THE KIDS ARE NOT ALRIGHT –
March 13, 2023 – The revelations were disclosed in a lawsuit over social media addiction that had been filed previously but with key portions sealed from public view. An unredacted version filed over the weekend in federal court in Oakland, California, offers details about how much engineers and others, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, knew about the harms of social media and their misgivings about it.
“No one wakes up thinking they want to maximize the number of times they open Instagram that day,” one Meta employee wrote in 2021, according to the filing. “But that’s exactly what our product teams are trying to do.”
The case in Oakland comprises a collection of scores of complaints filed across the U.S. on behalf of adolescents and young adults who allege that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Google’s YouTube caused them to suffer anxiety, depression, eating disorders and sleeplessness. More than a dozen suicides also have been blamed on the companies, based on claims that they knowingly designed algorithms that drew children down dangerous and addictive paths. Several public school districts have filed suits, too, alleging they can’t fulfill their educational mission while students are coping with mental-health crises.
According to the new filing, internal documents at TikTok parent ByteDance show that the company knows young people are more susceptible to being lured into trying dangerous stunts they view on the platform – known as viral challenges – because their ability to weigh risk isn’t fully formed.
