BERLIN — There is a moment in every identity crisis when the subject stops denying what they are and begins denying what the word means. The technology industry reached that moment in a Los Angeles courtroom.

"It's not social media addiction when it's not social media and it's not an addiction," Google's lawyer told the jury during opening statements in the landmark trial that would end with a verdict against both YouTube and Meta. [1] The statement was not a slip. It was the defense strategy.

YouTube, the lawyer argued, is a video platform — a streaming service, not social media. [2] It does not have the friend networks, the status updates, the social graphs that define the category. Users watch videos. They do not socialize. The fact that YouTube has comments, likes, subscriptions, notifications, an algorithmic feed designed to maximize engagement, and a recommendation engine that learns a user's vulnerabilities — none of this, in Google's legal framing, makes it social media.

Meta took a different route to the same destination. Rather than denying the category, it denied the causation. The plaintiff — identified as K.G.M. — had a difficult childhood. Her mental health challenges, Meta argued, preceded her use of Instagram and Facebook. The platforms did not cause her depression and anxiety. They were merely present while other factors did. [3]

The jury was unpersuaded. On March 25, after weeks of testimony, a California jury found both Meta and YouTube negligent, awarding K.G.M. $3 million in damages. [4] The verdict was the first of its kind — a jury determination that specific design features of these platforms were engineered to addict and that the addiction caused measurable harm.

What makes this trial philosophically significant is not the verdict but the defense. The companies that invented the architecture of social media — the infinite scroll, the variable-ratio reward schedule, the engagement-optimized feed — stood in court and denied that what they built was social media at all.

Courthouse News captured the broader absurdity: YouTube, which has over two billion monthly active users who upload, comment on, share, and discuss video content, claimed in sworn testimony that it is "not social media." [1] The argument requires accepting a definition of social media so narrow that it excludes every platform except the ones currently being sued.

Snap settled before trial, as did TikTok. Neither had to make the argument in open court, but their pre-trial filings followed similar logic — their products are communication tools, creative platforms, or entertainment services, but not social media in the legally actionable sense. [5]

This is not merely legal strategy. It is a category collapse with regulatory consequences. If YouTube is not social media, it may not fall under proposed social media regulations. If Meta's platforms cause harm only in the presence of pre-existing conditions, the platform bears no design liability. The "not social media" defense, if it had worked, would have immunized the industry against an entire class of accountability claims.

It did not work. But the argument has been made, and it will be made again. The next trials are already scheduled. The companies that built social media have decided that the best defense is to pretend they built something else.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin