US States Sue Meta for Addictive Apps, Fueling Youth Mental Health Crisis

More than three dozen states, including California, New York and the District of Columbia, are filing federal and state lawsuits claiming Facebook and Instagram intentionally — and illegally — manipulate young users.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in California also claims that Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent, violating federal law.

“Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Its motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize its financial gains, Meta has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its social media platforms,” the complaint says. “It has concealed the ways in which these platforms exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable consumers: teenagers and children.”

The lawsuits follow the collapse of settlement talks with the Menlo Park-based Meta, which operates both platforms. It’s also the result of an investigation led by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee, Vermont and more.

Attorney General Rob Bonta is part of the coalition of more than 30 AGs filing the federal lawsuit in Northern California.

“We refuse to allow the company to feign ignorance of the harm it knows it’s causing,” Bonta said in a statement on Tuesday. “We refuse to let it continue business as usual when that business is hurting our children.”

In addition to the 33 states, nine other attorneys general are filing in their respective states, bringing the total number of states taking action to 42.

“Kids and teenagers are suffering from record levels of poor mental health and social media companies like Meta are to blame,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said. “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.”

In a statement, Meta said it shares “the attorneys general’s commitment to providing teens with safe, positive experiences online, and have already introduced over 30 tools to support teens and their families.”

“We’re disappointed that instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path,” the company added.

The lawsuits also come on the heels of damning newspaper reports, first published by The Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2021, based on Meta’s research that found that the company knew about the harms Instagram can cause teenagers — especially teen girls — when it comes to mental health and body image issues.

One internal study cited 13.5% of teen girls saying Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 17% of teen girls saying it makes eating disorders worse.

Following the first reports, a consortium of news organizations, including The Associated Press, published their findings based on leaked documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has testified before Congress and a British parliamentary committee about what she found.

The use of social media among teens is nearly universal in the U.S. and many other parts of the world. Up to 95% of youth ages 13 to 17 in the U.S. report using a social media platform, with more than a third saying they use social media “almost constantly,” according to the Pew Research Center.

To comply with federal regulation, social media companies ban kids under 13 from signing up to their platforms — but children have been shown to easily get around the bans, both with and without their parents’ consent, and many younger kids have social media accounts.

Other measures social platforms have taken to address concerns about children’s mental health are also easily circumvented. For instance, TikTok recently introduced a default 60-minute time limit for users under 18. But once the limit is reached, minors can enter a passcode to keep watching.

In May, U.S. 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.

Associated Press Writers Maysoon Khan in New York and Ashraf Khalil in Washington DC contributed to this story. KQED’s Rachael Myrow also contributed to this report.