The state joined a coalition of 41 attorneys general in launching lawsuits against the California-based social media giant alleging that the company, “intentionally designed and deployed harmful features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children and teens.”
New Hampshire’s attorney general has released an unredacted version of the state’s complaint against Facebook- and Instagram-parent Meta Platforms to underscore the fight against the alleged “harms its platforms inflict on kids.”
“The people of New Hampshire can now see that Meta’s own documents acknowledge the harms its platforms inflict on kids,” said New Hampshire AG John Formella. “Meta not only knows that its products exploit the vulnerabilities of children’s developing brains, it actively studies the most effective ways to ‘hack’ the brain chemistry of children for profit. We will continue to prosecute this matter to stop Meta’s unlawful conduct and protect New Hampshire’s kids.”
READ THE COMPLAINT: NH Meta complaint
In October, the state joined a coalition of 41 attorneys general — including Massachusetts’ AG Andrea Campbell — in launching lawsuits against the California-based social media giant alleging that the company, as the New Hampshire AG statement alleges, “intentionally designed and deployed harmful features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children and teens to their mental and physical detriment.”
The lawsuits followed newspaper reporting dating back to 2021 that highlighted Meta’s own internal research that found that the company knew about the harms Instagram can cause teenagers — especially teen girls — when it comes to mental health and body image issues. One internal study cited 13.5% of teen girls saying Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 17% of teen girls saying it makes eating disorders worse.
Meta, in a response shared with the Herald on Oct. 24, said that it shares “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. 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.”
The company included with the statement a lengthy list of the ways it “already works to support young people on its platforms,” including more than 30 tools it says can support teens on its apps, including setting the accounts of teens to private, the use of age-verification technology, a medley of parental supervision tools that allow for time limits and supervision over who their child blocks and reports, and providing expert resources when teens search for sensitive topics including self-injury or body image issues.
Further, the company said that the problems addressed in the lawsuits would be better addressed as cross-industry standards, as there are other platforms — including TikTok and Snapchat that are just as, if not more, popular amongst young people — that offer up similar risks but that have not been singled out in the complaints.
In the statement announcing the unredacted complaint, AG Formella said that ⅔ of his state’s residents actively used Facebook and more than half of residents actively used Instagram and that the company had made some $540,000 in profit from users it has identified as being connected to the state in 2023 alone.
“This fight isn’t a fair one: the odds have been stacked against New Hampshire families by Meta’s experimental use of psychology, neurology, and manipulative design tactics to build apps that children cannot resist,” the New Hampshire complaint states in its introduction
The complaint adds that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg — who they claim unilaterally vetoed a plan to ban photo filters on the platforms that simulate the effects of plastic surgery — said that “‘unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.’ True to that ethos, in its rush to ‘mov[e] fast enough,’ Meta has frequently been ‘breaking’ the mental health, well-being, and trust of its youngest users.”
