eventually, when we win lawsuits like this, there’s gonna be a financial hit against these companies that will make a difference in how they build their products more responsibly. So, that’s kind of the journey of how I landed on really paying attention most to the legal battles.

Steven Rosenbaum: Absolutely.

Steven Rosenbaum: But you’re… I mean, you’re also just… I mean, you’re a leader, and I wonder if that came naturally to you? Like, I mean… I mean, you have young kids.

Steven Rosenbaum: A lot of the parents that you’re working with, you know, sadly have lost children. I mean, you’re not a lawyer, I mean, you’ve, like… like, we’ve known each other long enough that to watch you kind of grow into this role is really, exciting.

Steven Rosenbaum: For the, for the, for the cause. The cause needs you. I mean…

Nicki Petrossi: you.

Steven Rosenbaum: And it’s hard… I mean, you know, we watch you every day. It’s hard work.

Nicki Petrossi: I mean…

Steven Rosenbaum: You know, you talked about, like, just what it’s like sitting in the courtroom. It’s exhausting.

Steven Rosenbaum: I.

Nicki Petrossi: Yeah.

Steven Rosenbaum: Talk a little bit about your evolution, and how you came to be, you know, Nikki 2.0, or whatever you think of yourself as.

Nicki Petrossi: That’s kind of how I feel. So I guess when you say a leader, like, I was always kind of… I’m the oldest child, I was always the captain of the team, and the first one to raise my hand in class, and so I was always volunteering myself to be in charge.

Nicki Petrossi: And so I think, anyway, I had my own business out of college, my own marketing business for a long time, had a really hard time delegating. I think that’s just always been the role I’ve felt comfortable in, and so it… it was a good fit, I guess, for me to take on this new.

Nicki Petrossi: this new charge that felt really, like something I had to do once I realized there was a need for it.

Nicki Petrossi: And then once you learn more and more about what’s actually happening, and then the families that did everything they could to protect their child and still lost them, there’s no other option than to do the hard work sometimes, and the emotional work.

Nicki Petrossi: and the long hours and all of that, like, there’s never been a moment of regret. It’s just kind of… I would think anyone would do it once they see what’s actually happening to families and the scale at which it’s happening.

Emma Lembke: And for those of you… for the people who… again, I think when I first came to the case and the lawsuit in general, I had a general understanding, I got asked to stay in front of a few media outlets, I had to brush up on it, but can you give, like, a bit of a lay of the land? Like.

Emma Lembke: what exactly is the case? I know people have been throwing around the term, like, bellwether, like, what does that even really mean in this regard? What are the sides arguing?

Nicki Petrossi: Yeah, so it’s basically, thousands of families that have come together and filed a consolidated suit, in the California State Court.

Nicki Petrossi: And it’s sometimes called the JCCP for short, and that’s just a legal term. And it is these… they consolidate so that they can streamline the depositions and the evidence, because it’s all so related, and all of the, all of the allegations are very, very similar. But because it’s not a class action, they’re going to be trying the cases one by one. And so the bellwether is just a group of cases that they’re going to prioritize

Nicki Petrossi: first, and I believe it’s, like, 24 cases out of these, I think it’s about 3,000 consolidated cases. And so, the first of those being, Kaylee, who is now 20, and is alleging that she was addicted by these companies.

Nicki Petrossi: And that caused her to suffer, anxiety, depression.

Nicki Petrossi: body image issues, suicidal thoughts, and, and more. And so, there’s a separate grouping of lawsuits happening at the same time, which are called the MDL. This is another thousand families, and this is where also we have 1,500 school districts and about 30 states.

Nicki Petrossi: Combined together, and that’s filed in California federal court, with very similar claims. So these are all pushing forward at the same time.

Steven Rosenbaum: And… and…

Emma Lembke: Fascinating.

Steven Rosenbaum: when we started going down this road, like, did you have any secret in the back of your head, we have the evidence, we’re getting the discovery, we’re gonna win? Like, I know we’ve already… there’s already been two settlements, right? So, SNAP has already settled, and

Steven Rosenbaum: Who’s the other… TikTok. TikTok. So, so those… and those are… we don’t know the… I mean, you may, we don’t know the specific number, but it’s a big number.

Nicki Petrossi: I would assume it’s a big number, but also, to be very clear, TikTok and Snapchat only settled with Kaylee, and so they are still on the 2,999 other cases in the JCCP and all the other cases in the MDL, and so this is one, and Snapchat can’t afford to settle

Nicki Petrossi: thousands and thousands of cases in the, I don’t know, millions of dollars, I don’t know, I don’t really have a good guess for how much they settled for.

Nicki Petrossi: So… sorry, what was the question? I started talking over you.

Steven Rosenbaum: Was your gut feeling going into this, we’re gonna start knocking over dominoes and have a real trajectory of winning, or has that been a delightful surprise over the last 10 days?

Nicki Petrossi: I think I started to hear from some attorneys on the case many months ago that… who were seeing the internal documents.

Nicki Petrossi: they weren’t public yet, but these attorneys were seeing them, and they were telling me things like, it is worse than we thought. It is terrible what these companies knew and what we’re seeing being talked about and studied internally at these companies. And so I had that information.

Nicki Petrossi: Generally. And then, in the lead-up to… before the case was… before the case began, there was a lot of filings made public, expert reports and different motions.

Nicki Petrossi: that gave us little insights and little hints to things that were said in the internal documents. It would be like an expert’s report, and the expert witness had reviewed the internal documents, and so they would give teasers of what those internal documents were saying. And so, it… I mean…

Nicki Petrossi: I was getting more information as we got closer, and it became very clear that this is something that

Nicki Petrossi: I need to commit all of my time to cover, because even if we don’t win this one case, just the exposure of these internal documents and presentations will change the way, public views this. We’ll get laws passed, and we’ll trigger a movement towards safety.

Steven Rosenbaum: Wonderful.

Steven Rosenbaum: It’s… it’s extraordinary. And, we’ve read some of the discovery, and it’s…

Steven Rosenbaum: harrowing. It’s… yeah, terrible. And to have the two big meta executives

Steven Rosenbaum: You know, on the stand, and both essentially shrug their shoulders and say, well, but it’s not addictive.

Steven Rosenbaum: It’s like, okay, but the documents… so, for example, we could talk about some specifics. You know, the internal documents say we need the youngest possible customers we can get.

Steven Rosenbaum: like, 13 isn’t young enough, can we… how do we get younger? Which is just so dark. I mean, and for them to say that’s not the case when the internal, you know, or, you know, Zuckerberg kind of zips around and says, well, I wasn’t copied on that email.

Steven Rosenbaum: It’s like.

Nicki Petrossi: Or he’ll say, we were actually looking to create a separate, safer product. When we were talking about targeting kids under 13, it was with, you know, Messenger Kids, or they did talk about doing a separate Facebook product or Instagram product for, for my kids under 13. But then you have.

Nicki Petrossi: other documents refuting that, saying things like they need to make, and I’m looking at a quote right now, like a slide deck that says, opportunity, make Instagram relevant and offer unique features that speak to their lives at 11 and 12. And so, they’re…

Nicki Petrossi: And that’s… that goes into, like, that they know that there are kids under 13 on there, and they are marketing to them and developing the product to be more attractive to that age range.

Steven Rosenbaum: And, you know, it’s important to say here, you know, for you and I, Nikki, it’s about our kids. It’s… because when we were there that age.

Steven Rosenbaum: There was no such thing. But Emma, if you go back and look at her Senate testimony, that’s exactly what she talks about, is, like, being targeted by that company. And we’ve now spent enough time together at SMC, the three of us, that, you know, this is, you know, this is not a bunch of kooky parents.

Steven Rosenbaum: No. You know, this isn’t… you know… well, no, because that’s really what Facebook’s trying to say, is it’s the kid’s fault.

Steven Rosenbaum: You know, it’s the parent’s fault.

Nicki Petrossi: The kid had a mental health problem, we didn’t have anything to do with it.

Steven Rosenbaum: When you’re sitting in the courtroom.

Steven Rosenbaum: you have a very rare view. Not only do you get to see the witnesses, but you get to see the jury.

Steven Rosenbaum: Tell us about what those faces look like.

Nicki Petrossi: Wow, so…

Nicki Petrossi: it’s very multiracial, it’s very multi-age, there are… there’s a young gentleman, I would say, who’s maybe 20, and maybe a young woman that’s 21, 22, 23, somewhere in there.

Nicki Petrossi: All the way up to, there was a couple of 70-plus-year-old men who’ve never even been on Instagram. Now, one of them…

Nicki Petrossi: actually had to go into the hospital for a respiratory infection, and has since been excused in the past few days, and subbed in a woman, I would say maybe about 50 years old, looks to be a mom, and so it’s just a wide range

Nicki Petrossi: of people, all different races and genders and ages, and I feel really good about The spectrum of that.

Nicki Petrossi: And they seem really engaged, I will say, as just observing

Nicki Petrossi: how they’re absorbing the information. They’re following… looking back and forth as people talk, and nodding, and…

Nicki Petrossi: I mean, there’s some light-hearted moments, and they’re smiling, and so they’re listening, and they’re paying attention, and they’re not supposed to research the case when they go home, but I don’t know how they can stay away from it, so… and they walk out of that courtroom, and there’s media all over the place, and so I’m sure they understand the gravity of the situation.

Steven Rosenbaum: when, when the New York Post put Mark Zuckerberg on the cover,

Steven Rosenbaum: You never want to be on the cover of the New York Post.

Nicki Petrossi: That’s true.

Steven Rosenbaum: That’s not where you want to be.

Steven Rosenbaum: Talk a little bit about… I know that the parents have been there.

Steven Rosenbaum: The parents have been out on the steps of the courthouse, they’ve been sleeping there at night to make sure they had seats in the courtroom, because I guess Google had been hiring line sitters to try and hold places. Is that even legal? I guess it…

Steven Rosenbaum: I guess it is.

Nicki Petrossi: I don’t know the technicalities or the legality around that, but the court staff caught on really quickly and changed to, a auction or raffle system, and so, there was…

Nicki Petrossi: There was about the first.

Nicki Petrossi: 3 weeks leading up… no, I would say, okay, let me think, maybe… the jury selection period was all first-come, first-served, so I was getting there about 5 AM,

Nicki Petrossi: to get one of the 6 media spots that were available, and they were gone by 6 AM, and so you had to be there. The court doors don’t open till 7, and so you’re just sitting in the dark for a couple of hours there. Now, once the trial started and the media, like myself, were given badges, so we just have to get there by 8, and we can get into our spot in the courtroom.

Nicki Petrossi: Now there were parents going into a first-come, first-served situation.

Nicki Petrossi: And that started to get really competitive, and there were…

Nicki Petrossi: people, there were companies, I think law firms and Google, from what I heard, paying people through TaskRabbit to come at 6pm the night before, and there were shifts, one shift from 6 to midnight, and they would pass off from midnight till 6 AM, and then the YouTube employee would walk up and the YouTube communications guy, and tap him out. And so that…

Nicki Petrossi: was something that I observed, and…

Nicki Petrossi: was really upsetting, and yeah, those parents did the hard thing and got there about 11PM one night in the pouring rain.

Nicki Petrossi: And sort of slept on the steps, but kind of played cards and tried to keep each other company. And a lot of them got in in that day, and shortly after, it did switch to that public lottery system, because it was just getting too crazy.

Steven Rosenbaum: I think… average folks just have little… a little sense of how important this can be. Like,

Steven Rosenbaum: But for those of us who cared about this issue for now a long time, this feels like… I mean, up until this case, everyone would say.

Steven Rosenbaum: civil litigation, and then they would say, in the next sentence, Section 230,

Steven Rosenbaum: Nothing to see here, moving on.

Steven Rosenbaum: in Section 230, Essentially shut down any possibility of victory in civil litigation.

Nicki Petrossi: And the fact that these cases.

Steven Rosenbaum: were brought as product liability, and there’s a whole kind of… I’m, again, not a lawyer.

Nicki Petrossi: Right.

Steven Rosenbaum: But I do understand that this is a very different approach. Right. And that’s important.

Nicki Petrossi: Yeah, though I will say there’s… the Section 230 cloud is still hovering in the courtroom, like, there’s still a lot of…

Nicki Petrossi: ish… there’s a lot of limitations on what can be said. They have to be very careful about anything related to content. There’s a lot of objections. Section 230, content objections happening, interrupting, and there’s attorneys having to navigate these really sticky arguments, and the judge admits, like.

Nicki Petrossi: this is a really new situation, we’re gonna kind of figure this out together. But it’s just incredible that

Nicki Petrossi: That these really, really smart attorneys were able to come up with a way around that immunity.

Emma Lembke: And in general, you… from a…

Emma Lembke: a youth perspective, and I’m at 23, but again, like, I got on social media at 12. From reading about the lawsuit, and I know I’ve talked with a lot of other young people about it, it seemed quite baffling that anyone could say that social media, specifically Instagram, like, isn’t addictive.

Nicki Petrossi: And I know in reading through Masseri’s and reading through Zuckerberg’s argument, you know, that’s kind of the basis. I know one quote is, like.

Emma Lembke: Sari said, like, I don’t think it can be clinically addictive. Can you talk through a little bit more about, like, the…

Emma Lembke: Outrageousness of the claims that are being made from these big tech executives from being in the courtroom.

Nicki Petrossi: Oh, yeah, so they will only say the words problematic use, and they’ll describe that as using Instagram more than you feel good about, similar to watching TV late at night. And so, that’s what they will reference in their internal documents for Meta.

Nicki Petrossi: Early on, you’ll see the word addiction, but later, you’ll just see problematic use.

Nicki Petrossi: And, you know, that was refuted very quickly by Dr. Anna Lemke, who’s, like, this amazing addiction expert, and she basically reviewed all their documents and said, anywhere they say problematic use, just switch that out with addiction. Like, they’re just subbing out that term when it really what they’re describing, and she reviewed.

Nicki Petrossi: like, a dozen different specific features that are available on YouTube and Meta’s platforms.

Nicki Petrossi: and found all of them, like, 12 of 12, to be, addictive to young people who are vulnerable to addiction. And so, yeah, it was a really…

Nicki Petrossi: The interesting moment when…

Nicki Petrossi: Adam Masseri said, I, you know, I don’t find it to be clinically addictive, and mark Lanier, the plaintiff attorney, was like, I’m sorry, I’m looking at your CV, and I don’t see where you got a psychology degree, or any type of degree, like, how can you make that assessment?

Nicki Petrossi: So it was really clear in the courtroom what was happening there and what they were trying to cover up.

Steven Rosenbaum: And by the way, we should just clear up, the doctor that you’re referring to is not related to Emma.

Nicki Petrossi: Oh, yeah. Isn’t that funny?

Emma Lembke: You get that a lot?

Emma Lembke: Oh, every single interview, I get asked that. I would like to claim the… I would like to claim her as my own, because I love her work, and I… she wrote Dopamine Nation, I believe, her book?

Emma Lembke: Yes. Absolutely wonderful, scholar and individual in the space, but no, not related.

Nicki Petrossi: Her daughter was in the courtroom watching, which was…

Nicki Petrossi: Had to have been tough, because they were attacking her a little bit from the other side, so I’m proud that they were able to be there.

Steven Rosenbaum: So, Nikki, I want to ask, like.

Steven Rosenbaum: Was there… has there been a moment

Steven Rosenbaum: Sitting there, where you got angry?

Nicki Petrossi: There’s a lot of…

Nicki Petrossi: There’s a lot of deep breaths, I just did a deep breath before I answered.

Nicki Petrossi: But because it’s…

Nicki Petrossi: It’s not like in the movies, where there’s, like, a big moment, and, you know, it’s a longer form situation. So when the, you know, opening statement, for example, from Mark Lanier was, was about…

Nicki Petrossi: was it 3… about 3 hours? Like, it was hours long, two and a half hours long, okay? So, we’re not talking about quick soundbites, we’re talking about an arc, and creating this story, and taking us on a journey. And so, it’s more of an experience than it is, like, a

Nicki Petrossi: boom moment where you are just shocked and you’re wanting to yell out.

Nicki Petrossi: not to say there wasn’t times where things were said, and you’re like, ugh, like, you roll your eyes, and even you see attorneys on the plaintiff’s side rolling their eyes sometimes at things that are said by Meta’s attorney or some of the Meta executives there. So I will say the sh… the…

Nicki Petrossi: Shocking things have been…

Nicki Petrossi: sort of the way that Meta attacks some of the experts that the plaintiff is bringing in as witnesses, and trying to devalue their character, those are things that feel kind of yucky, and so they bring up some things that… and I think it’s only gonna get much, much worse when they attack

Nicki Petrossi: Kaylee’s family and parents, and so that’s gonna be really hard. But there was a moment this week where

Nicki Petrossi: Mark Lanier and his team brought out this giant banner, and it was, like, almost 40 feet long, and 3 or 4 feet tall, and it had a bunch of the… about 4,000 little tiny pictures, all of

Nicki Petrossi: Kaylee’s pictures, almost all of Kaylee’s pictures she had posted on Instagram through the past few years, and, like, all these filtered selfies, and just seeing that, I mean, it took up the entire courtroom. It was really an insane moment to hold that up in front of the jury, and have them process what it really… what her life was really like.

Nicki Petrossi: On this platform over the past few years, and you saw that recognition in their eyes.

Steven Rosenbaum: I read about that, and I wish they’d brought that out in front of the courthouse to… I imagine the image, but I wish I could have seen it.

Nicki Petrossi: Yeah, they, Mark Lanier said that he wanted to, but I don’t know that they can bring… I mean, it’s a piece of evidence, I don’t know that they’re allowed to bring it out and show it to everyone like that. Maybe later, when it gets…

Nicki Petrossi: publicly filed. There will be some imagery of it.

Steven Rosenbaum: I’ll tell you the thing I yelled at, and it’ll be… because again, I wasn’t in the courtroom.

Nicki Petrossi: Yeah.

Steven Rosenbaum: first of all, I wished somebody had turned their phone on and streamed the audio, but of course they couldn’t. I yelled at the fact that Facebook turned the trial into a marketing opportunity for their glasses, and they had their employees wear them, knowing they would be told to take them off.

Nicki Petrossi: And knowing that that would become a media moment. I was like, that is just…

Steven Rosenbaum: You know, because they didn’t really need to record the court… I mean, they knew they couldn’t record in there.

Nicki Petrossi: That’s interesting. I… obviously, our first thought is, and Sarah and I, in our weekly episode, talked about this. First thought is advertisement. Second thought was, this is an anonymous jury, and…

Nicki Petrossi: That means that the attorneys for Meta and YouTube aren’t allowed to tell Meta and YouTube the names or information about the jurors. Because imagine the data points that those companies hold on these people, and the way that they could sway arguments.

Nicki Petrossi: And so there was thought, then, were they trying to get images of the jury to scan in and find out who these people are?

Nicki Petrossi: Yeah, it’s conspiracy-ish, but… you know…

Nicki Petrossi: I don’t know why… I don’t know why they would… that is so against the rules. Like, that… it should have been a bigger deal, to be honest. And the judge was very serious about the… the warning about it, and scolding that happened, but it was… that’s a huge deal. Big no-no.

Steven Rosenbaum: Talk about the tobacco analogy.

Nicki Petrossi: It’s P.

Steven Rosenbaum: used, it’s being said a lot. By the way, interestingly enough, first time, because I went looking, the idea that social media could be at a tipping point that’s similar to the change in tobacco, this is really the first time that that’s made its way out into mainstream media. Does that hold up for you?

Nicki Petrossi: Absolutely, and this is something you should have Sarah Gardner on of Heat Initiative, who co-hosts The Heat is On With Me, and over at Heat, they are studying the tobacco movement and that arc that happened, and I’ve seen a slide that they show, and it has these different moments along this arc, and one of them being the tobacco trials, and it wasn’t the last thing to get you over the finish line, but it was a really important

Nicki Petrossi: moment in that arc. And so that’s where we are, and the alignment of these companies, knowing it’s addictive.

Nicki Petrossi: Funding studies to show it’s not addictive, lying to everyone about it, hiding it, you know, now we have this trial. It’s… it, to me, lines up

Nicki Petrossi: Exactly, although I will say I haven’t studied it enough to speak to it more than that, but Sarah would love to come on and speak to that even more, but everyone you talk to that kind of was around during that time, paying attention, this feels exactly the same.

Steven Rosenbaum: One of the things that I say to young people who don’t remember the world before social media is, I’ll say to them kind of casually, you know, there was a time when you could smoke on airplanes.

Steven Rosenbaum: And they look at you and go, you’re kidding, that’s insane, it’s a sealed tube, it’s like, you know, and now you can’t. So, things do change.

Nicki Petrossi: One teacher… I talked to one… I was interviewing a teacher about tech at school, and we were talking about cigarettes, and he said that they used to have a smoking

Nicki Petrossi: quad or something at his high school. Like, that’s how normal it was for teenagers to be smoking, is the school sanctioned it. And it does… that does remind me of, like, schools having kids communicate through social media for, you know, this club or that sport. Like, they are sanctioning and…

Nicki Petrossi: Being like, okay, you can use this, and in some cases have to be using this addictive product.

Nicki Petrossi: in order to be on this… in this group, it’s… There’s a similarity there, too.

Steven Rosenbaum: So, you’re reminding me… I mean, there’s a lot of things that have happened in the last week.

Steven Rosenbaum: Jonathan hates showing up.

Steven Rosenbaum: Jonathan is the leading advocate in getting phones out of schools. He’s done amazing work. He’s relentless. He’s tireless.

Steven Rosenbaum: I’ve never seen him choke up before.

Nicki Petrossi: I haven’t either, and it was… I was so…

Nicki Petrossi: squatting, squatting right in front of him, and it was…

Nicki Petrossi: I mean, he had just spent the morning, about an hour or so having breakfast with probably a dozen or more of these parent survivors, and so I think it really hit him in that moment. What’s at stake?

Steven Rosenbaum: Yeah.

Steven Rosenbaum: It’s funny, I… I think Em and I are, like.

Steven Rosenbaum: we… every day, we feel like we’re there. It’s like we’re following all our friends, and we’re reading everything, and we’re looking at all the feeds, and it’s just like…

Steven Rosenbaum: That’s weird.

Nicki Petrossi: That’s the goal, we want to bring you in to the courtroom in whatever way we can, not being able to have an audio or video feed in there.

Steven Rosenbaum: So, I know we’re gonna run out of time, but I have to ask one more thing, and then I know Emma has one more question. Yeah. Like, talk about the work of the Social Media Victims Law Center. I mean…

Steven Rosenbaum: and Laura, and they’re just, like… like… They’re… they… I mean… Speaking of driving force.

Nicki Petrossi: Yeah. I mean…

Steven Rosenbaum: I’m pretty sure she doesn’t sleep.

Nicki Petrossi: No, and I mean, SMVLC revolutionized this whole product liability

Nicki Petrossi: approach that’s being taken here, and it was really memorable this week, because one of the two people that got in the lottery… through the lottery system, one of the two parent survivors that got in the courtroom on Zuckerberg’s day was Tammy Rodriguez, who was the first

Nicki Petrossi: family with SMVLC, but the first family in the nation to sue on these grounds, to sue a social media company because of her, she lost her daughter, Selena, at 11 years old to suicide after experiencing basically every social media harm you could name. And…

Nicki Petrossi: Tammy got in that courtroom, and then after, there was a press conference at 5pm that day, Matt Bergman, who founded SMVLC, spoke to press, and Tammy said some words to press, and she did such an incredible job.

Nicki Petrossi: But just to see the lineup of a couple dozen outlets from international outlets, national outlets.

Nicki Petrossi: Standing there, hearing the stories of these parents, and understanding the through line of what this is really about, and the scale at which

Nicki Petrossi: kids are being harmed. And this… so this all started with SMBLC, and Matt Bergman, and Laura Marquez-Garrett, and everyone on that team.

Nicki Petrossi: And has expanded since then. I mean, the caseload itself, think of how many thousands of cases we talked about, so that now there are so many firms that have taken up, this work, but it really just started… it started with them, and we’re so grateful.

Emma Lembke: Absolutely. And…

Emma Lembke: For individuals like me and Steve and beyond in the SMC community, the last question I have is really, one, what should people be looking out for over the next coming weeks as the trial progresses? What should people tune into? And then two, where do people tune in for your reports, for the information, and to continue to stay up to date?

Nicki Petrossi: Great, yeah. So, if you’re on Instagram, I am doing live posting there, and doing a lot of that also over on LinkedIn, because I like that platform much better. But…

Nicki Petrossi: where I’m really driving people is to an email list at scrollingtoredeath.com slash heat, and there I’m sending near, daily updates on what happened in the court every evening.

Nicki Petrossi: But more importantly, weekly podcast episodes that show the whole… everything that happened in that week, inside and outside of the courtroom related to this case.

Nicki Petrossi: And so what people can expect to see is finalizing of the plaintiff witnesses through the… the plaintiff team is calling witnesses through the next week or two, and then we’re gonna transfer over to defendants calling witnesses. And then it’s gonna get ugly, it’s gonna get a little…

Nicki Petrossi: scary for Kaylee’s family. You know, Kaylee’s been coming to a couple things here and there. She wants to stay anonymous, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing her much until she’s called as a witness, and probably her mom as well. So, you know, right now, we’re kind of in this place where we’re unveiling a lot of truths, and…

Nicki Petrossi: It’s a… it’s great for the movement, and then we’re gonna move into this…

Nicki Petrossi: yuckier phase, where we’re gonna hear the other side of it, but I think it’s gonna reveal

Nicki Petrossi: how dirty and low these companies… how low these companies will go to try to defend their business model that we can very clearly see from their own documents is predatory. And so, I think it will put the nail in the coffin, basically.

Emma Lembke: Okay, wonderful. So, everyone, we will, in the notes for this, this show, we will make sure we get all of that, so that people know where to be directed to. And the podcast is amazing. I listen, so I highly suggest that everyone else does. So…

Emma Lembke: Thank you so much, Nikki. We really appreciate you coming on and talking us through this. I know that this is just the beginning of the conversation we’re having together about the case, and I really hope that

Emma Lembke: like, it continues to be, good notes, and then that we continue to see progress here, because again, like we said at the offset, this is an incredibly important case, and we just really hope that it continues on the right track. So thank you for coming on.

Emma Lembke: And everyone, we look forward to continuing to have a conversation with you again next week. Thank you.

Nicki Petrossi: Thank you.

When you think of Los Angeles, California, what comes to mind? If you’re anything like me, you picture a city defined by glitz, glam, and, most of all, movies. But this week, residents of Los Angeles didn’t need to visit the Hollywood Walk of Fame or a movie theater to witness a drama worthy of the big screen.

At the Spring Street Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, a trial has begun that could reshape the course of social media history as we know it. In this landmark case, a 20-year-old plaintiff known as K.G.M. is taking major social media companies to court, arguing that the harm she faced from tech addiction did not stem from any single post, but from the platforms’ very design—features like infinite scroll, autoplay, and algorithmic recommendation systems engineered to keep young users hooked for hours at a time.

At the core of the argument is the claim that social media was built to be addictive—and that this addiction can harm young people.

In K.G.M.’s case, that harm manifested as adverse mental health outcomes—anxiety, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts. But for many young people, the effects of tech addiction are broader and more diffuse. You can see it almost anywhere young people gather: heads down, faces illuminated, fingers endlessly scrolling.

This isn’t the childhood we chose—it’s the one Big Tech designed.

So if we want to change how the next generation relates to themselves, the world around them, and most importantly, each other, we have to address the underlying design of these platforms—that’s exactly what the Los Angeles lawsuit is trying to do.

At a macro level, the suit is attempting to shift responsibility. Instead of asking young people to “out-discipline” billion-dollar design systems, the court is asking whether those systems need guardrails. This case decides whether youth wellbeing is a user preference— or a design requirement.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: isn’t this about content and free speech—and can’t Big Tech just hide behind its Section 230 shield?

No. This is about design choices. The way feeds are tuned, the way recommendations escalate, the way filters change self-image. Those are product decisions, not speech. The question is whether those design choices put kids at risk.

To tech executives like Adam Mosseri and Mark Zuckerberg—both of whom have testified in the past week—the answer is nuanced and contested. They question whether social media is “clinically addictive” and point to built-in safeguards as evidence that their products support young people.

To those in my generation, the truth is painfully simple: social media is designed to be addictive, and young people are its primary audience.

As for the safeguards touted by the defense, including those cited by Zuckerberg and Mosseri—if the underlying system is still built to keep kids scrolling, safety tools are purely cosmetic. It’s like putting a fire extinguisher in a car you know has a fuel leak. The core design is what drives the harm we’re seeing across this generation.

So for companies that truly want to protect and support the well-being of their youngest users, the goal should be providing real control over digital lives—not more addictive features to keep them scrolling. Give users the ability to turn down the intensity of the algorithm. Give people a real off switch, not just more prompts. Young people want tools that respect their autonomy, not systems optimized to keep them hooked.

Advocates within the Sustainable Media Center community are showing up on the steps of the Los Angeles courthouse every day to challenge this addictive design. Whether it’s a parent sharing the story of a child they lost or an attorney at the Social Media Victims Law Center filing the case, this trial matters deeply to us and our community members.

Ultimately, this court case is not the end—it’s only the beginning. The real victory right now is transparency. For the first time, internal documents and testimony are entering the public record. That’s how accountability begins. Verdicts will take time, but the truth is starting to surface now.