Social Media Giants Face Massive Lawsuit for Downplaying Teen Mental Health Risks

A massive lawsuit awaits Facebook's parent company, Meta, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok for gatekeeping information about how addictive their platforms can be to young users, but they continue targeting teen subscribers anyway.

A group of school districts gathered to file a lawsuit against the four social media giants, CNN reported, citing a recently unsealed legal filing that cited the companies' internal documents.

How the Platforms View Their Impact on Teens

The lawsuit included quotes from the social media companies to prove how they downplay their effect on teenage users' mental health.

'IG (Instagram) is a drug ... we're basically pushers,' stated by Meta researchers in an internal chat found in the lawsuit file.

Meanwhile, an internal TikTok report said, 'minors do not have executive mental function to control their screen time.'

On the other hand, executives at Snapchat once realised that their users who 'have a Snapchat addiction have no room for anything else. Snap dominates their life.'

Then YouTube employees stated that '[d]riving more frequent daily usage [was] not well-aligned with ... efforts to improve digital wellbeing.'

The publication could not verify if the statements allegedly mentioned by companies are accurate or not.

These statements from employee testimonies, comments and research were presented as evidence in a large-scale lawsuit filed by hundreds of individuals, school district representatives and attorneys general from different states in the country against the four biggest social media companies in the Northern District Court of California.

Reason for Filing the Case

According to the complaint, the four social media platforms 'deliberately embedded design features in their platforms to maximise youth engagement to drive advertising revenue.'

School district reps claimed that these companies have added to a youth mental health crisis that schools must address through investing in solutions like counselling and other resources.

'Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snap designed social media products they knew were addictive to kids, and these internal company documents and testimony show they actively pushed these platforms into schools while bypassing parents and teachers,' the co-lead plaintiff's counsel Lexi Hazam said. 'They knew the serious mental health risks to kids but provided no warnings, leaving schools and families to suffer the consequences.'

The Platforms are Fighting to Have the Case Dismissed

Meanwhile, the social media platforms fight to have the case dismissed. The representatives from Meta, TikTok and Snapchat stated that the lawsuit could lead to confusion about their platforms and their safety features. Meanwhile, YouTube's parent company, Google, has yet to come up with a statement regarding the case.

All four companies rolled out their own parental control and youth safety features in the past, including 'take a break' notices, content restrictions for minors and default privacy protection that parents can customise.

But the lawsuit stated that these measures have limited efficacy, and they want the companies to act on the mental health issues brought by their platforms on the teenage kids today.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit want to have a jury trial so the court can decide on the case since they have become a 'public nuisance that burdens schools and communities.'