Big Tech Exploiting Youth Vulnerability

The Innocent Victims of the Dopamine Economy

How corporations use children’s developmental vulnerabilities to create life-long consumers.

Gauri Sood

July 7, 2025

A Neanderthal returns from his hunt to express an unspoken pitch. He tosses the catch at the feet of his family, then grunts with pride, raising it to the firelight, and then gesturing toward its size. From these moments, a primitive form of marketing was born, composed of early humans exchanging goods and favors. In those kin-based communities, the “consumer” was intimate and familiar, and the stakes were survival, reputation, and belonging.

But by the 1920s, the stake of appeasing a population increased, as rapid industrialization raised the sheer amount of public consumption of corporation-produced goods. An increase in “consumer-oriented businesses,” or corporations targeting their products for specific populations, was the side effect of this booming, innovative economy. Corporations now no longer knew their customers personally, but still needed to persuade them.

Advertising Across the Decades

Corporations began investing their resources to intimately get to know their audiences, and advertising skyrocketed. To do so, they moved beyond simply matching their consumer preferences, and started trying to actively shape them. Advertising progressed rapidly from a tool that reflected the people’s desires, to an instrument that influenced and changed them.

Corporations hired psychologists and other experts in an eager hope to better understand the behavioral mechanisms of their consumer base. When companies began this behavior-focused marketing race, obtaining and keeping their users’ attention became of utmost importance, and marketing became more about manufacturing the user’s demand instead of solely meeting it.

In the 1920s and 1930s, General Motors (GM) overshadowed Ford’s dominance within the American car manufacturing industry. This automobile takeover by GM, led by Alfred Sloan at the time, was a clear example of the sharp increase in targeted advertising. During the Great Depression, the consumer base for cars was significantly poorer. GM recognized and capitalized on that knowledge by allowing consumers to utilize car financing and by shifting its production to Chevrolet, a high-volume affordable brand.

As neuroscience and psychology research into dopamine and its connection to pleasure grew, the marketing industry shifted forever, now tailored to not only our behavioral mechanisms but also our neural processes.

The end goal for the corporation was, as always, profit maximization. And by building a base of loyal consumers, GM established the promise of lifetime customers, rather than one-off sales, guaranteeing decades of profits.

Fast-forward 100 years to today’s economic landscape, where advertising finds its consumer-targeted success in neuroscience, a field intertwined with parts of psychology. “Anticipation is marketing gold — and dopamine is the currency that leads to a richer bottom line,” writes a columnist at MarTech, a digital publication on marketing technology. As neuroscience and psychology research into dopamine and its connection to pleasure grew, the marketing industry shifted forever, now tailored to not only our behavioral mechanisms but also our neural processes.

The Function of Dopamine

The rush of dopamine is a familiar feeling; a normal surge of pleasure, joy, perhaps intense excitement. You might anticipate meeting someone; look forward to exciting weekend plans; or are surprised by a promotion you didn’t think you would get. These moments of unexpected reward stem from this neurotransmitter, one of the few that powers the positive emotions emulating from our brains.

Dopamine does more than drive our happiness. It’s the backbone of our reinforcing behaviors. And the slope between reinforcement and addiction is a slippery one. As discovered and researched by Dr. Roy Wise, now a Senior Investigator at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, dopamine plays a central role in anticipation and motivation to seek rewards. This dopaminergic-driven motivation is the root of all addictive behaviors, including gambling, substance abuse, tobacco consumption, and most recently, technology use. The brain’s all-encompassing focus on the anticipation of drugs, or other rewards, is a “hijacked brain,” taken by the motivating drive for more and more and more.

Social Media, Variable Rewards, and Addiction

Social media has now been scientifically proven to engage the same dopaminergic circuitries as cocaine, though one is a criminalized substance, and the other flows freely. Surely, for social media companies to understand the presence of this neurotransmitter and its related processes is not enough to hook a user. And indeed, technology giants like Meta and others have moved past a thorough understanding of what kinds of mechanisms can grab adolescent consumers, and into what will keep them addicted.

Social media platforms share a technique with slot machines — the mechanism of variable rewards. These are uniquely unpredictable, which creates a sense of anticipation within the user. Indeed, companies manufacture intermittent rewards by waiting to send through a user’s notifications at all before releasing several at one time. This increases the strength of the reward, fueling the consumer’s dopaminergic reinforcement system.

By refraining from releasing all of the user’s reward all at once — the likes, comments, and views — the unassuming consumer remains eagerly waiting, frequently checking their phone, repetitively reactivating the same networks that light up when they pick up their device. Meanwhile, subtler mechanisms, such as endless scrolling opportunities, auto-play on Netflix and YouTube, and the ability to “tag” friends on platforms work to increase constant engagement and simultaneously decrease the ease of exiting an app.

Recent statistics show that these tactics are working. Over 33 million Americans, or roughly 10% of the U.S. population, report feeling addicted to social media. Teenagers and young adults (between ages 18-22) make up roughly 40% of this group. Yet, an even larger percentage of addicted individuals are also the most vulnerable; over one-third of girls ages 11-15 reported feelings of addiction.

There is a scientific reason as to why children report greater levels of addiction, and that isn’t merely the inextricably tight link between technology and the everyday lives of younger generations. In fact, the reason extends beyond even the growing presence of youth-targeted media, or the large amount of time they spend on Snapchat, Instagram, and other social media apps. Instead, it is precisely in the neuroscience of the developing brain.

The Vulnerabilities of the Developing Brain

Dr. Judith Edersheim, the Founding Co-Director of the MGH Center for Law, Brain, & Behavior, explained that children are particularly susceptible to addictive behaviors and reward-driven engagement due to differences in three main brain areas.

“There are gray matter changes, there are white matter changes, and there are neurotransmitter changes,” she noted. The limbic system of our brain is focused on emotion and reward, and during adolescence, it is a highly developed system. This means our tendency to seek rewards is in sufficient operation throughout adolescence. However, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and overall frontal lobe, which are areas involved in executive functioning, decision-making, and emotional regulation, are underdeveloped.

Dr. Judith Edersheim, the Founding Co-Director of the MGH Center for Law, Brain, & Behavior, explained that children are particularly susceptible to addictive behaviors and reward-driven engagement due to differences in three main brain areas

The PFC is essential for most of the aspects of higher-order functioning and the inhibition of impulses. This makes its underdevelopment a key player in the heightened frequency of freak accidents amongst adolescents, such as car crashes and drownings. Teenagers between the ages of 16-19 have a fatal crash rate close to three times as high as the rate for drivers ages 20 and above. Data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) displays a massive increase in deaths in passenger vehicles for male drivers between 16 and 19 years of age.

For male drivers, the rate of deaths in passenger vehicles per 100,00 people skyrockets between the ages of 16 and 19, and then drops afterward.

Data on deaths in passenger vehicles by age and sex by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

“In the prefrontal cortex, between those ages of about 13-25, there is a 17% reduction in the volume of gray matter,” explained Dr. Edersheim. “And so you would think, okay, why would less be more?” The answer, she detailed, is that this reduction is needed for the effective linkage between areas of the brain. The brain really only has so much real estate, so this neural pruning increases the efficiency of our computation capability.

The second change is in the white matter, which makes up the “communication superhighways” of the brain, linking information from one place to another. White matter increases in adolescence, speeding up the connections that the reward network has with the executive functioning system.

And the third and final change occurs in the dopaminergic system itself. “Teenagers and emerging adults have the greatest circulation of dopamine and dopamine receptors of the whole lifespan. You’ll have more as a teenager than you’ll have as a grown-up,” she detailed. “Everything will be more salient, and the drives will be for novelty and rewards,” she explained.

The instant gratification we feel when experiencing a dopamine rush therefore feels even stronger in teenagers and young adults. And they aren’t to blame, or to be paternalized, as the law often does to young people. Teenagers and young adults have no say over the amounts of dopamine in their systems or their heightened susceptibility to addiction.

The Social Media Epidemic and the Corporate Response

The excessive usage of social media — precisely what big technology corporations foster, through the knowledge of children’s susceptibility to addiction, and targeted mechanisms to bring in users — is inextricably linked to a variety of negative outcomes, disproportionately so for younger individuals.

Spending more than three hours online correlates with adolescents internalizing their problems, and social media has been studied to latch on to our innate tendency to compare ourselves with others. These comparisons can often lead to decreased self-esteem, particularly in adolescents, who have a heightened level of care for others’ opinions of them. In turn, low self-esteem is correlated with suicidality. One in three teenage girls considered death by suicide in 2021. These phenomena are inextricably linked to the excessive usage of social media; in fact, research shows that reducing our social media usage significantly improves body image, which is a large part of one’s self-esteem.

Meanwhile, corporate actors, well-versed in developmental neuroscience, use this information to systemically target their consumers and shape their profit maximization strategies. In 2018, Meta conveyed a rather dehumanizing statistic in their internal correspondence: the lifetime value (LTV) of a young user was cashed in at $270 in profits for the company. As part of the email, the company noted, “you do not want to spend more than the LTV of the user,” warning corporate employees to be mindful of their cost-benefit analysis.

In one of the few public rebukes, CEOs from Meta, TikTok, X, Discord, and Snapchat were grilled in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in January of 2024. The CEOs, unmoved by multiple Senators describing the overabundance of suffering caused by their platforms, went on to rattle out meaningless statistics expounding the safety of their respective corporations.

In 2018, Meta conveyed a rather dehumanizing statistic in their internal correspondence: the lifetime value (LTV) of a young user was cashed in at $270 in profits for the company

In this hearing, Zuckerberg faced many families whose children faced pain, some of whom passed away, at the hands of Facebook. He publicly apologized to these individuals, but also repeatedly rejected any link between mental health and social media usage, ignoring the wide swath of existing research linking the two. At one point, he stated, “it’s important to look at the science, and the bulk does not support that.”

While the companies’ CEOs were expectedly shameless in their disregard for the danger of their platforms, so too were the politicians. Less than one year later, two of these five CEOs flew back to Washington, D.C. to attend the presidential inauguration for Mr. Trump, an event where Zuckerburg sat proudly amongst several others. These CEOs were idolized instead of scrutinized, and sat closer to the President than even some members of his prospective Cabinet.

Even more troubling than the lack of accountability from U.S. leadership is the legal protections these companies continue to enjoy. The scope of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act considers social media companies similar to “bookstores.” Put simply, the Act lets them evade any responsibility for the content posted on their sites, unlike “publishers,” that are responsible for the content of the work they publish.

We Have Seen This Problem Before

There is precedent for holding tech companies accountable for their manipulation. Not too long ago, another set of companies’ businesses boomed while profiting off of addiction. They went by the names of Camels, Lucky Strike, and Philip Morris — cigarette companies that destroyed the physical health of their users.

When these companies first dominated, they weren’t dissimilar to the tech giants of today, with zero regulatory oversight. Yet, the U.S. has seen a stark decrease in tobacco usage over the last 75 years, from roughly 42% of the U.S. using tobacco in 1942, to about 12% in 2022. This was a multi-pronged effort, involving legislation, public policy, healthcare research, and cultural change.

In 1998, a “master settlement agreement” was reached across several major tobacco companies. Alongside a hefty compensation package of roughly $206 billion for the initial 25 years, the companies were also forced to end advertising that targeted youth, such as certain logos on clothing.

Cigarette companies knew that their products were harmful, even when they claimed they did not. In 1994, seven tobacco company CEOs testified that they were not aware of nicotine’s addictive capacities. Shortly afterward, internal documents proved the CEOs’ falsehoods. Part of the successful litigation of 1998 included internal documents that displayed tobacco companies’ marketing strategies: to utilize the addictive tendencies of nicotine and hook young users.

Big tech follows a similar story. Aside from physical evidence of corporations’ knowledge such as Meta linking a dollar value to a young user, individual whistleblowers have similarly unveiled Big Tech’s awareness of neuroscientific vulnerabilities from the inside.

“Imagine whole bookshelves, seminars, workshops and trainings that teach aspiring tech entrepreneurs techniques like these. Imagine hundreds of engineers whose job every day is to invent new ways to keep you hooked.”

Tristan Harris, now the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, was previously a Design Ethicist at Google. Shortly after leaving his position, he wrote about technology’s hijacking of our minds. He noted several mechanisms that big tech uses, from companies creating “inconvenient choices” through notoriously hidden “unsubscribe” buttons, to the introduction of a “Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI)” feeling that keeps the user fearful from getting disconnected.

“Are you upset that technology hijacks your agency? I am too. I’ve listed a few techniques but there are literally thousands,” Harris wrote. “Imagine whole bookshelves, seminars, workshops and trainings that teach aspiring tech entrepreneurs techniques like these. Imagine hundreds of engineers whose job every day is to invent new ways to keep you hooked.”

His information confirmed our suspicions: that corporations are well aware of their actions.

Current Litigation

Today, parents and teens are trying to hold big tech accountable for the consequences of their manipulation, just as they did for the tobacco industry some time ago. One such example is the heartbreaking case of Sewell Seltzer III, a 14-year-old boy who died by suicide after losing access to an artificial intelligence chatbot with which he had engaged in a months-long “relationship” that was at times sexual and predatory.

Setzer’s mother, Megan Garcia, is now actively suing Google and Character Technologies Inc. — an artificial intelligence start-up that specializes in chatbots which allow their users to “build chatbots that mimic pop culture personalities,” alleging that the companies negligently designed an AI chatbot with the potential to harm adolescents and teens.

But Garcia and her lawyers face a number of legal hurdles in their suit, arising not only from the unique artificial intelligence component of the case, but also from demanding legal standards. The job of Garcia’s legal team is to clearly find and identify the series of intentional events that led Google, whose search engine powered the Character.AI chatbot that her son interacted with, to directly cause her son’s death. This causal connection is difficult to trace and point to, particularly given that the U.S. currently has no artificial intelligence regulations or standards for litigants to reference, making it all the more challenging to prove that the companies knew or should have known their products carried risks (and particularly for younger users).

In January, Google claimed that “it had ‘no role’ in the teen’s suicide and ‘does not belong in the case,’” even though the corporation was in a $2.7 billion deal with Character Technologies, Inc. to help grow the start-up without acquiring it. Garcia, in an interview with The Mercury News, stated, “They knew about these dangers, because they do their research, and they know the types of interactions children are having.”

Algorithms and Accountability

This case raises novel questions for other recent cases and future litigation that attempts to hold companies accountable for their algorithms. Companies are increasingly relying on algorithms to power everything from an individual’s Tik Tok feed to the large-scale decisions of predictive policing for criminality.

With the algorithm-driven customization that feeds individualized content to users, there may be room to hold corporations to the standards of “publishers,” as entities that are actively creating these algorithms, and utilizing them to power their platforms. Algorithms can establish more causality of intent for a corporation, creating a stronger causatory link for cases involving social media and its harms.

No matter how gnarly the territory, existing litigation will continue to navigate the realm of tying a minor’s content consumption and exact interaction with a given technology platform to its real-world effects, as already seen in Garcia v. Character Technologies Inc.

Learning From Our Past

Before we can jump to understanding the legal landscape of our present and future, it is relevant to learn from the corporate-caused cigarette addiction of the past. Much of the defense that tobacco corporations put forward was the ostensible uncertainty of the science.

“Consumer protection usually stalls when the scientific evidence for the toxicity of something is not large enough or direct enough,” said Dr. Edersheim. The link between smoking and cancer was not definitive, the companies argued, and therefore, they cannot possibly be held accountable. Corporate leadership was interested in causality, and without it, assumed the research would not suffice in court.

Yet policies do not operate on absolute certainty. It is not conclusive that a PG-13 movie will be damaging to a twelve year old — the notice merely exists as a recommendation. Similarly, the fields of psychology and neuroscience will nearly never express 100% certainty. As described by Dr. Edersheim, neuroscience and law fundamentally diverge as disciplines. “Science finds the commonality; science finds group data. And the law wants individuated judgments between two people, and the finding of harm and fault between one party and another.”

The brain’s all-encompassing focus on the anticipation of drugs, or other rewards, is a “hijacked brain,” taken by the motivating drive for more and more and more.

This dichotomy presents issues for court cases in which families seek compensatory justice, at the very least, for the harms that social media and related technology giants brought upon their children, such as in Garcia v. Character Technologies Inc.

Civil legal proceedings, aside from class actions and government enforcement actions, largely operate through damage claims to solve a personal dispute between two parties. While the issues in each case can represent a wide variety of individuals in similar situations, they work with the details of a single person, or group of people, and their case.

In contrast, neuroscience, psychology, and related scientific disciplines operate on a group-level probabilistic approach, with statistical significance in their results and sample sizes in the hundreds and thousands.

“Neuroscience’s greatest accomplishments in law have been to identify group differences that are meaningful, capturable, actionable, and accurate from a policy-sense,” noted Dr. Edersheim. And though its usage has been successful in a few notable case studies, such as juvenile justice reform, it still does not serve to be particularly advantageous in the courtroom.

For example, in the multi district litigation of California v. Meta Platforms Inc., the court “declined to dismiss at this stage theories of liability predicated on a failure-to-warn of known risks of addiction….” The court cited Section 230 for the limits they had to place on claims of Meta’s alleged deception. They allowed the case to continue onward, but largely limited the scope, finding that research on addiction risks was not sufficient to discredit the entirety of Meta’s motion to dismiss.

Looking Forward: The Social Media Victims Law Center

Without conscience and good practices driving the ethical use of social media targeted to children, the responsibility falls on the legal actors for corporate regulation. It is hopeful that an intimate understanding of children’s developmental vulnerabilities and the bravery of whistleblowers can shape a narrative of regulating technology companies instead of informing corporate profit maximization practices.

Organizations like the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC) are working tirelessly to bring justice to individuals and families negatively affected by social media and other big Tech companies. With active lawsuits against Meta, Snapchat, Discord, TikTok, and Character.AI, “SMVLC works to hold social media companies legally accountable for the harm they inflict on vulnerable users.”

SMVLC highlights the importance of civil litigation alongside existing pushes in government regulation. Indeed, civil litigation’s focus on individual disputes and compensatory justice can be a mobilizing factor for a corporation’s incentivization to act proactively. Civil lawsuits can force platforms to become safer from the outset, instead of paying a large profit after the fact.

Multiple active lawsuits by SMVLC target the same addictive mechanisms that lead to youth addiction of social media and downstream mental health effects. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell filed a lawsuit in 2023 against Meta Platforms Inc., stating that “Instagram’s features, like infinite scrolling and autoplay, are intentionally designed to addict children and harm their mental health.” SMVLC notes that the multidistrict litigation now includes more than 1,700 cases.

Conclusions

“Teenagers are fantastically impulsive. They’re built that way,” notes Dr. Edersheim. “Their planning is limited, and their response to their own affect is exaggerated. And so, that is, the perfect storm for impulsive suicidality.”

We know children are more susceptible to addiction from technology and the downstream mental health concerns that follow. We also know that corporations have this knowledge, and utilize it daily to maximize their profits. While we cannot change this youth susceptibility, we can work with precaution, urging big tech to adapt the products that currently flow freely for young people.

While we cannot change this youth susceptibility, we can work with precaution, urging big tech to adapt the products that currently flow freely for young people.

For large-scale systems, well-being of the users is paramount. We did not scale the consumption of automobiles before determining that the brakes worked effectively, and we ensured that planes could land properly before allowing hundreds of people to fly. For technology and social media companies, however, safety has been an afterthought. If we want to bring the well-being of technology users at par with those from other industries, particularly for our most vulnerable populations, a more proactive approach is in order, such as the civil litigation efforts of SMVLC.

“In my heart, I think that should be a distinguishing feature. That, because of their brains, because of their stage, because of what nature requires them to be at that stage of their lives, that vulnerability shouldn’t be exploited. It shouldn’t be permitted to be exploited,” stated Dr. Edersheim.