LOS ANGELES (AP) — Comparing social media platforms to casinos and addictive drugs, lawyer Mark Lanier delivered opening statements Monday in a landmark trial in Los Angeles that seeks to hold Instagram owner Meta and Google’s YouTube responsible for harms to children who use their products.

Instagram’s parent company Meta and Google’s YouTube face claims that their platforms addict children through deliberate design choices that keep kids glued to their screens. TikTok and Snap, which were originally named in the lawsuit, settled for undisclosed sums.

Jurors got their first glimpse into what will be a lengthy trial characterized by dueling narratives from the plaintiffs and the two remaining defendants.

Meta lawyer Paul Schmidt spoke of the disagreement within the scientific community over social media addiction, with some researchers believing it doesn’t exist, or that addiction is not the most appropriate way to describe heavy social media use.

Lawyers representing YouTube will begin their opening statement on Tuesday.

‘Addicting the brains of children’

Lanier, the plaintiff’s lawyer, delivered lively first remarks where he said the case will be as “easy as ABC” — which stands for “addicting the brains of children.” He said Meta and Google, “two of the richest corporations in history,” have “engineered addiction in children’s brains.”

He presented jurors with a slew of internal emails, documents and studies conducted by Meta and YouTube, as well as YouTube’s parent company, Google. He emphasized the findings of a study Meta conducted called “Project Myst” in which they surveyed 1,000 teens and their parents about their social media use. The two major findings, Lanier said, were that Meta knew children who experienced “adverse events” like trauma and stress were particularly vulnerable for addiction; and that parental supervision and controls made little impact.

He also highlighted internal Google documents that likened some company products to a casino, and internal communication between Meta employees in which one person said Instagram is “like a drug” and they are “basically pushers.”

At the core of the Los Angeles case is a 20-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose case could determine how thousands of other, similar lawsuits against social media companies will play out. She and two other plaintiffs have been selected for bellwether trials — essentially test cases for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury.

Plaintiff grew up using YouTube, Instagram

KGM made a brief appearance after a break during Lanier’s statement and she will return to testify later in the trial. Lanier spent time describing KGM’s childhood, focusing particularly on what her personality was like before she began using social media. She started using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9, Lanier said. Before she graduated elementary school, she had posted 284 videos on YouTube.

The outcome of the trial could have profound effects on the companies’ businesses and how they will handle children using their platforms.

Lanier said the companies’ lawyers will “try to blame the little girl and her parents for the trap they built,” referencing the plaintiff. She was a minor when she said she became addicted to social media, which she claims had a detrimental impact on her mental health.

Lanier said that despite the public position of Meta and YouTube being that they work to protect children, their internal documents show an entirely different position, with explicit references to young children being listed as their target audiences.

The attorney also drew comparisons between the social media companies and tobacco firms, citing internal communication between Meta employees who were concerned about the company’s lack of proactive action about the potential harm their platforms can have on children and teens.

“For a teenager, social validation is survival,” Lanier said. The defendants “engineered a feature that caters to a minor’s craving for social validation,” he added, speaking about “like” buttons and similar features.

Meta pushes back

In his opening statement representing Meta, Schmidt said the core question in the case is whether the platforms were a substantial factor in KGM’s mental health struggles. He spent much of his time going through the plaintiff’s health records, emphasizing that she had experienced many difficult circumstances in her childhood, including emotional abuse, body image issues and bullying.

Schmidt presented a clip from a video deposition from one of KGM‘s mental health providers, Dr. Thomas Suberman, who said social media was “not the through-line of what I recall being her main issues,” adding that her struggles seemed to largely stem from interpersonal conflicts and relationships. He painted a picture — with KGM’s own text messages and testimony pointing to a volatile home life — of a particularly troubled relationship with her mother.

Schmidt acknowledged that many mental health professionals do believe social media addiction can exist, but said three of KGM’s providers — all of whom believe in the form of addiction — have never diagnosed her with it, or treated her for it.

Schmidt emphasized to the jurors that the case is not about whether social media is a good thing or whether teens spend too much time on their phones or whether the jurors like or dislike Meta, but whether social media was a substantial factor in KGM’s mental health struggles.

A reckoning for social media and youth harms

A slew of trials beginning this year seek to hold social media companies responsible for harming children’s mental well-being. Executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are expected to testify at the Los Angeles trial, which will last six to eight weeks. Experts have drawn similarities to the Big Tobacco trials that led to a 1998 settlement requiring cigarette companies to pay billions in health care costs and restrict marketing targeting minors.

A separate trial in New Mexico, meanwhile, also kicked off with opening statements on Monday. In that trial, Meta is accused of failing to protect young users from sexual exploitation, following an undercover online investigation. Attorney General Raúl Torrez in late 2023 sued Meta and Zuckerberg, who was later dropped from the suit.

A federal bellwether trial beginning in June in Oakland, California, will be the first to represent school districts that have sued social media platforms over harms to children.

In addition, more than 40 state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against Meta, claiming it is harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms. The majority of cases filed their lawsuits in federal court, but some sued in their respective states.

TikTok also faces similar lawsuits in more than a dozen states.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Thursday that demands made by Democrats for new restrictions on federal immigration officers are “unrealistic” and warned that the Department of Homeland Security will shut down next week if they do not work with Republicans and the White House.

Democrats say they will not vote for a DHS spending bill when funding runs out unless there are “dramatic changes” at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal law enforcement agencies in the wake of the fatal shootings of two protesters in Minneapolis last month.

The Democratic leaders, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, released an expanded list of 10 detailed proposals on Wednesday night for restraining President Donald Trump’s aggressive campaign of immigration enforcement. Among the demands are a requirement for judicial warrants, better identification of DHS officers, new use of force standards and a stop to racial profiling.

Congress is trying to renegotiate the DHS spending bill after Trump last week agreed to a Democratic request that it be separated from a larger spending measure and extended at current levels for two weeks while the two parties negotiate. The deal came after ICU nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, and some Republicans agreed that new restrictions were necessary.

But with nearly a week gone, a shutdown is becoming increasingly likely starting Feb. 14 as Republicans have been cool to most of the Democrats’ requests.

“This is not a blank check situation where Republicans just do agree to a list of Democrat demands,” said Thune, R-S.D. “The only way to get reforms to ICE is to agree to a bill.”

As of now, Thune said, “we aren’t anywhere close to having any sort of an agreement.”

In addition to ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the homeland security bill includes funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Transportation Security Administration. If DHS shuts down, Thune said, “there’s a very good chance we could see more travel problems” similar to the 43-day government closure last year.

Democratic demands

Schumer, D-N.Y., said he is “astounded to hear” Republicans say his party’s proposals were political or unworkable.

“It’s about people’s basic rights, it’s about people’s safety,” Schumer said. If Republicans do not like the ideas, he said, “they need to explain why.”

Schumer and Jeffries, D-N.Y., have made several demands, including no masks for officers, judicial warrants and better federal coordination with local authorities. The list they released Wednesday added several new items, including a stricter use-of-force policy, legal safeguards at detention centers and a prohibition on tracking protesters with body-worn cameras.

Democrats say Congress should end indiscriminate arrests, “improve warrant procedures and standards,” ensure the law is clear that officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant and require that before a person can be detained, it’s verified that the person is not a U.S. citizen.

They also want an end to racial profiling, saying DHS officers should be prohibited from stopping, questioning or searching people “based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent or their race and ethnicity.”

For officers conducting immigration enforcement, Democrats say that in addition to officers taking off their masks and showing identification, DHS should regulate and standardize uniforms and equipment to bring them in line with other law enforcement agencies.

Republican pushback

Schumer called it a “gut check moment for Congress” as the immigration enforcement operations have rocked Minneapolis and other U.S. cities. But Republicans were dismissive.

Wyoming’s John Barrasso, the No. 2 Republican senator, said the demands are “radical and extreme” and a “far-left wish list.”

Sen. Katie Britt, who is helping lead negotiations, said the list is “a ridiculous Christmas list of demands” and warned that time is running out before the deadline.

“I encourage them to talk to the White House,” she said. “We only have one week left.”

Down to the last funding bill

Thune has also encouraged Democrats and the White House to talk. It is unclear whether they are or whether Democrats would be willing to back down on any of their demands.

Some Republicans have demands of their own, including adding legislation that would require proof of citizenship before Americans register to vote and restrictions on cities that they say do not do enough to crack down on illegal immigration.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said it is up to Republicans to ensure the government doesn’t shut down because they are in charge.

“The American people want this abuse to stop,” Murphy said.

Some look to limit shutdown pain

Other lawmakers are searching for options to prevent another partial shutdown.

One idea being floated is to essentially fund some of the other agencies within DHS -– the Coast Guard, airport operations under TSA and disaster assistance from FEMA.

“Why not take that off the table?” said Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, whose state is in need of FEMA funds from recent disasters.

“If it doesn’t look like they can get it done,” he said about the immigration enforcement overhaul. “I really think they should look at a la carte funding of agencies.”

Some Democrats have said they agree, but Thune said Thursday that splitting apart the DHS appropriations bill to single out ICE would “defund law enforcement.”

Splitting the bill would mean essentially cutting ICE loose by allowing it to go without its routine federal funding because the agency already has such a robust budget from Trump’s tax and spending cut bill from last year.

ICE is expected to receive about $10 billion in the annual appropriations bill, a fraction of the $175 billion-plus for homeland security for the administration’s mass deportation agenda.

ATLANTA (AP) — Officials in Georgia’s Fulton County said Wednesday they have asked a federal court to order the FBI to return ballots and other documents from the 2020 election that it seized last week, escalating a voting battle as President Donald Trump says he wants to “take over” elections from Democratic-run areas with the November midterms on the horizon.

The FBI had searched a warehouse near Atlanta where those records were stored, a move taken after Trump’s persistent demands for retribution over claims, without evidence, that fraud cost him victory in Georgia. Trump’s election comment came in an interview Monday with a conservative podcaster and the Republican president reaffirmed his position in Oval Office remarks the next day, citing f raud allegations that numerous audits, investigations and courts have debunked.

Officials in heavily Democratic Fulton County referenced those statements in announcing their legal action at a time of increasing anxiety over Trump’s plans for the fall elections that will determine control of Congress.

“This case is not only about Fulton County,” said the county chairman, Robb Pitts. “This is about elections across Georgia and across the nation.”

In a sign of that broader concern, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said this week that he once doubted Trump would intervene in the midterms but now “the notional idea that he will ask his loyalists to do something inappropriate, beyond the Constitution, scares the heck out of me.”

The White House has scoffed at such fears, noting that Trump did not intervene in the 2025 off-year elections despite some Democratic predictions he would. But the president’s party usually loses ground in midterm elections and Trump has already tried to tilt the fall races in his direction.

During an interview with NBC News that aired Wednesday, the president said he will trust Republican losses in the midterms “if the results are honest.” It’s a strategy Trump has regularly used ahead of elections, suggesting that a loss would only be due to some type of fraud.

Democratic election officials plan for interference in the midterms

Democratic state election officials have reacted to Trump’s statements, the seizure of the Georgia election materials and his aggressive deployment of federal officers into Democratic-leaning cities by planning for a wide range of possible scenarios this fall. That includes how they would respond if Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were stationed outside polling places.

They also have raised concerns about U.S. Department of Justice lawsuits, mostly targeting Democratic states, seeking detailed voter data that includes dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers. Secretaries of state have raised concerns that the administration is building a database it can use to potentially disenfranchise voters in future elections.

Trump and his allies have long fixated on Fulton County, Georgia’s most populous, since he narrowly lost the state to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. In the weeks after that election, Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, urged him to help “find” the 11,780 ballots that would enable Trump to be declared the Georgia winner of the state and raised the prospect of a “criminal offense” if the official failed to comply.

Raffensperger did not change the vote tally, and Biden won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes. Days later, rioters swarmed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and tried to prevent the official certification of Biden’s victory. When Trump returned to the presidency in January 2025, he pardoned more than 1,000 charged in that siege.

“The president himself and his allies, they refuse to accept the fact that they lost,” Pitts said. “And even if he had won Georgia, he would still have lost the presidency.”

Pitts defended the county’s election practices and said Fulton has conducted 17 elections since 2020 without any issues.

‘The results will be the same,’ says Georgia election official

A warrant cover sheet provided to the county includes a list of items that the agents were seeking related to the 2020 general election: all ballots, tabulator tapes from the scanners that tally the votes, electronic ballot images created when the ballots were counted and then recounted, and all voter rolls.

The FBI drove away with hundreds of boxes of ballots and other documents. County officials say they were not told why the federal government wanted the documents.

The county is also asking the court to unseal the sworn statement from a law enforcement agent that was presented to the judge who approved the search warrant.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the county’s motion.

“What they’re doing with the ballots that they have now, we don’t know, but if they’re counted fairly and honestly, the results will be the same,” Pitts said.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, was at the Fulton search last week, and Democrats in Congress have questioned the propriety of her presence because the search was a law enforcement, not intelligence, action.

In a letter to top Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence committees Monday, Gabbard said Trump asked her to be there “under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security.”

During the NBC News interview, Trump said he didn’t know why Gabbard was in Fulton County, but suggested without providing evidence that other countries were meddling in elections: “A lot of the cheating, it’s international cheating.”

Trump pushes for federal control of elections

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the president’s “take over” remarks, which included a vague reference to “15 places” that should be targeted, were a reference to the SAVE Act, legislation that would tighten proof of citizenship requirements. Republicans want to bring it up for a vote in Congress.

But in his remarks that day, Trump did not cite the proposal. Instead, he claimed that Democratic-controlled places such as Atlanta, which falls mainly in Fulton County, have “horrible corruption on elections. And the federal government should not allow that.”

The Constitution vests states with the ability to administer elections. Congress can add rules for federal races. One of Trump’s earliest second-term actions was an executive order that tried to rewrite voting rules nationwide. Judges have largely blocked it because it violates the Constitution.

Trump contended that states were “agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said Wednesday said he supported the SAVE Act but not Trump’s desire for a federal takeover. “Nationalizing elections and picking 15 states seems a little off strategy,” Tillis told reporters.