On 18 February, Mark Zuckerberg walked into a Los Angeles courtroom surrounded by security guards wearing Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. Some observers found the moment almost comic. The prosecution team, led by veteran trial lawyer Mark Lanier, did not. They were immediately alarmed — not because of the optics of product placement near grieving parents, but because of what those glasses can do.

Smart glasses equipped with cameras, Lanier argued, could be used for facial recognition, potentially identifying the anonymous jurors his team had fought so hard to protect. When the prosecution raised the matter, the judge required Zuckerberg's entourage to swear they had taken no photographs. The glasses came off. That unsettling opening moment captured something essential about the case itself: the technology on trial was also, potentially, present in the room.

The lawsuit, known as KGM v Meta et al, centres on a plaintiff identified as Kaley, who claims that exposure to YouTube from age six and Instagram from age nine led her to develop body dysmorphia, anxiety and depression. Snapchat and TikTok had already settled out of court for undisclosed sums before the trial began. What remained was a direct confrontation with Meta and Google — not over harmful content they had failed to remove, but over platforms they had allegedly engineered, with deliberate intent, to be addictive. That distinction is what makes this case historically significant.