‘This was a righteous case. A holy war’: the lawyer who took on Meta and Google – and won

When Mark Lanier and his young client Kaley faced the tech giants in an LA courtroom earlier this year, it seemed a bigger battle than David v Goliath. But they scored a landmark victory, proving that the social media giants had created ‘addiction machines’ that harmed mental health. How did they pull it off? When Mark Zuckerberg walked into a Los Angeles courtroom on 18 February flanked by an entourage bedecked in Meta Ray-Bans, some people laughed. If this was an attempt at product placement for the company’s newest range of smart glasses, it was jarringly ill-judged: Zuckerberg was about to