How tech companies are establishing addiction as a business model

San Francisco, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Brüssel. Gabriella Cusato was a teenager full of energy, an excellent runner and a warm-hearted person. But the US-American's life changed dramatically when she got a smartphone in seventh grade and opened several Instagram accounts - one officially, many others secretly.

Eating disorders set in and her parents sent her to therapy. But the problems didn't stop. Because her mother took her phone away after an argument in November 2019, Cusato disappeared into her room. But her parents couldn't find her there the next morning. It was only after some searching that they came across a gruesome scene in the wardrobe: Gabriella, then 15, had hanged herself there. "I will never forget my husband's screams," says Karen Cusato, her mother.

These details can be found in the obituary and in media reports - and in court documents that have been published about the Cusato family's case in the US state of New York. The family is suing Instagram parent company Meta, along with 1,800 other families in the USA. The parents are convinced that the algorithms have increasingly driven the teenager "down a rabbit hole", fuelling her with content about slimming, beauty and eating disorders, says lawyer Jessica Carroll from the Motley Rice law firm in South Carolina, which is representing the families, among others.

And the conviction of the parents and their lawyers is gradually gaining ground in the USA. Last week, juries at two federal courts in California and New Mexico sentenced Meta and Google to high compensation payments in lawsuits involving similar allegations, in New Mexico alone to 375 million dollars. However, the Californian case in Los Angeles is more interesting. It is known as the bellwether trial - a test case that is linked to around 2,000 other pending lawsuits in which parents and school districts are suing the platforms.

Meta and Google intend to lodge an appeal, as they announced when asked by Handelsblatt. "We do not agree with the judgement," said a Google spokesperson. A Meta spokesperson said that the prosecution had used "selected quotes from Meta's internal documents in order to achieve a misleading representation".