The Dark Truth Behind the Los Angeles Social Media Addiction Trial

It’s not just “features” that addict kids but an entire secret science

Photo: Antonio Guillem/Shutterstock

A recent landmark Los Angeles court case found Facebook’s and Instagram’s owner Meta guilty of using addictive “features”—including infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations—that caused a young woman serious mental health problems during her childhood. While individual design features do pose risks to kids, the trial did not center on a much darker truth: social media corporations are using an entire clandestine science to addict kids. A science in which hundreds of features are designed to interact with one another simultaneously to form a powerfully addictive product. This is the science of persuasive design in which digital devices and apps are developed to employ psychology to control humans.

I believe that parents and others who care for kids need to know it is the use of persuasive design—not a few features—that makes social media addictive and dangerous for kids. I have devoted my career as a child and adolescent psychologist to exposing Silicon Valley’s hidden use of persuasive design and how it is devastating kids’ health and success. In 2018, I wrote the first major media article on the hurtful impact of the tech industry’s use of persuasive design on kids. And, in 2025, I authored my book Better Than Real Life revealing how Big Tech’s use of persuasive design is robbing kids of the real-world lives essential to their health.

In this article, I pull back the curtain on the essentially unknown science of persuasive design to show how it is being used by industry to addict kids to devices.

“Machines Designed to Change Humans”

Persuasive design was fathered by psychologist and adjunct professor Dr. B.J. Fogg at Stanford University in the 1990s. In 1998, Fogg founded the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab with the website tagline that perhaps best captures the science’s purpose: “Machines Designed to Change Humans.” Today, the science is used ethically in the development of websites and other technologies to make them work better for users. However, persuasive design has the potential to be used unethically, something that was recognized early on in its development.

“Either ‘This is dangerous. It’s like giving people the tools to construct an atomic bomb’; or ‘This is amazing. It could be worth billions of dollars.’”—Economist writer Ian Leslie

As Fogg unveiled his science of persuasive design at a 1997 Atlanta tech conference, his talk triggered a strong reaction from the audience. According to Economist writer Ian Leslie, this reaction fell into two groups: “Either ‘This is dangerous. It’s like giving people the tools to construct an atomic bomb’; or ‘This is amazing. It could be worth billions of dollars.’” Both were right. Persuasive design has gone on to be a colossal profit engine for the consumer tech industry; at the same time, the science has created technologies that pose the risk of addiction and harm—especially to a generation of children and teens.

Hacking Kids’ DNA

Fogg’s science of persuasive design, as used by social media companies, gains its power by hacking our brains which evolved for four million years to succeed in a Stone Age environment but that are a poor fit for the modern world. Fogg explains how social media companies can use his “Fogg Behavior Model,” which has the deceivingly simple formula for behavior change of: B = M A T. “B” represents the target behavior that a company desires from users, which for social media corporations is to increase “time on device.” To achieve the target behavior, three factors are put into place simultaneously: motivation (M), ability (A), and triggers (T).

“M” Is for Motivation

Beginning with the first factor in Fogg’s model, motivation (M), the Stanford psychologist describes how social media companies can use a key element of motivation, the human instinct for social connection, to manipulate their users’ behavior. As he does so, Fogg makes it clear that this takes advantage of vulnerabilities in our ancient DNA. He says, “The power of social motivation is likely hardwired into us and perhaps all other creatures that historically depended on living in groups to survive… the power over us is undeniable.”

Social media companies supercharge Fogg’s motivation factor by quantifying peer connections in the form of “likes,” friends, followers, and other markers of social bonds. Social media corporations then gamify this social environment by putting these markers on conspicuous display, encouraging social comparison and turning it into a contest of kids’ social value. These faux measures of social worth are then delivered to kids like a slot machine as they swipe through their platforms.

Remarkably, Fogg says an even more powerful motivator than social connection is the instinct “to avoid being socially rejected.” As he explains, “Being banished from a community was a severe punishment for humans. For other creatures, being ostracized from a pack may have meant certain death.” Social media companies exploit this painful instinct by fostering the fear of missing out, or FOMO, as kids are sent a steady feed of peers having a great time without them. As Fogg makes clear, “Today, with social technologies [i.e., social media] a reality, the methods for motivating people through social acceptance or social rejection have blossomed.”

“A” Is for Ability (or Simplicity)

Yet motivation (M) is just 1 of 3 factors used in Fogg’s behavior change formula employed by social media companies. The second factor is ability (A). Contrary to the common meaning for “ability,” this is actually about making technologies require little effort or thought. This is so that users don’t have to, as Fogg says, “think hard.” So he also refers to this factor as “simplicity.”

The persuasive design factor of ability takes advantage of an adaptive trait formed over millions of years in times of scarcity for humans to take the least demanding path. Why risk life and limb trying to hunt down one antelope when you can run a small herd off a cliff (and still have energy for the next task)? As Fogg explains, “In real-world design, increasing ability is not about teaching people to do new things or training them for improvement. People are generally resistant to teaching and training because it requires effort. This clashes with the natural wiring of human adults: We are fundamentally lazy.”

Translating this into practice, Fogg writes: “If a task seems simple to us—like clicking the mouse once or twice—we are likely to do the task right away. When tasks are complex or have multiple steps, we are more likely to avoid the task or procrastinate.” That’s why all it takes to “like” one more photo is the impulsive tap of a finger. The result is that Fogg’s behavior change formula ensures that kids don’t have to do the hard work of real social engagement… they just stare at their phones clicking away.

“T” Is for Triggers

So far, based on Fogg’s persuasive design formula, social media corporations create products that feed primal forms of motivation and require little ability. Enter the third and final factor in Fogg’s behavior change formula: triggers (T). As Fogg tells us, triggers “can cause us to act on impulse.” Silicon Valley’s use of triggers includes interrupting sound and visual notifications telling users to check social media over and over, until users develop their own internal triggers, or habit.

Throughout millions of years of our evolution, it was absolutely critical for our hunter-gatherer ancestors to focus on interrupting triggers, such as the noise in the bushes that signaled it was time to fight or run away from a predator. Today, Silicon Valley exploits this instinct with incessant distracting notifications. It’s not by happenstance that many notifications are presented visually in red, which is a color that since the beginning of time has signaled danger (e.g., blood).

With each factor in Fogg’s formula—motivation, ability, and triggers—we see how it targets the vulnerabilities in children’s Stone Age DNA to pull them away from the real world into the social media domain. Yet Fogg tells us that the real power of his behavior change formula is that the factors are applied together: users are continually triggered (T) to indulge in easy (A) rewards (M).

Fogg’s model is only the beginning: the foundation on which Silicon Valley invents thousands of techniques. As Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever explain in their book Your Happiness Was Hacked, “Fogg has had a disproportionate influence on Silicon Valley founders and on the ongoing quest of so many technology companies to design products that exploit the hardwired weaknesses of our slowly evolving brains.”

The power of persuasive design is now multiplied as social media companies use rooms full of brain scientists to feed data into AI-driven supercomputers. Hundreds of individual elements of Fogg’s factors—motivation, ability, and triggers—are tweaked in real time to ensure maximal addictive potential. Kids’ developing brains make them far more vulnerable to persuasive design than adults.

Meta Knows Its Products Hurt Kids

Meta is stocked with world-leading brain scientists turning persuasive design on kids. So it’s not surprising that its employees are aware that their products are addictive and hurt kids, as revealed in internal documents unsealed during court cases:

• “No one wakes up thinking they want to maximize the number of times they open Instagram that day. But that’s exactly what our product teams are trying to do.”—Max Eulenstein, VP of Product at Instagram

• “Teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to”—Meta internal study

• “Oh my gosh yall IG [Instagram] is a drug… We’re basically pushers.”—Meta internal chat message

Weaponizing Persuasive Design to Steal Childhood

Fogg provides mixed messages on his science being used by tech corporations to control kids’ behavior. On one hand, Fogg bragged that his methods are used in social media popular with kids, noting, “Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people. The co-founder was a student of mine.” However, Fogg made it clear that persuasive design should not be used to unfairly manipulate kids, explaining: “Persuasive technology products can be designed to target vulnerable populations, people who are inordinately susceptible to influence. When they exploit vulnerable groups, the products are unethical. The most obvious vulnerable group is children.” But that is exactly what the social media industry is doing to kids today.

What makes social media different than TV or other types of media is that it is scientifically and experimentally developed by brain scientists to be addictive. Fogg describes this process. He outlines how a “research team” does “pilot testing” using “independent and dependent variables.” Following these steps “is the starting point for a controlled experiment . . . from a scientific standpoint.”

The result is a product that is predictably dangerous for kids. In spite of industry claims that social media is a place for kids to connect, Fogg’s science helps turn social media into a digital Skinner Box, or behavioral conditioning chamber, to hook users. To deliberately use persuasive design to pull kids onto social media sites robs them of real-world experiences essential to their physical and mental health. This is why research leaders—including Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt—demonstrate that kids’ social media use is driving epidemic rates of depression, suicidality, and self-injury. This is true especially in girls who use social media much more than boys.

Addictive at its Core

Knowledge that the child-exploitive science of persuasive design is at the core of the social media business model should guide decisions about whether kids should use social media and at what age. This is a science that is purpose-built to hack kids’ brains to convince them that engaging with social media is better than running and playing, better than engaging with school, better than spending time with family. This is the essence of addiction. This science—if left unchecked—is capable of destroying childhood.