Ohio Joins Lawsuit To Sue Meta, Claiming It Harmed Young Users’ Mental Health to Boost Profits

The State of Ohio has joined a federal lawsuit today against Meta alleging that the social-media technology giant designed and deployed harmful features for Facebook and Instagram to addict young users to its platforms and enhance its bottom line.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims that Meta, instead of working to mitigate the damage inflicted by its social-media platforms, publicly concealed the severity of the psychological harm they cause, including addiction to the platforms, which could, and in some cases did, result in physical harm.

The lawsuit comes on the heels of the U.S. Surgeon General’s recent warning about a “youth mental health crisis” caused by the effects of social media: which has prompted suicides, devastated families and damaged a generation of young people. The report asserts that the influence of social media on youth mental health is shaped by many complex factors, including, but not limited to, the amount of time children and adolescents spend on platforms, the type of content they consume or are otherwise exposed to, the activities and interactions social media affords, and the degree to which it disrupts activities that are essential for health like sleep and physical activity. Social media also impacts children based on their individual strengths and vulnerabilities, and based on cultural, historical, and socio-economic factors. There is broad agreement across the scientific community that social media has the potential to both benefit and harm children and teens.

The report highlights the impact that social media has on not only brain functioning, but on the development of the brain itself. Frequent social media use may be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain in the amygdala (the area most closely associated with emotional learning and behavior) and the prefrontal cortex (important for impulse control, emotional regulation, and moderating social behavior). As such, adolescent social media use is predictive of a subsequent decrease in life satisfaction for certain developmental stages including girls 11-13 years old and boys 14-15 years old. As such, the US Surgeon General advises that heavy scrutiny is warranted in our evaluation of these systems – with the potential to take significant policy and regulatory actions for the purpose of protecting our youth from harm.