Latest York City Mayor Eric Adams said on Wednesday that his administration has filed a lawsuit against social media corporations including Meta Platforms’ Facebook and Instagram for fueling mental health crisis among the many youth.
The lawsuit, filed within the California Superior Court, also includes Alphabet’s YouTube, Snap’s Snapchat and ByteDance’s TikTok and alleges that the businesses intentionally designed their platforms to “purposefully manipulate and addict children and teenagers to social media applications.”
Meta, TikTok and YouTube already face lots of of lawsuits filed on behalf of youngsters and college districts over the addictiveness of social media.
“Over the past decade, we now have seen just how addictive and overwhelming the web world may be, exposing our kids to a non-stop stream of harmful content and fueling our national youth mental health crisis,” Adams said in an announcement.
Social media corporations have come under intense scrutiny as regulators push them to guard children from harmful content.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg last month apologized to families at a Senate hearing concerning the impact that social media has on children.
A Meta spokesperson said the corporate wanted teens to have “secure, age-appropriate experiences online,” while TikTok said it is going to proceed to work to maintain the community secure by tackling industry-wide challenges.
“We’ve built services and policies to offer young people age-appropriate experiences, and fogeys robust controls. The allegations on this grievance are simply not true,” Google’s spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in an announcement.
