MAKES MARLBORO LOOK JUDICIOUS –
Nov. 26, 2025 – Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat know exactly how addictive their platforms can be to teens. And they continue to target teen users anyway. “IG (Instagram) is a drug … we’re basically pushers,” Meta researchers said in an internal chat. TikTok noted that “minors do not have executive mental function to control their screen time.” Snapchat executives once acknowledged that users who “have the Snapchat addiction have no room for anything else. Snap dominates their life.”
And staffers within YouTube once said that “[d]riving more frequent daily usage [was] not well-aligned with … efforts to improve digital wellbeing,” the filing states.
The brief containing the internal comments, research and employee testimony has been presented as evidence in a massive lawsuit brought by hundreds of individuals, school districts and attorneys general from across the United States against the four companies — Instagram-parent Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube-parent Google — in the Northern District Court of California.
The platforms “deliberately embedded design features in their platforms to maximize youth engagement to drive advertising revenue,” the complaint claims. And the school districts allege that the social media companies have contributed to a youth mental health crisis that schools must address by investing in counseling and other resources.
