A group of 41 states – including California and New York – are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for causing harm to young people’s mental health and knowingly designing addictive features on Facebook and Instagram.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in California and claimed that Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent, in violation of federal law.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said: “Kids and teenagers are suffering from record levels of poor mental health and social media companies like Meta are to blame.
“Meta has profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem.”
The lawsuit is the result of an investigation led by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Vermont.
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The lawsuit follows damning newspaper reports – first by the Wall Street Journal in 2021 – based on Meta’s own research that found that the company knew about mental health harm caused by Instagram.
One internal study cited 13.5 percent of teenage girls saying Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 17 percent of teen girls saying the app makes eating disorders worse.
Following the first reports of this, several news outlets published their own findings based on leaked documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has testified before Congress about what she found.
According to the Pew Research Center, up to 95 percent of youth ages 13 to 17 in the US report using a social media platform, with more than a third saying they use it “almost constantly.”
To comply with federal law, social media companies ban kids under 13 from signing up for their platforms, but children have easily gotten around the bans – with or without their parents’ consent.
In May, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy called on tech companies, parents, and caregivers to take “immediate action to protect kids now” from the harms of social media.
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