Suit: Constant Instagram content led young LIer to mental crisis

A Yaphank woman and her family have sued tech giant Meta, alleging that the company's Instagram site bombarded her with so much inappropriate content at an early age, she became suicidal and spent time in a hospital for depression and an eating disorder.

Alexis Spence, 19, and her parents, Kathleen and Jeffrey Spence, filed the federal lawsuit Monday in the Northern District of California, about eight months after a former employee of Meta released documents that detailed how the company, previously known as Facebook, designed features that encouraged addictive behavior among teenagers, leading to mental health problems.

“I don’t think anybody understood or knew that these products were harmful to girls or addictive before that,” said attorney Matthew Bergman, the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center of Seattle, which is representing the Spence family in the lawsuit. “It was clear to her family that Alexis was struggling, but the causal connection and the outrageous conduct was not known until the fall.”

Several other lawsuits have been recently filed in federal courts across the nation alleging that exposure to Facebook and Instagram led to suicides, attempted suicides, eating disorders and other mental health problems among teens, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for Meta declined to comment on the lawsuit Thursday but did provide information about features on Instagram that provide support for people with suicidal thoughts and body issues. The company also offers tools families can access to protect children and teens, the spokeswoman said. 

In addition to seeking unspecified monetary damages, the lawsuit aims to force Meta to enact safeguards its own workers have proposed, said Laura Marquez-Garrett, one of the lawyers bringing the suit.   

Now a student at St. Joseph’s University in North Patchogue, Alexis Spence told Newsday of Instagram: “It would show me harmful content at a very young age.”

When Spence opened her first Instagram account in 2013 at age 11, the lawsuit said, she did it without her parents’ permission and in violation of the platform’s policies, which bar children under age 13 from establishing accounts.

She was a happy, confident child who dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, according to the lawsuit. And her mother and father installed parental controls and scoured their daughter’s cellphone as well as other devices for inappropriate content.

But she learned from other users how to disable parental blocks and access apps needed to conceal accounts, including one that made her Instagram icon look like a calculator, according to the lawsuit.

The girl developed “anxiety, depression, self-harm, an eating disorder and suicidal thoughts” not long after establishing the account, according to the lawsuit. Her parents sought mental health treatment for her, but she refused to meet with the counselor after a few sessions.

“What they did was prey on her,” Kathleen Spence said of Instagram and Facebook. “My husband Jeffrey and I are very involved parents and Instagram was teaching my daughter to hide things from us, how to have an eating disorder and how to hide it from us. And how to lie to your parents.”

Their daughter also received explicit sexual communications from adults, according to the lawsuit. She was solicited for sexual content and acts on numerous occasions because Meta refuses to verify identity and age for new users, or implement safeguards to prevent young users from receiving inappropriate content, the suit alleges.

In 2018, according to the suit, officials at Bellport High School, where Alexis Spence was a student, told her mother that she had sent Instagram posts expressing a desire to hurt and possibly kill herself. The teen was hospitalized for 10 days for anorexia, major depressive disorder and anxiety.

She graduated from high school in June 2020 and started at St. Joseph’s University that September, but her eating disorder returned and required extensive outpatient treatment.

“I feel like there’s no 100% recovery,” she told Newsday. “I would say I’m in recovery now, and working to stay in recovery. Every day is not necessarily a struggle, but you have to stay in recovery.”