David Bridges
A Virginia woman filed a lawsuit against Meta — the parent company of Instagram and Facebook — alleging the company knowingly unleashed a defectively designed product which is “addictive, harmful, and at times fatal to children,” according to court records.
In the civil complaint filed on Sept. 4 in San Mateo County, Laura Ashman, 21, of Fredricksburg, Va. said she became addicted to Instagram at age 12, scrolling through the site up to 10 hours per day. That usage, she added, caused her to develop a severe eating disorder and depression.
When Ashman was in 8th grade, according to court documents, she began a pattern of self-harm which resulted in multiple hospitalizations over her teenage years including a three-month residential treatment and various partial-hospitalization treatment programs.
Ashman is seeking unspecified compensatory damages for physical pain and mental anguish due to her Instagram addiction in addition to punitive damages which would prevent future negligence from the platform, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit comes just weeks after a separate lawsuit was filed on Aug. 26 in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco alleging the Meta Inc. platforms and Snapchat designed defective and dangerous products with algorithms that, among other problems, “attract, enable and facilitate child predators’ recruitment of unsuspecting child users,” according to court records.
Previn Warren, one of Ashman’s attorneys in the case, argued that the addictive nature of Instagram’s product design has created a public health crisis — specifically among preteen and teenage girls.
“There are teenagers and pre-teenagers all around the country who are suffering from serious mental health problems on account of their addiction to Instagram,” Warren said, pointing to the specific algorithms used by the app and Meta’s leaked research related to its affects. “At the end of the day it’s about the structure of the product. The algorithms and the product designer’s knowledge that the algorithm was going to be addictive.”
Ashman’s attorneys also included citations of internal Meta presentations from 2019 and 2020 in which the company concluded their product makes “body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” according to the complaint.
Warren — who said he attended Harvard University at the same time Meta Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg did — recalled the initial upset feelings his fellow students had at the school when Zuckerberg introduced Facemash, his precursor to Facebook, which invited Harvard student users to rank female students by their appearance by comparing their photos.
“This isn’t something I read in an article somewhere. I lived it,” he said. “The self esteem of others and mental health is something that Mark Zuckerberg has treated as collateral damage throughout his career.”
Meta Inc. could not be immediately reached for comment on Thursday night.
Joel Umanzor (he/him) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: joel.umanzor@sfchronicle.com
Sophie Langley
Maya Kensington
