A landmark case was decided this week, when a jury found that Instagram and YouTube were designed for addiction and failed to warn users about known risks.

Framed as negligence, the jury heard how these tools contributed to mental health issues for a woman who began using social media as a child. The plaintiff was awarded around $6 million in damages from Meta and Google, which own the social media platforms. TikTok and Snap settled before the trial, suggesting that mental health risks aren’t exclusive to any single platform.

Meta/Google trial a ‘Big Tobacco’ moment for tech

HR leaders should expect that issues related to technology and mental health for younger employees (or workers of any age, realistically) will have further workplace implications, potentially legal ones.

“The outcome of this case could influence thousands of other consolidated cases against the social media companies,” according to reporting from NPR. “The litigation has drawn comparisons to the legal crusade in the 1990s against Big Tobacco, which forced the industry to stop targeting minors with advertising.”

Read more | Mental health: When ‘merely surviving’ becomes the norm

Research shows the dangers

While HR leaders may focus on how at-work technology impacts employees, it’s worth considering that these risks are hitting workers during their personal lives, which could bleed into their experiences during the workday.

A 2025 study out of Wayne State University revealed that teen and young adult respondents reported an average daily screen time of 6.5 hours, with 96% heavily using social media apps. Sixty percent felt phone-addicted and 94% reported negative impacts ranging from depression to isolation and more. The authors argue that addictive use may disrupt dopamine regulation, harming concentration and self-perception.

Gen Z and younger millennials hit the workforce with a decade of exposure to addictive design. Many experts say that ignoring that history understates the baseline mental‑health risk in the talent pool.

There is growing evidence that workplace technology can echo risky engagement patterns, particularly when it “turns labor into a game.” Carnegie Mellon University researcher Tae Wan Kim argues that gamification “can erode employees’ moral agency” and that points, badges and leaderboards “hollow out the ethical substance of professional life,” even as they boost short‑term productivity.

‘Technological ill‑being’ for workers

While the report doesn’t accuse any workplace tools of “addictive design,” data from Grammarly and The Harris Poll show that knowledge workers now spend 88% of their workweek communicating and about 23% engaging through collaboration tools, with over half saying constant notifications make it hard to concentrate and that poor communication has increased their stress.

That pattern suggests collaboration suites, internal social platforms and gamified HR tools can become stress multipliers when they mirror consumer‑style engagement mechanics.

The same research also found that workers burn 88% of the week communicating across channels and 23% of the week on collaboration tools. This seems to indicate that HR teams and managers may be stacking workplace demands on top of pre‑existing digital susceptibilities.

There is a warning here for business leaders. “While digitization has brought many societal benefits, it has also created many challenges for the labor force,” according to a 2025 study published in the Annals of Work Exposures and Health. “It has been linked to pervasive ‘technological ill‑being’ for workers,” which is a reality that HR leaders can’t avoid.

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