New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday that his administration has filed a lawsuit against the parent firms of TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube, alleging that their services are damaging to the mental health of young adults and youngsters in the most important U.S. city.
The town of New York together with plaintiffs including the varsity district and health organizations filed the lawsuit within the Los Angeles county branch of the California Superior Court due to the firms’ ties to the world, attorneys wrote within the filing.
The suit alleges that Meta, Snap, ByteDance and Google (whose parent company is Alphabet) knowingly “designed, developed, produced, operated, promoted, distributed, and marketed their platforms to draw, capture, and addict youth, with minimal parental oversight.”
The plaintiffs allege that the tech firms violated several city laws related to public nuisance and gross negligence through the design and marketing of their addictive products. They claim that New York’s school districts and various health and social services have been severely impacted by children who’ve suffered negative mental health consequences stemming from their use of popular social media apps.
“Over the past decade, now we have seen just how addictive and overwhelming the net world could be, exposing our youngsters to a non-stop stream of harmful content and fueling our national youth mental health crisis,” Adams said in a statement. “Today, we’re taking daring motion on behalf of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to carry these firms accountable for his or her role on this crisis, and we’re constructing on our work to handle this public health hazard. This lawsuit and motion plan are part of a bigger reckoning that may shape the lives of our young people, our city, and our society for years to come back.”
A TikTok spokesperson said in an statement that the corporate has “industry-leading safeguards” for teens, including parental controls and features for age restrictions.
“We often partner with experts to grasp emerging best practices, and can proceed to work to maintain our community protected by tackling industry-wide challenges,” the spokesperson said.
A Google representative said the allegations are “simply not true.”
“Providing young individuals with a safer, healthier experience online has at all times been core to our work,” Google said. “In collaboration with youth, mental health and parenting experts, we have built services and policies to provide young people age-appropriate experiences, and fogeys robust controls.”
Meta said it’s “spent a decade working on these issues” and desires “teens to have protected, age-appropriate experiences online, and now we have over 30 tools and features to support them and their parents.”
A Snap spokesperson said that “Snapchat was intentionally designed to be different from traditional social media,” specializing in facilitating conversations with close friends.
“Snapchat opens on to a camera – slightly than a feed of content that encourages passive scrolling – and has no traditional public likes or comments,” the Snap spokesperson said. “While we are going to at all times have more work to do, we feel good in regards to the role Snapchat plays in helping close friends feel connected, completely satisfied and ready as they face the numerous challenges of adolescence.”
New York’s lawsuit echoes similar allegations made against Meta, Snap, TikTok and Alphabet in litigation filed in 2022 within the Northern District of California. Multiple school districts and individuals claim the businesses’ products “are defective because they’re designed to maximise screen time” and that they’ve resulted in various emotional and physical harms, including death.”
Social media firms have come under fire from lawmakers who’re pushing multiple bills just like the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, as a part of a broader appeal for regulation. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel attended a Senate Judiciary hearing in late January and faced tough questions from a bipartisan group of lawmakers about their alleged negligence in protecting kids.
Meanwhile, a coalition of over 40 attorneys general filed a joint federal lawsuit against Meta alleging that its products are addictive and harm mental health.
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