LOS ANGELES—They have come from Colorado, New York state, Louisiana, and Indiana. Some days, they arrive at 4 a.m. or camp out in the rain to get a place in the courtroom. They sit in the gallery, watching the spectacle unfold while replaying the tragedy that brought them here.

For parents who have lost a child to what they say are the engineered harms of social media, a landmark jury trial that began on Feb. 9 in Los Angeles has been a roller coaster of emotion and a chance at validation, years in the making.

“You can’t sit there and not think about how your child died,” said Lori Schott, a Colorado mother who lost her 18-year-old daughter, Annalee, to suicide in 2020. “And you’re facing some of the biggest companies in the world.”

Schott has cited compulsive use of both Instagram and TikTok as a catalyst for Annalee’s spiral.

“I lost my daughter to the addiction, mental health, and algorithmic push,” she told The Epoch Times.

The current case in Los Angeles Superior Court centers on a 20-year-old California woman, identified as “K.G.M.” in court documents, who says she became addicted to social media as a child and suffered resulting harms, including depression, anxiety, and body dysmorphia.

The broader claim is that major social media companies—YouTube and its parent company Google, Instagram and parent company Meta, Snapchat and parent company Snap Inc., and TikTok and its parent company ByteDance—design products that hook young people and keep them enthralled in a cycle of addiction and mental illness.

Considered a bellwether, the trial is the first of its kind, bound to affect how thousands of related, consolidated cases play out.

For grieving parents involved in similar cases, it is their first chance to see how some of the country’s most powerful people will answer, under oath, allegations that they engineered platforms to drive compulsive use among children despite known harms.

Watching Instagram head Adam Mosseri testify this past week was difficult for Schott.

“When they started with the emails showing that they knew about the [harms] of beauty filters, I could see Anna’s journal, what she wrote about,“ Schott said, referring to internal Meta documents disclosed in the trial. ”I sat and played it out in my head.”

Thousands of pages of such documents, some leaked by whistleblowers, have been unsealed in the trial.

“[Meta CEO Mark] Zuckerberg knew about it, but he wanted to drive revenue,“ Schott said. ”Internal employees told them. The hardest part is they could have stopped it.

“So now we’re here saying, ‘Look at us, see what you did to these families.'”

Attorneys for defendants Google and YouTube have suggested that plaintiffs are misconstruing internal business documents, including those from third parties. In the first week of the trial, they pushed back on claims that their products are harming young people.

TikTok and Snapchat settled days before K.G.M.’s case went to trial, but they are still named in related cases.

‘Problematic Use’

Luis Li, an attorney for YouTube, questioned in opening statements whether the app was in fact social media, while Instagram’s Mosseri said he did not believe that there was such a thing as an Instagram addiction, describing “problematic use” as engaging with the app “more than you feel good about.”

Joann Bogard, who lost her 15-year-old son, Mason, in 2019 after he participated in a viral “choking challenge” on YouTube, disagreed.

“They can call it whatever they want,“ Bogard told The Epoch Times. ”They can say it’s not social media. But the bottom line is, it’s a product that’s addictive, purposefully designed that way, and that’s what we’re here to change.”

Joann Bogard holds a photo of herself with son Mason at Los Angeles Superior Court on Feb. 5, 2026. Mason died at the age of 15 in 2019 after trying a viral "choking challenge" on YouTube. (Courtesy of Joann Bogard)

Attorneys for Google and Meta both argue that safety features have long been in place to allow parents to monitor and control their children’s use.

“Tap, tap, tap,” said an attorney for Google this past week, showing the court how easy it is to turn off allegedly addictive features such as “AutoPlay” or “infinite scroll,” which feed users a limitless stream of content.

Some features—including YouTube’s “Shorts,” a vertical video format of quick clips that experts say drive dopamine response and addiction—can be reduced but not eliminated entirely.

The companies’ attorneys have also suggested that it was not the platforms that negatively affected K.G.M.’s mental health, but a lack of parental supervision and a troubled family life.

A study by Meta conducted in partnership with the University of Chicago and disclosed during the trial found little association between parental supervision and teens’ compulsive use. It also found that vulnerable teens were most at risk for problematic use.

“I had all of the settings—I had the watchdog apps, I checked his devices,” Bogard said. “I did everything the experts told me to do.”

‘Just a Great Kid’

“He loved entertaining us with his witty humor,” she said. “He was just a great kid, went to a good school, had good friends.”

He would go on YouTube to watch videos on how to make a better fishing lure or master his woodworking skills, she said.

“Then in 2019, the algorithm fed him the choking challenge, unsolicited,” Bogard said.

For Mary Rodee, who lost her 15-year-old son, Riley, to suicide in 2021 after he was targeted in a sextortion scheme on Facebook, there were never any warning signs, no mounting mental health crisis, she said.

A perpetrator in the Ivory Coast posing as a beautiful young girl enticed Riley to send a compromising photo, and then threatened to share it with his friends and family unless he sent money.

“It was [during] COVID, I thought somebody was going to get him on Fortnite,“ Rodee told The Epoch Times. ”I was going to his room all the time, putting on the headphones. I never thought it would be an app where I set his correct age.”

Since Riley’s death, she said, there have been 38 sextortion suicides of which she is aware—all of them boys.

On Feb. 17, after the judge called an early recess, parents stood in a circle on the steps outside the courthouse. Under a light rain, they prayed together and wept.

Although many can sympathize, Bogard said, parents who have lost a child under such circumstances share a particular empathy that “fills a room with energy.”

“When we’re together, it allows us to laugh without feeling guilty, to talk about our kids openly, and no one shies away, no one feels uncomfortable,“ she said. ”We are a community.”

Despite the emotional ups and downs, Rodee said, she felt fortunate to be there.

“I believe it’s a gift to be able to keep talking about our children,“ she said. ”It’s so much more than some parents get in their grief.”

She said she hopes that the outcome of the trial tips the “financial scales” and makes companies realize that it will be cheaper to fix the problem than to continue litigating it.

The parents said they hoped for a chance to watch Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg take the stand on Feb. 18.

“I just hope for the truth ... just him and the attorneys and the judge and the jury,” Schott said.

Justice comes in many forms, according to Schott.

“Court doors opening, educating parents, building awareness,“ she said. ”They didn’t have to listen to us; now they do. That’s a win.”