YouTube employees deliberately target ‘viewer addiction,’ safety tools kill children: court documents
YouTube employees admitted their goal was to “enslave viewers” and kill proposed safety tools for children because they wouldn’t provide enough “ROI” — a financial term for “return on investment,” according to court documents reviewed by The Post.
The explosive records, which include logs of internal conversations and presentations from YouTube employees, were opened ahead of a series of landmark hearings scheduled for this summer in Oakland, Calif. In the US District Court for Northern California. Google-owned YouTube, Meta, Snap and TikTok are listed as defendants.
In his presentation at the trial last March, John Harding, YouTube’s longtime vice president of engineering, confronted the plaintiffs’ attorneys about an internal email dated June 7, 2012, in which a YouTube employee, whose name has been redacted, said “the goal is not views, it’s viewership addiction.”
Harding confirmed the email was authentic but denied responsibility, saying employees were discussing a “video creation app” that was “not designed for viewers.” The next part of the exchange between Harding and the lawyer will be reenacted.
The case is part of what legal experts and critics have called “Big Tobacco” for Google and Meta. Both companies were found guilty last week of fueling social media addiction in a landmark lawsuit filed in California state court on behalf of a 20-year-old woman known only as KGM.
The shocking revelations from the Oakland federal lawsuit contradict public statements from administrators who said the app was never intended and that any harmful effects on children are caused by third-party content rather than its deliberate app design choices.
During a federal hearing last month, YouTube CEO Christos Goodrow testified that the app was “not designed to maximize time” and that the company “doesn’t want anyone to be addicted.”
This summer’s lawsuit in Oakland, however, includes an internal YouTube presentation from April 2018 that recounts research findings that “excessive video viewing is linked to addiction” and that it results in a “‘quick fix’ of dopamine.'”
The presentation even includes a colorful flow chart labeled the “addiction cycle,” complete with arrows showing that “guilt” is an “emotional trigger” that leads to “craving, habit and use.”
“Researchers feel that YT is designed to be addictive,” said the document. “Designed with tactics to encourage more viewing (ie, autoplay, recommendations, etc.”
US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is presiding over a case that includes more than 2,000 lawsuits against social media companies making similar allegations. A group of school districts has a June trial date, and a coalition of state attorneys will face off against Big Tech’s attorneys beginning in August.
“These stone-picked, decade-old quotes do not describe our product design work well. In fact, they prove that our teams identify challenges to ensure that our products prioritize high-quality, age-appropriate experiences,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement.
The company’s 2018 study, however, estimates that 32 million users aged 13 to 24 are described as “habitually active” and watch videos for more than two hours a day, while 36 million users aged 18 to 24 say they regret how much time they spent on YouTube in the past week.
In the presentation of an internal slide with a screenshot of a silly cat video, YouTube employees said that survey research shows that watching the video is “a common way to manage emotions” but that it is “hard to stop watching.”
“In the end, viewers felt guilty for spending too much time doing meaningless tasks,” the researchers wrote.
As recently as August 2024, in an internal presentation titled “The Well-Being of (Unsupervised) Youth Viewers,” YouTube employees admitted that the app’s “endless feed” is a big part of the problem.
The staff wrote that the app’s “two biggest challenges” were video recommendations that “normalized unhealthy beliefs or behaviors” and “long-term” use that “distracted from important activities like time with friends or sleep.”
“This concern is particularly acute for short-form content (which is popular with young people) due to its lack of depth and endless feed information,” the document said.
The documents, which span 2012 to 2025, were unveiled in late February and compiled by the Tech Oversight Project, an online watchdog group that has emerged as one of Big Tech’s most vocal critics.
“YouTube’s position in court is that they are not a social media platform, but their managers don’t buy that theory either,” said the group’s director, Sacha Haworth.
“These explosive documents show that YouTube is willing to deliberately hypnotize children and teenagers because it has generated more screen time to deliver ads and more data to Google’s surveillance business,” Haworth said in a statement. “They see our children as competitors to make their trillions of dollars, and it’s time to break this bad situation.”
During an internal presentation about YouTube’s self-play feature on September 14, 2021, one employee asked if the team had tested tools intended to “help users sleep.”
“It was something we were looking at…but it was generally not a high ROI compared to other projects,” the YouTube project manager replied.
Elsewhere, in a 2019 “delocalization” presentation, employees wrote that YouTube’s goal of “regularly driving daily use is not well aligned with our efforts to improve digital efficiency.”
Another document reveals that YouTube administrators have taken steps to cover their tracks and prevent future scrutiny of its processes.
At the time of the April 2, 2025 release, James Beser, YouTube’s chief child safety officer, admitted that his team would keep a “history” of internal conversations — a move he said was intended to help “younger people” reread it and “take things out of context.”
An attorney for the plaintiffs pressed Beser on whether “any seniors” at YouTube had ever ordered him to turn off history in his interviews.
“I don’t remember being told that,” Beser replied.
The issue of “closing history” has come up in other high-profile cases involving Google. A number of federal judges have ripped Google for destroying negotiations that should have been preserved, including US District Judge James Donato, who angrily criticized the practice during a 2023 antitrust trial as a “direct attack on the administration of justice” that “obstructs due process.”
A Los Angeles judge ordered Google and fellow defendant Meta last week to pay $6 million in damages, with parent YouTube responsible for 30% of the penalty and parent Facebook and Instagram responsible for the other 70%.
