Attorney General Gentner Drummond on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram. Drummond was one of eight attorneys general who filed petitions in their respective state courts, as did the District of Columbia. Thirty-three other states joined a federal lawsuit filed in California.
Drummond alleged that Meta operates Instagram in a manner unfair to adolescents by intentionally inducing compulsive use and that Meta engages in deceptive conduct by omitting and misrepresenting material facts about Instagram, particularly that the company’s own research revealed the platform was harmful to some adolescents.
“In the decade ending in 2021, the percentage of teens who reported having felt so consistently sad or hopeless that they discontinued their usual activities increased by more than 50%,” Drummond said in the complaint. “Rates of students who report having contemplated or even attempted suicide are similarly alarming.”
The lawsuits’ genesis was a Wall Street Journal story published two years ago after company documents that detailed the harm caused by Instagram were leaked to the newspaper. By the time the story was published, Meta had been studying the effects of its platforms for three years.
“We make body-image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.
“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”
Meta wasn’t the only one studying the problem. As Emily Hemendinger, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus wrote in June, mounting research documents the harmful effects of social media use on mental health, including body image and development of eating disorders.
“People, as a general rule, look to others to know how to fit in and judge their own lives,” wrote Christia Spears Brown, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky. “Teens are especially vulnerable to these social comparisons. Just about everyone can remember worrying about fitting in in high school. Instagram exacerbates that worry. It is hard enough to compare yourself to a supermodel who looks fantastic (albeit filtered); it can be even worse when the filtered comparison is Natalie down the hall.”
The Associated Press reported that Meta responded to the allegations with a written statement in which the company 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.
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