{"id":748,"date":"2026-07-05T19:12:49","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T19:12:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=748"},"modified":"2026-07-05T19:12:49","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T19:12:49","slug":"grim-new-details-from-the-life-of-the-plaintiff-in-social-medias-big-tobacco-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=748","title":{"rendered":"Grim New Details From the Life of the Plaintiff in Social Media\u2019s \u2018Big Tobacco\u2019 Case"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>The plaintiff in a landmark lawsuit against the major social media companies just revealed her identity to Bloomberg Business Week. Her full name and several magazine style photos are included in the article. (Her first name had been revealed months earlier.)<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=746\">GoDaddy Sounds Alarm Over How India Law Would Upend Internet Privacy Everywhere<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Personally,I\u2019m going to skip using her name. The details of her life as revealed in the Bloomberg profile left this reader unsettled.<\/p>\n<p>To be clear, social media \u201caddiction\u201d may be real (though there are good arguments that \u201caddiction\u201d is the wrong term), and at first blush, nothing about her account at trial comes across as disingenuous or false. She genuinely <i>sounds<\/i> like someone whose mental health was damaged by technology that has been allegedly wielded irresponsibly for profit.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>But this plaintiff herself stands to profit significantly from the legal payouts expected to come her way soon\u2014although two of the companies involved could still prevail in their appeals\u2014and she\u2019ll profit intangibly as gratitude and approbation flow in from supporters and other alleged victims believing themselves to have been harmed.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>With that in mind, the article paints a painful picture of a young person\u2019s life lived within the \u201cattention economy.\u201d It seems like common sense, then, to suggest that privacy was a wiser choice than exposing her name and face. At 20-years-old, she is, of course, well into adulthood, and free to become a public figure if she wants. For the moment, though, I\u2019d rather not help too much.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s what makes the whole case so disturbing:<\/p>\n<h2>The basic facts of the case are shocking at face value<\/h2>\n<p>K.G.M. sued YouTube parent Alphabet, Inc., TikTok\u2019s ByteDance, Snapchat\u2019s Snap, and the big kahuna, Meta, alleging they intentionally designed platforms to be addictive, despite (or perhaps because of) their alleged ability to worsen mental health issues. These issues include not just depression and anxiety, but\u2014importantly it turns out, in the case of K.G.M.\u2014body dysmorphia and self-harm.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Those who settled were Snap and ByteDance. Google and Metawent to court, but lost. A jury found them\u00a0<span>liable<\/span><span>,<\/span>\u00a0and ordered them to pay $6 million. Meta and Google have now appealed, though it hasn\u2019t gone well so far.<\/p>\n<p>So a jury has determined that powerful tech juggernauts harmed this person immensely. It\u2019s even uglier when you zoom in.<\/p>\n<h2>\u201cBy the time [K.G.M.] was 10, she had uploaded 200 videos to YouTube\u201d<\/h2>\n<p>Bloomberg Business Week says she actually started using YouTube when she was six, which would be roughly 2012. Back then, YouTube was less a part of the discourse around social media. If you\u2019re old enough to remember what the internet was like during the first Obama Administration, kids being on YouTube was seen as cute and quirky\u2014just kids being kids\u2014not alarming.<\/p>\n<p>But by the time she was ten, Bloomberg says she had uploaded 200 videos on her own. This was about 2016\u2014a time when social media addiction was already part of the national conversation, although at the time, it was mostly conservatives seeking to crack down on figures like Mark Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=744\">TP-Link Deco BE77 Review: Great Mesh Wi-Fi for the Eero-Weary<\/a><\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>K.G.M., the profile says, was a working class child of a fairly recent divorce when she started using YouTube, and was obsessed with her older sister who was careening toward an eating disorder. She was struggling in school.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s familiar, and so is the idea of coping with heavy use of YouTube. \u201cShe loved watching videos and soon taught herself how to film, edit and upload,\u201d the profile says. I have known people exactly like this, haven\u2019t you?<\/p>\n<h2>\u201cIn 2022, when [K.G.M.]was 16, she was spending as many as 16 hours a day on Instagram\u201d<\/h2>\n<p>From 2016 to 2022, it sounds like things got completely out of control, with K.G.M. largely switching, by the sound of it, from YouTube to Instagram, which she used up to 16 hours per day. I don\u2019t know how much you sleep, but if it\u2019s a healthy amount, 16 hours is\u2026 your whole day.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>K.G.M.\u2019s particular flavor of heavy Instagram use sounds, again,queasily familiar. Her posting style sounds like it leaned heavily toward selfies, and Bloomberg says in addition to posting on her main account, she had\u00a0\u201c15 different Instagram accounts so she could like and comment on her own posts.\u201d She modified her appearance significantly in photos and came to \u201chate\u201d her actual reflection. Most disturbing of all, Bloomberg says, at this point she started practicing self-harm.<\/p>\n<h2>She says \u201cWhen I look back on my life, this will be one of the things I am most proud of.\u201d<\/h2>\n<p>It certainly took bravery to get through this legal process, and succeeding is, without a doubt, an achievement. I might slightly push back on the idea that anything you do when you\u2019re 20 will be one of the things you\u2019re most proud of. It certainly might, but at 20, most of your life is still ahead of you, including plenty of adversity\u2014for most people anyway.<\/p>\n<h2>She says, \u201cEven now, even after the lawsuit, I\u2019m still addicted,\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m still scrolling my life away.\u201d<\/h2>\n<p>This quote is the ending of Bloomberg\u2019s piece, and it\u2019s devastating. The story says K.G.M. lives in her own two bedroom house, a few miles away from her mom, who pays her rent. In that house, she apparently spends most of her time in the dark, on her phone, scrolling.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Not to be all \u201cas a parent,\u201d but\u2026 <em>as a parent<\/em>\u00a0I\u2019m going to have nightmares about this part. This is a person who had enough awareness of what her behavior was doing to her that she took a long enough look at that behavior, figured out what she believed caused it, and went to court over it. A jury agreed, tacitly agreeing with her that scrolling one\u2019s \u201clife away\u201d is so grim that it merits recompense.<\/p>\n<p>The tragic tale of K.G.M. makes it feel like there\u2019s nothing in the world with more power over the emotions of young people than the apps on the ubiquitous devices with screens that our lives revolve around\u2014in fact, it feels like nothing else even comes close. Maybe you\u2019re reading this blog post on such a device because of one such app. Maybe K.G.M. is too. It\u2019s almost too bleak for words.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=742\">Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Runs on Sycophancy to Trump<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The anonymous social media addiction lawsuit plaintiff known as \u201cK.G.M.\u201d has stepped out of the shadows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":747,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-media"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Grim New Details From the Life of the Plaintiff in Social Media\u2019s \u2018Big Tobacco\u2019 Case - Long Haul Moving Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=748\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Grim New Details From the Life of the Plaintiff in Social Media\u2019s \u2018Big Tobacco\u2019 Case - 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