YouTube’s Top Engineer Says App Not Designed to Encourage Binge Watching, Addiction

LOS ANGELES—Taking the stand in a landmark jury trial considering whether social media giants are designing their platforms to addict young people despite known harms, YouTube’s vice president of engineering testified in Los Angeles Superior Court on Feb. 23 that the algorithm and design features he oversees are not made to be addictive.

Referencing a cache of recently unsealed internal documents—slide presentations, research, and email chains dating back to 2011—attorneys for the plaintiff sketched a narrative of a company fiercely competing with other tech titans to “hook” young people with addictive features by exploiting “existing vulnerabilities” and driving watch time to increase profit.

“I did design the algorithm, and I know what it was optimized for,” Cristos Goodrow, the company’s top engineer, told the court.

How much time people spend on the app is a measure of the goal, he said, not the goal itself.

The goal of YouTube’s design is to create a “valuable experience” for the user, Goodrow said.

“It’s never been addiction, it’s only ever been helping people find good stuff to watch.”

His answer was similar to those used by Meta executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who testified earlier in the trial.

The case, which began Feb. 9, focuses on a 20-year-old woman anonymized in court documents as “K.G.M.,” who says she became addicted to social media as a child and suffered serious harms as a result—including depression, suicidal ideation, and body dysmorphia.

YouTube (Google) is named along with Instagram (Meta), TikTok (ByteDance), and Snapchat (Snap, Inc.) in thousands of civil product liability cases—brought by children, parents, school districts, and state attorneys general—that have been consolidated into joint actions.

K.G.M’s case is one of a handful of bellwether trials—high-stakes proceedings that will determine how the others will be argued and what liability and damages may be expected.

Snap, Inc. and ByteDance settled with the plaintiff before trial began, but remain named in related cases.

‘Better TV’

Goodrow and attorneys for YouTube on Monday attempted to differentiate the platform from co-defendant Meta’s products, Instagram and Facebook, arguing it lacks many of the social media features plaintiffs say are addictive.

“I know for a fact because I was part of the design team that it was not designed with tricks to encourage binge watching,” Goodrow said.

The app, they suggest, is more akin to a service like Netflix.

YouTube is the top streaming platform in the United States, according to the 2025 Nielson distributor gauge, and most people watch it on their television.

“YouTube is better TV,” said Goodrow.

Parents suing the company in related cases whose children died after participating in viral challenges on YouTube beg to differ.

Joann Bogard lost her son, Mason, in 2019 after he tried a viral “choking challenge” he saw on YouTube.

“I had the watchdog apps, I checked his devices, I did everything the experts told me to do. The YouTube algorithm fed him the choking challenge unsolicited,” she said.

Social media platforms are protected under the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Act from liability for what third parties post on their platforms, so lawyers in this and related cases have carefully built their arguments around design features, avoiding discussion of content.

Plaintiffs contend it is the algorithm, which delivers highly tailored content, and features like short video feeds, notifications, and recommendations that are targeting and harming children—not just the content itself.

“When they feed content to these kids, unsolicited, and they know those [are] dopamine hits, and they know what to feed them to keep them engaged longer, that is creating an addictive product,” Bogard told The Epoch Times.

1 Billion Daily Watch Hours

Plaintiff’s attorney Mark Lanier highlighted internal company documents in which executives, project managers, and engineers suggested YouTube’s mission was to make it “more like an addictive experience” people would keep returning to, where the goal is “not viewership, it’s viewer addiction.”

In 2013, YouTube announced a goal to meet one billion watch hours per day.

According to internal documents, watch time had grown steadily since the previous year as traffic shifted toward mobile, and as the company “optimized for watch time instead of views.”

Goodrow, in a 2017 blog post, announced YouTube reached that goal in 2016.

Pushing back against Lanier’s suggestion that the focus on watch time was to increase revenue—the company estimated that hitting 1 billion daily watch hours would generate $15 million to $50 million—Goodrow said revenue dropped after it began using watch time as a metric.

“If we wanted to make the goal revenue, we could’ve just made the goal revenue,” Goodrow said. “We were trying to measure value. Who knows how much more we would have made if we stuck to other [measurements] like clicks.”

‘Attention Casinos’

Part of the plaintiff’s strategy is showing how companies use special features, algorithms, and a dragnet of data to hook users and keep them engaged.

Testifying the week prior, Brian Boland, a former VP of advertising for Meta, told the court: “Everything you do is watched,” referring to how companies collect detailed data on users by surveilling what they respond to and engage with them.

That information compounds, allowing the apps to place content and ads to maximize “stickiness,” or an experience that keeps users plugged into the app.

The allegation is that these platforms have become a kind of panopticon that monitors everything people do and uses that information to exploit human psychological vulnerabilities for profit.

But where Lanier suggested YouTube benefits from all the data it collects through Gmail, Google Search, and its other products, Goodrow said this wasn’t the case.

“We at YouTube didn’t find it very helpful. We didn’t use that information to make recommendations … it was better to use what you watched on YouTube.”

In 2015, a Google project manager—later identified as design ethicist Tristan Harris, who left the company in 2016—distributed a presentation imploring the company to rethink design in a way that would “minimize distraction” and “respect users’ attention.”

In it, he compared intermittent, variable rewards and infinite feeds to slot machines.

Like slot machines, the unpredictable, sporadic reward that comes from social media features—likes, shares, a pull to refresh the screen, or engaging content—triggers a higher dopamine release than consistent rewards, and can keep users in a loop of anticipation.

Likening social media platforms to a drug delivered via smartphone, Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, a star witness for the plaintiff, told the court last week that such a drug becomes more potent when it is delivered by a powerful, highly individualized and adaptive algorithm—and when novel features are injected at intervals.

Such, she said, engages with the “treasure-seeking” function of our brains.

“We know our brains evolved to find unexpected rewards more reinforcing than rewards we know are coming,” Lembke said.

Goodrow said the company avoids using intermittent, variable rewards.

“We specifically designed the system to avoid regret,” he said.

As Lembke pointed out last week, YouTube introduced its “Shorts” feature, a vertical, TikTok-style feed of quick videos that could be viewed on a smartphone and were designed to autoplay and loop by default, in 2020.

“The very quick onset and offset, very short duration of the videos increases the potency of the drug and hence contributes to its addictiveness,” Lembke told the court.

According to internal documents from 2016, the company’s youth strategy was to transition children from a kids version of the app to its main platform, with “tweens” and teens presenting a “great monetization opportunity.”

“This is a great opportunity to make more money,” Lanier suggested.

“That’s not the reason we’re trying to do this,” Goodrow said.