The lawyer insisted to the six men and six women on the jury that he “just did not recognise” the description of YouTube put forth by plaintiffs’ lawyers.
This was in response to the lawyer for the plaintiff who accused YouTube and Meta of engineering addiction in young people’s brains in order to gain users and profits.
What YouTube is selling “is the ability to watch something essentially for free on your computer, on your phone, on your iPad,” Li insisted.
“More people watch YouTube on television than they do on their phones or their devices. More people watch YouTube than cable TV,” he said.
Li argued it was the quality of content that kept users coming back for more, citing internal company emails that allegedly showed a rejection of virality to the benefit of educational and more socially useful content.
The blockbuster case is being treated as a bellwether proceeding whose outcome could set the tone for a tidal wave of similar litigation across the United States.
Social media firms are accused in hundreds of lawsuits of leading young users to become addicted to content and suffer from depression, eating disorders, psychiatric hospitalisation and even suicide.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs are borrowing strategies used in the 1990s and 2000s against the tobacco industry, which faced a similar onslaught of lawsuits arguing that companies knowingly sold a harmful product.
