After the suicide of her daughter, a mother files a complaint against the editors of Instagram and Snapchat

Eleven years. It’s very young to surf without parental control on the Internet or on your smartphone, and at that age, the law prohibits having a personal account on social networks. This is the case in France, but also in the United States where the “majority digital is set at 13 years. Unfortunately, teens and tweens, girls and boys, easily circumvent this ban and, in Connecticut, a mother decided to attack Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp…) and Snapchat after the suicide of her 11-year-old daughter Selena in July 2021.

In her complaint, this mother explains that her daughter ” struggled for more than two years with an extreme addiction to Instagram and Snapchat to the point of being followed by a therapist. A addiction impossible to control by social networks, forcing this mother to confiscate smartphone, Tablet and computer so that his daughter no longer connects.

Apps knowingly designed to be addictive

This addiction has led to a lack of sleep, truancy, eating disorders, and eventually suicide. An addiction linked to rewards on Snapchat “ similar to a slot machine, but marketed to teenage users who are even more likely than gambling addicts” can we read in the complaint. An addiction linked to this dictatorship of likes and followers, a form of reward on certain social networks.

Concretely, the complaint has been filed Thursday in a California court, by the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC), a Seattle-based legal advocacy group, and she holds responsible for the suicide of Selena Rodriguez “ faulty design, negligence and unreasonably dangerous characteristics of the products from Meta and Snapchat. This grouping adds that these publishers ” knowingly and willfully designed, manufactured, marketed and sold social media products that were unreasonably harmful because they were designed to be addictive for underage users”.

After addiction, harassment

Beyond the phenomena of addiction and dependence, the documents reveal that the teenager ” was approached for sexually abusive content by adult male Instagram and Snapchat users”. Offenses made possible by the lack of verification of the identity and age of subscribers, and which had led the teenager to send sexually explicit images on Snapchat, recovered and shared by her classmates.

This complaint comes a few months after the hearings in France and the United States of whistleblower Frances Haugen which had revealed the practices of Meta, more concerned with its profits than with the protection of its users. At the same time, and faced with attacks from child protection advocates, Meta had chosen to suspend its project to create an Instagram application dedicated to children.