Attorney General Lynn Fitch today filed an amended, unsealed complaint in the Chancery Court for the First Judicial District of Hinds County against Meta alleging that the company knowingly designed and deployed harmful features on its social media platforms that purposefully addict children and teens. In the amended complaint, the state now also alleges negligence, citing internal communications as evidence that Meta breached their duty to make its platforms reasonably safe for young users by creating harmful and addictive platforms, misleading users on their impact, and failing to provide adequate warnings to users and their parents.
“Meta has been conducting a social experiment on our children’s developing brains by making harmful platforms that were purposefully addictive and failing to warn users and their parents,” said General Fitch. “In addition to holding Meta accountable, it is my hope that through this lawsuit, the public will finally know the true impact of social media platforms on youth’s mental and physical health and safety.”
The state details through internal presentations and communications that Meta knew the platform had a harmful impact on teens. According to the company’s own survey of users in September and October 2018, “33% of people hav[e] been feeling worse about themselves on [Instagram] for ‘several months to a year.'” And that same survey found that teen girls are eight times more likely to engage in negative social comparison due to Instagram use. In November 2019, Meta internally published the results of a 22,000-person survey that found “at least 1 in 2 [Instagram] users had experienced at least one mental health related issue in the last 30 days.”
Internal communications also revealed that Meta intentionally created the product to be addictive. In a December 2015 communication, CEO Zuckerberg listed as one of Meta’s goals for 2016: “Time spent [on the Platforms] increase[] by 12%” over the following three years. And as of November 2016, Meta’s “overall goal remain[ed] total teen time spent … with some specific efforts (Instagram) taking on tighter focused goals like U.S. teen total time spent.” A May 2020 internal presentation conceded, “due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even though they want to – our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the amount of time they spend on our app.”
By Meta’s own internal measure, only 2% of content that young people encounter on its platforms is “age appropriate nutritious” or “the sort of content we would like to promote to teens.” Still, a “pre-read” 2018 internal document acknowledged that Meta “[does] very little to keep [under 13-year-olds] off our platform,” and Facebook’s registration process doesn’t prevent their creating accounts.
Meta knew what it was doing and failed to make changes because it interfered with its business strategy. Meta’s leadership, including its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, repeatedly declined employees’ requests to fund measures that would reduce Instagram’s known harms and then limited internal access to any incriminating findings to keep the public from discovering the truth. One internal email from September 2018 indicates that, according to Meta, “The lifetime value of a 13 [year old] teen is roughly $270 per teen.”
A detailed summary of the complaint, including internal quotes by Meta personnel, is available here.
General Fitch filed the initial lawsuit on October 24, 2023. On the same day, seven other states filed parallel complaints and 34 Attorneys General filed two federal complaints.