Meta is being sued by a family who blames the social media platform Instagram for their daughter’s eating disorder, self-harm, and thoughts of suicide.
The preteen’s family says she became addicted to the popular social media platform, so much so that it resulted in self-harm.
The lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Monday, cites the Facebook Papers, which is a trove of internal Meta research documents that were leaked last fall and revealed that the tech giant knew Instagram was damaging body image and other mental-health issues specifically in teenage girls.
The case was filed on behalf of Alexis Spence, who created her first Instagram account at the age of 11, notably without her parents’ knowledge and in violation of the platform’s minimum age requirement of 13. The complaint claims Instagram’s artificial intelligence engine almost immediately steered Spence who was in the fifth grade at the time into a repetitive chamber of content they allege glorifies anorexia and self-cutting, while also systematically supporting her addiction to using the app.
The Social Media Victims Law Center, which is a Seattle-based group that advocates for families of teens harmed online filed the lawsuit.
Spence who is now 19, was once “confident and happy” but has since been hospitalized for depression, anxiety, and anorexia and “fights to stay in recovery every day.” The suit claims her conditions are a result of “the harmful content and features Instagram relentlessly promoted and provided to her in its effort to increase engagement.”
It is an unprecedented lawsuit of its kind to draw from the Facebook Papers while also exposing the real human harm behind its findings, Spence’s attorneys say.
The suit also encloses previously unpublicized documents from the leaks, which includes one in which Meta identified “tweens” as “herd animals” who “want to find communities where they can fit in.” The attorneys argue that the details in the documents demonstrate Meta’s efforts to recruit minor users to its platforms.
“If you look at the extensive research that it [Meta] performed, they knew exactly what they were doing to kids, and they kept doing it,” said the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, Matthew P. Bergman, who represents Spence and her family. “I wish I could say that Alexis’ case is aberrational. It’s not. The only aberration is that she survived.”
Bergman is also representing Tammy Rodriguez, an Enfield, Connecticut, woman who also filed a lawsuit earlier this year against Meta and Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, for the companies’ alleged roles in her 11-year-old daughter’s suicide last summer.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a statement on Oct. 5, 2021, following the early release of the Facebook Papers, saying, “I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the kinds of experiences I want my kids and others to have online, and it’s very important to me that everything we build is safe and good for kids.”
He also specifically mentioned to a reporting that showed teenagers suffered more from “anxiety, sadness and eating issues” and noted that “more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse.”
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