Is Social Media Liable for Teen Mental Health? A Bellwether Trial Begins
WSJ Opinion: Potomac Watch
The Wall Street Journal
4.2 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Isn't home where we all want to be? |
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| 0:23.5 | August 2025 proprietary survey. Over 500,000 new listings every month based on average new for sale and |
| 0:27.6 | rental listings, July 24 to June 2025. From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. |
| 0:40.4 | A bellwether trial begins in California as a wave of personal injury lawsuits seek to hold social media companies liable |
| 0:46.0 | for teen psychological problems and other harms. Meanwhile, Australia says its new law to bar social |
| 0:52.5 | media for children under 16 has led |
| 0:55.2 | the deactivation of nearly 5 million accounts, while other countries in U.S. states consider |
| 1:00.9 | implementing their own restrictions. Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with the Wall Street Journal. |
| 1:06.2 | We're joined today by my colleagues on the journal's opinion pages, columnist Alicia Finley and Kim Strassel. |
| 1:13.7 | With thousands of lawsuits on the docket against social media companies, the trial now beginning |
| 1:18.7 | in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County is being viewed as a landmark that could set the tone for the rest. |
| 1:25.4 | The case involves a young woman known as KGM, now 19 or 20 years old, |
| 1:29.7 | who blames app usage for her spiral into depression, anxiety, issues over body image. The complaint |
| 1:36.8 | says this, the more KGM accessed defendants products, the worse her mental health became. |
| 1:43.1 | Alicia, start with these mental health |
| 1:44.5 | claims by KGM. Is there a consensus that social media is harmful in general to teens? And then also, |
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