16 hours on social media is an ‘addiction’

A young woman in the US stood up in court and said she spent 16 hours a day on Instagram. It’s a hefty figure, yet a closer look at the platform’s own research into algorithmic design, and how routinely it is used, shows it sits less at the margins than one might assume.

KGM, a 20-year-old whose identity remains protected, joined Youtube at eight, Instagram at nine, and by the time she brought her case to Meta and Google, she was describing a childhood that, in her own words, social media had hollowed out.

On 25th March, a LA jury ultimately agreed that the platforms bore meaningful responsibility. Meta was found 70 per cent liable, Youtube 30 per cent.

The combined damages of $6m may seem like a rounding error for tech titans that, between them, generate hundreds of billions in annual revenue, but a verdict whose implications stretch far further than the cheque.

The case, the first of what legal experts have expected to become a deluge, rested on how platforms were designed.

KGM’s lawyers framed Instagram and Youtube as “digital casinos”: built with deliberate intent, made to make leaving them feel impossible.

“It’s not the content that we have a problem with”, said Princess Uchekwe, corporate attorney and founder of the Chief Counsel. “It’s the fact that when people use your platform, you have implemented certain features that make it almost impossible for people to leave”.

The case prompts the question: where exactly does the line fall between KGM and the rest of us?

In the spirit of self-examination, we asked our City AM colleagues to share their weekly screen times on various social media platforms.

The results, as anticipated, were not an easy read. One colleague logged 10 hours and 39 minutes on TikTok a day on average, another 9 hours and 31 minutes. Another clocked six hours and 51 minutes on Instagram.

Of the eight people asked, a third spent more than three hours on Instagram, on top of nearly three hours on Meta-owned WhatsApp.

Those numbers fall comfortably within the national average, with British adults reportedly spending around three hours on social media daily, according to the University of California, Davis.

Across the pond, the American teenager averages five hours, according to analytics firm Gallup. At least four of our colleagues are keeping pace with them.

What this means for your brain

Anna Lembke, director of addiction medicine at Stanford University and author of Dopamine Nation, has described the smartphone as “the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine for a wired generation”.

When a notification lands in the form of a like, mention, or follower, the brain’s reward circuitry fires in patterns neuroscientists have compared to those triggered by cocaine.

Harvard University research has found that self-disclosure on social platforms activates the same neural regions as addictive substances.

So the scroll is less mindless than we may think; it is, in a very literal sense, a dopamine delivery mechanism that never runs out.

What makes social media particularly pernicious, Lembke adds, is that it has “druggified” something we are evolutionarily wired to crave: human connection.

Our brains release dopamine when we make social bonds because, for millions of years, those bonds kept us alive.

The platforms have simply learned to exploit that wiring at an industrial scale, amplifying the feel-good properties of social interaction while stripping away everything that made it good for us.

The result, she writes, is a chronic dopamine-deficit state, where social media feels good when you use it, and has the opposite effect the moment you stop.

Whether that experience rises to the clinical threshold of addiction is a more contested question.

Social media addiction does not yet appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of American psychiatry, and Meta and Youtube’s defence teams were quick to lean on that gap.

However, Carl Erik Fisher, addiction psychiatrist and author of ‘The Urge: Our History of Addiction’, argues: “We kind of get stuck into a binary view, which is both misleading and harmful, where we say, oh, you’re either addicted or you’re perfectly normal. In 2026, nobody feels normal about the internet”.

Fisher dubs addiction as a latent human capacity, activated under particular conditions, and present to varying degrees in all of us.

Under that framework, the clinical question is not whether you are addicted, but how far along the dial you sit.

As it stands, between five and 10 per cent of Americans are estimated to meet the criteria for social media addiction, according to California State University, which is up to 34m people.

Globally, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has recorded teen addiction rates rising from seven to 11 per cent in just four years.

Teens who use social platforms for more than three hours a day face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms, according to research published in JAMA Psychiatry.

And, among teen girls who already felt bad about their bodies before logging on, almost a third reported that Instagram made things worse, which is a finding from Meta’s own internal studies, which the company chose not to publish.

Over the course of the Los Angeles trial, internal Meta communications were placed before the jury that painted a rather different picture from the one the company has long presented publicly.

One email showed Meta employees raising concerns about the harm a beauty filter the company had developed posed to teenage girls.

Elsewhere, documents revealed that the company knew children well under the minimum sign-up age of 13 were using its platforms in significant numbers.

And, a separate internal note, attributed to a senior metadata scientist and surfaced in research by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues at NYU Stern, acknowledged the mechanism plainly: “Intermittent rewards are most effective, think slot machines, reinforcing behaviours that become especially hard to extinguish, even when they provide little reward, or cease providing reward at all.”

Chief executive and tech titan Mark Zuckerberg told the US Senate under oath in 2024 that the existing body of scientific work showed no causal link between social media use and worsening youth mental health.

The NYU Stern team has since catalogued 35 internal Meta studies, many of them surfaced through litigation, which tell a considerably more ambivalent story.

Among their findings was the fact that 3.1 per cent of all Facebook users met Meta’s own threshold for “severe problematic use”, a figure Zuckerberg himself acknowledged in internal correspondence.

The researchers note that Meta’s defence has typically rested on a “net positive” framing, the idea that if more teens report benefits than harms, the product is broadly good.

The NYU team describes this as misleading. The relevant public health question, they argue, is not whether benefits exist, but whether serious or predictable harms occur at scale. By that measure, the internal research suggests they do.

Joseph McNally, former federal prosecutor and director of emerging torts at McNicholas and McNicholas, who has followed the case closely, argued: “They looked the other way because, the plaintiffs argued, they had a long-term benefit, long-term value of hooking those users early. The emails painted a picture of a company whose own employees were raising concerns about features in the product.”

Beyond the trial

Beyond Meta’s trial in the US, the EU Commission found, a month before the LA verdict, that TikTok’s addictive design features were in preliminary breach of the Digital Services Act.

Elsewhere, Brazil has already moved to ban infinite scroll. Australia has introduced age restrictions for under-16s.

But closer to home, the UK’s Online Safety Act has historically focused on harmful content rather than the design of platforms themselves.

Product liability law in Britain does not currently extend to software. However, City AM understands that this may be under review.

In the meantime, Meta is expected to appeal, as while the $6m award may be pocket change, the precedent is not.

There are already 2,465 similar lawsuits pending in American courts, with school districts and state attorneys general among the plaintiffs.

A loss on appeal, Uchekwe says, could be “almost devastating” for the tech industry because of the structural changes that might be required, such as redesigning the very features that make these platforms profitable in the first place.

None of that changes much of what our screen times reveal; the average teenager spends five hours a day on social media, and several adults in City AM’s newsroom were not far behind.

And while the California case presented an extreme example, the distance between exceptional use and everyday use only seems to narrow under scrutiny.