Meta sued by over three dozen U.S states over “addictive” designs on Facebook and Instagram

Attorney generals in 33 U.S. states have jointly filed a lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, accusing the tech giant of intentionally designing features to get young children and teenagers addicted to their services. Eight other states and the District of Columbia have filed a separate version of the suit with most of the same claims.

The suit alleges that Meta broke consumer protection laws with products that harmed the mental health of underage users. Meta is accused of purposefully enticing young users to spend more time on their platforms and "employing harmful and psychologically manipulative platform features while misleading the public about the safety of those features."

It is contended that when Meta was confronted with the detrimental effects of their platforms, the company ignored or downplayed the problems. Further federal law was broken, the suit alleges, when Facebook began collecting user data on under 13-year-olds without parental consent.

The suit is the result of an investigation originally announced by Los Angeles Attorney General Rob Bota in November 2021. “Our bipartisan investigation has arrived at a solemn conclusion," Bota said in a statement announcing the lawsuit, "Meta has been harming our children and teens, cultivating addiction to boost corporate profits."

When reached for comment by Variety, Meta offered the following response:

“We share the attorneys general’s commitment to providing teens with safe, positive experiences online, and have already introduced more than 30 tools to support teens and their families. We’re disappointed that instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path.”

The suit seeks unspecified financial penalties as well as injunctions against Meta that would prevent the company from using the offending tools in the states named in the lawsuit.

In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published an internal Facebook memo containing research Meta had commissioned itself which showed the negative effects its products were having on younger users. This year, United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy raised alarm over a "youth mental health crisis" stoked in part by social media platforms.