A Massachusetts appeals court has just said “no” to Meta. Mark Zuckerberg’s company had requested the dismissal of a class action lawsuit accusing it of causing child addiction with its Instagram platform. But the court not only rejected the request: it opened the door to one of the most important trials that could define the responsibility of social media over the mental health of the youngest users.
What exactly is Meta being accused of?
The state attorney general, Andrea Joy Campbell, accuses Meta of having designed Instagram to hook younger users with a clear purpose: to create addicts.
According to the lawsuit, features carried out on Instagram such as infinite scroll, autoplay, or the absence of real age verification are not accidental, but strategies designed to capture attention, generate dependency, and take advantage of the emotional vulnerability of children and teenagers.
It is not a content problem: it is how the app works
Unlike other lawsuits, here it is not about what users publish. The problem, says the prosecution, lies in the very design of the platform, in how Instagram was built to be addictive, especially for minors.
What did Meta argue?
Meta tried to have the case dismissed by arguing two things:
- That they were protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields platforms from lawsuits over third-party content.
- By invoking the First Amendment to claim that this amendment protects users’ freedom of expression.
But the court did not accept their arguments, as they consider that this case is not about user posts, but about corporate decisions made about the application, and about how Meta lied about its risks. So the trial moves forward.
The prosecution accuses Meta of lying
According to Andrea Joy Campbell, while Instagram has been sold as a safe place for young people, Meta’s own internal documents told a different story. The complaint says that company executives minimized the problem in interviews knowing that the platform seriously affected the mental health of minors.
What effects does all this have on minors?
Teenagers spend hours on Instagram and get trapped on the platform, spending hours constantly comparing themselves, idealizing bodies and lives that are impossible… The result?
Anxiety, depression, body image disorders, eating disorders, and even social isolation… A disorder has even been catalogued called “Selfie Dysphoria,” where children do not accept their real faces simply because they want to look like they do with filters.
They are just children, who should be playing, laughing as always, and instead are going to psychologists to treat these kinds of problems. Are social networks even good for adults?
What comes next?
It is possible that Meta executives will have to testify and that internal documents we do not yet know about could come to light. If Meta loses, it could not only face multimillion-dollar fines, it could also be forced to change the design of Instagram. And at the same time, it would put pressure on other platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, or YouTube, which have similar formats.
What happens with this lawsuit against Meta could change many things in the digital world we know today.
For millions of families concerned about the impact of social media on their children, it could be the opportunity to start setting clear limits on a field that until now no one had dared to enter.