Meta Platforms has been sued in federal court by 33 states including California and New York that claim its Instagram and Facebook platforms addict and harm children. The action is to date the most sweeping state action to contend with the impact of social media on the mental health of children. The suit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges Meta violates consumer protection laws by targeting children and deceiving users about platform safety. Also that day, the District of Columbia and eight states filed separate complaints addressing the same issues.

“Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Its motive is profit,” the 33 states claim in a 233-page lawsuit. The company did this by engineering “psychologically manipulative product features to induce young users’ compulsive and extended use” of platforms including Instagram and Facebook.

Meta’s “algorithms were designed to push children and teenagers into rabbit holes of toxic and harmful content, the states said, with features like ‘infinite scroll’ and persistent alerts used to hook young users,” The New York Times summarizes, adding the attorneys general also claim Meta violated the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), accusing the company of “unlawfully collecting ‘the personal data of its youngest users’ without their parents’ permission.”

“Despite overwhelming internal research, independent expert analysis, and publicly available data that its social media platforms harm young users, Meta still refuses to abandon its use of known harmful features — and has instead redoubled its efforts to misrepresent, conceal, and downplay the impact of those features on young users’ mental and physical health,” attorneys generals of the 33 states write, specifying that roughly 22 million U.S. teenagers daily use Instagram.

Wired breaks out the “5 Instagram features that U.S. states say ruin teens’ mental health: Likes, Instagram Stories, Notifications, Photo Filters and Recommendation Algorithms. Meta spokeswoman Liz Crenshaw is quoted in Wired saying Meta has introduced more than 30 child safety tools, including parental controls, and that other stressors like school and income inequality significantly impact the mental health of children.

“Whether services such as Instagram are truly damaging to young users remains up for debate,” Wired writes, citing a May U.S. Surgeon General Advisory that urged more research, “though it acknowledged that ‘there are ample indicators’ about social media’s profound risk.”

Ultimately, Wired writes, “the states’ case will hinge on whether Meta overpromised and underdelivered in terms of protections for children.

This past year has seen tremendous momentum by states attempting to rein in social media with regard to children. In September of last year, Governor Gavin Newsom made California the first state to enact a social media child protection law. Six other states subsequently followed suit: Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana and Utah.

Related:
Is Social Media Addictive? Here’s What the Science Says, The New York Times, 10/25/23