手机让她生病了

Speaking of the relationship between phones and social media, something big just happened.

In America there is a girl called Kaley.

She is twenty years old this year.

She started watching YouTube videos when she was six.

YouTube is a very big video website.

She started using Instagram at age nine.

Instagram is an app for sharing photos.

You take a photo and post it there.

Other people can see it.

If others think it looks good, they give you a "like."

Kaley started using these apps when she was very young.

She used them more and more.

Eventually she spent a lot of time on her phone every day.

Even during class she wanted to look at her phone.

She would go to the bathroom to secretly check.

To see if anyone liked her posts.

She said every time she saw a new like, she felt happy inside.

Just like eating candy.

But if nobody liked her posts, she felt very sad.

Slowly she started to feel she wasn't pretty.

Because Instagram has "filters."

What are filters?

Filters are a tool that can make photos look prettier.

Making your face whiter, making your eyes bigger.

But that's not real.

Kaley didn't understand this.

She felt everyone else looked so pretty, but she wasn't good enough.

She became more and more unhappy.

She didn't want to go out with friends.

She didn't want to talk to her family.

The doctor said she had "depression."

Depression means you always feel very sad and have no interest in anything.

The doctor also said she had "body dysmorphic disorder."

What does that mean?

It means she felt her body had a big problem.

But actually it didn't.

It was just in her mind.

Kaley felt this wasn't only her fault.

She felt it was the fault of the companies that made the apps.

She said they deliberately made the apps extremely fun.

So you can't put down your phone.

Why?

Because the longer you use it, the more money they make.

So Kaley took two big companies to court.

One is Meta.

Meta is the company that makes Instagram and Facebook.

The other is Google.

Google is the company that makes YouTube.

Taking them to court means letting the court decide who is right and who is wrong.

This case started in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is in California, America.

Kaley's lawyer said something very important in court.

He said: "How do you make a child never put down the phone?

That's called addiction engineering."

This means the engineers at these companies deliberately designed many things to make you addicted.

For example, infinite scrolling.

You finish watching one video, the next one comes right away.

You don't need to do anything.

Videos just keep playing by themselves.

There are also notifications.

Your phone keeps buzzing.

"Someone liked your post."

"Someone commented."

"Someone followed you."

Every time you hear the sound you want to look.

The court held the trial for five weeks.

Many people came to speak.

There were doctors.

There were engineers.

There were also company executives.

Meta's boss Mark Zuckerberg also came.

Then twelve people formed a "jury."

A jury is a group of ordinary people.

They listened to everything everyone said.

Then they discussed together.

They discussed for over forty hours.

Nine days.

In the end they said: Meta and Google were wrong.

They deliberately made apps that are addictive.

They knew this was bad for children.

But they didn't care.

Why didn't they care?

Because the court found internal documents from Meta.

The documents said: "If we want to win teenagers, we need to start with elementary school kids."

This shows they knew all along.

They deliberately wanted children to use their apps.

The court ordered them to pay six million dollars.

Meta pays seventy percent.

Google pays thirty percent.

Six million seems like a lot.

But for Meta it's actually nothing.

Meta makes tens of billions of dollars a year.

What's truly important isn't this six million.

What's truly important is that this verdict opened a door.

There are now over two thousand similar cases waiting.

Many parents also want to sue these companies.

Some people say this is like the "tobacco war" back in the day.

Decades ago, cigarette companies did the same thing.

They knew cigarettes were bad.

But they said: "It's fine, cigarettes are no problem."

Later the court said they were wrong.

Today's social media companies are doing the same thing.

Meta said they disagree with this verdict.

They said they will appeal.

Appealing means asking a higher court to look at it again.

Google also said they disagree.

Google said YouTube is not social media.

YouTube is just a website for watching videos.

But the court doesn't think so.

This story is very important.

Because right now billions of people around the world use social media.

Many children start using it from a very young age.

Before, everyone thought there was no problem with this.

Now more and more people are starting to think.

Are phones really good for children?

Are these apps really safe?

This case might change a lot of things.