States Sue Meta Claiming Its Social Platforms Are Addictive and Harm Children's Mental Health

TIME

Dozens of US states, including California and New York, are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.

Transcript

00:00 We are suing Meta, the umbrella company for Facebook, Instagram, and other popular platforms

00:07 for violating federal and state laws, including the following three laws that we're focusing

00:14 on.

00:15 The Federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, California's unfair competition

00:20 law, and California's false advertising law.

00:26 In seeking to bolster profits, Meta has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers

00:33 of its products.

00:34 It has concealed the ways in which Instagram and Facebook exploit and manipulate its most

00:41 vulnerable consumers, teenagers and children.

00:46 We know, thanks to our investigation, as well as disclosures by former insiders, that the

00:51 company knows the following, Instagram is harmful to a significant percentage of teenagers,

00:57 especially teen girls.

01:01 They have research that found that 13.5% of teen girls on Instagram say the platform makes

01:08 thoughts of suicide and self-injury worse.

01:14 That's 17% say it makes eating issues worse, and 32% say it makes body images, image worse.

01:21 Meta has internal warnings that certain key features can push users into harmful content.

01:30 Folks from states and backgrounds, parties that can't seem to agree on too much agree

01:37 on this, agree that we're going to protect our children, that Republican or Democrat,

01:44 red state or blue state, smaller government or larger government, whatever your ideology

01:50 is, we agree that what Meta is doing is illegal and wrong, harms our children and deserving

01:57 of collective action.

01:59 Social media and its impact on young people is one of the most important things that I'll

02:03 work on in my career.

02:06 Meta is one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the history of the world.

02:11 They have unfathomable troves of data on their users and others.

02:16 They have constantly used the data that they have to refine their products to make them

02:21 more and more difficult to stop using.

02:24 They have made, through sophisticated means, Instagram and their other platforms addictive.

02:30 They have targeted these platforms at teenagers and at kids.

02:34 We all know that teenagers and kids are different.

02:37 Their brain chemistry is different.

02:38 They are more vulnerable and more susceptible to this kind of manipulation.

02:43 The company knew exactly how these design decisions could and would hook young people

02:49 to the point of addiction and yet continued to use them.

02:52 And in many cases rejected using feasible alternatives that they knew would mitigate

02:57 harm to our young people.

03:00 They did all of this with profit in mind, not people, not young users.

03:05 There is nothing wrong with looking to make a profit, but we allege in our complaint that

03:11 Meta's unscrupulous and unconscionable conduct and its campaign of deception in order to

03:16 pursue that profit has gone beyond what is legally permissible and has contributed to

03:21 an ongoing mental health crisis among our children here in Massachusetts and of course

03:26 across the country.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended