A 19-year-old girl and her family are suing Meta, alleging that the company willfully built ‘addictive’ features that led to the development of an eating disorder and suicidal thoughts in her at such a young age.
The first-of-its-kind action, filed Monday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, is based in part on a cache of stolen internal Meta papers that suggest the internet giant was aware of Instagram’s negative impact on teenage girls’ mental health.
The complaint was brought by the Social Media Victims Law Center, a Seattle-based organization that works for families of children who have been hurt online, according to DailyMail.com.
on behalf of Alexis Spence, a 19-year-old woman who set up her first Instagram account at the age of 11 without her parents’ permission and in breach of the platform’s 13-year-old minimum age limit.
It claims that Instagram’s artificial intelligence directed the then-fifth-grader to accounts celebrating anorexia and self-cutting, as well as new features designed to make the program more addictive.
Spence has been hospitalized for despair, anxiety, and anorexia as a result of ‘the toxic content and features Instagram persistently marketed and gave to her,’ according to her lawyers, and ‘fights to stay in recovery everyday.’
Instagram officials declined to comment when approached by DailyMail.com.
‘Alexis was a confident and cheerful child who loved reading, writing, and helping people and animals,’ according to the lawsuit.
‘She aspired to work as a veterinarian.’ She participated in singing competitions and theater productions, and she loved being in the spotlight and sought out opportunities to do so.’
It alludes to her 2012 notebooks, which were chock-full of images of her and her family laughing and having fun on vacations.
When she was ten years old, she received her first Internet-enabled tablet gadget for Christmas in 2012. She mostly utilized the device to make Webkinz films and play with Webkinz toy animals that came with a code to play online.
However, once she entered fifth grade, her classmates began to taunt her for not having an Instagram account, and ‘her friends informed her that she needed to make an account and that she could open one even if her parents said “no,”‘ according to the lawsuit.
So, when Alexis was 11 years old, she created her own Instagram account and began posting regularly about her age, writing: ‘Hello, I’m 12 years old and I love Webkinz.’
According to the lawsuit, she began to show signs of sadness in November of that year, and her parents sought mental health care, despite the fact that they were unaware she was on social media at the time.
Alexis had seen posts from other users describing how to get your parents’ PIN to disable parental controls and what apps you’d need to hide Instagram.
The software she was using turned the Instagram icon into a calculator, which she placed next to other utility apps.
According to the lawsuit, Alexis opened her second Instagram account on May 23, 2014, using a school-issued email address that she did not have inbox access to and thus could not authenticate, but she was still able to use the program.
Soon, it claims, she began to see her mother as overprotective, irrational and wrong as she tried to limit Alexis’ screen time.
Alexis received her first mobile in December 2013, a slide-phone that her parents gave her in case she needed to call them while she stayed after school, but after much pleading, her parents bought her a smartphone the following year for a low price.
They set up parental controls and forbade her from bringing her phone into her room at night. They also allegedly installed parental controls on their home computer, but the lawsuit claims that ‘Alexis used what she learned on Instagram to circumvent those protections and obtain even more access to Instagram, because now she could use Instagram all day while at school on her cell phone,’ according to the lawsuit.
She drew a picture of herself crying on the floor next to her phone four months later, according to the lawsuit, with comments like’stupid, ugly, obese’ flowing from the screen and ‘murder yourself’ in a thought bubble.
The site began recommending pages displaying emaciated young ladies and models at that point, according to the lawsuit, and began pushing extreme weight loss information and bulimic purging instructions on her.
Those pages then directed her to hashtags including the terms ‘ana’ and ‘pro-ana,’ abbreviations for anorexia, and advised her to ‘friend’ people with eating disorders.
According to the lawsuit, Alexis began saving anorexic model photographs as’motivation’ whenever she felt hungry and began purging.
Her parents eventually discovered she was on social media, but she was already beyond the age of 13 at the time, and she had only reported that she had one account, according to the report.
Alexis’ parents were aware of her self-harm and eating disorder in early 2018, according to the lawsuit, and sought counseling for her, as well as a therapy dog named ‘Draco.’
Nonetheless, Alexis’ school contacted her mother, Kathleen, on May 8, 2018, regarding images and Instagram posts Alexis had made showing a wish to self-harm and revealing suicide ideas.
‘I hate myself and I hate my body, and I’m here on the bathroom floor crying,’ she wrote in the posts.
‘Please don’t worry about me; I’m a waste of time and space, and everything would be better without me; all I do is make people miserable.’
Alexis was subsequently reportedly hospitalized for ten days due to ‘Anorexia Nervosa and associated purging tendencies, as well as serious depressive disorder and anxiety,’ according to reports.
Alexis is currently in remission and will begin her college career at St. Joseph’s University in September 2020, according to the complaint. However, shortly after she began her college career, Alexis relapsed and required lengthy outpatient treatment once more, according to the lawsuit.
‘She must be in close contact with her doctors and battles to stay in recovery every day,’ according to the lawsuit. Alexis has not erased all of her Instagram profiles.
‘Because of what Instagram has done, Alexis will suffer lifelong mental and emotional harm,’ it claims, adding that ‘Alexis’ doctors have also cautioned that long-term bodily harm is likely.’
She now lives with her parents on Long Island, New York and ‘cannot live the independent and successful life she had planned for herself.’
Meta’s complaint comes less than a year after a former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, leaked secret documents suggesting the company built features that encourage addictive behavior in pre-teens while also encouraging eating disorders.
Former employees claim that the so-called Facebook Papers reveal a substantial quantity of data that proves the social media conglomerate is aware of many of its problems, including the devastating impact it has on its users’ mental health, particularly young girls.
According to the documents, Facebook had known for two years that Instagram was poisonous for young girls but continued to add beauty-editing filters to the app, despite six percent of suicidal girls in the United States blaming it for their desire to kill themselves.
When Facebook researches first alerted the company of the issue in 2019, the documents showed, they said: ‘We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.’
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An increase in the rate of anxiety and sadness among teenagers is blamed on Instagram, according to them. This was an unprompted reaction that was shared by all groups.’
In March 2020, a statement on an internal message board stated that the app found that 32% of girls said Instagram made them feel worse about their bodies if they already have issues.
As a result, according to Haugen, the app spreads an epidemic of eating disorders, body shaming, and self-dissatisfaction among young people.
‘There will be people walking around this world with brittle bones in 60 years because of the choices Facebook makes today about valuing profit,’ she said, referring to the consequences of eating disorders.
‘What’s super tragic is Facebook’s own research says, as these young women begin to consume this — this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed. And it actually makes them use the app more,’ Haugen told CBS’ 60 Minutes in October before testifying before Congress about its negative affects.
Spence’s attorneys now argue that these documents prove Meta knowingly peddled a dangerous product.
They claim the company put profit over people, with Kathleen telling NBC News. there was nothing she could have done to save her daughter ‘because we are fighting a multibillion dollar corporation and we have two different interests at heart, and their interest is not my daughter.’
‘If you look at the extensive research that it performed, they knew exactly what they were doing to kids, and they kept doing it,’ Matthew P Bergman, the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center who is representing Spence and her family, added.
‘I wish that I could say that Alexis’ case is aberrational,’ he continued. ‘The only aberration is that she survived.’