Tennessee’s attorney general is leading a bipartisan coalition of 42 states in suing Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, alleging that Instagram causes mental health harm to its young users.
“Meta has known for years that Instagram causes psychological harm to young users,” said Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti in a Tuesday press release. “Rather than take steps to reduce or disclose the harm, Meta leaned further in to its profit-maximizing approach that hurts kids. Targeting kids with a harmful product and lying about its safety violates the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act. Meta knows every last design decision that made Instagram addictive to kids and that means it knows exactly how to fix the problem. We’re suing to make the company fix the problem.”
According to the complaint filed in the Chancery Court of Davidson County for the Twentieth Judicial District at Nashville, Instagram “increased levels of depression and anxiety, increased hyperactivity, lack of sleep, and other mental health harms.”
Some of the 42 states have filed the lawsuit in their own jurisdictions.
The complaint alleges that Meta knew about these mental health concerns but that “concealed the extent of the harms suffered by young users addicted to the use of its platform.”
The release said that the lawsuit is largely based on a confidential investigation, the results of which have not yet been released to the public. The state has asked that redacted documents from the investigation be released to the public.
“This is a tough time in America,” Skrmetti said in a Tuesday press conference. “We have polarization the likes of which we have not seen since the Civil War. And so for all of the attorneys general from both parties, people who frequently disagree very vocally and very publicly, to all come together and to move in the same direction, I think that says something.”
“We share the attorneys general’s commitment to providing teens with safe, positive experiences online, and have already introduced over 30 tools to support teens and their families,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone reportedly said in response to the lawsuit. “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.”
Skrmetti is also leading a coalition of states in suing popular social media platform TikTok over similar mental health concerns.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on X / Twitter.
