The City of New York filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against a group of prominent social media platforms, including TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, accusing them of contributing to a mental health crisis among young people.
“Young people are now addicted en masse to the defendants’ platforms, significantly interfering with the operations of school districts and placing a heavy burden on cities, school districts, and public hospital systems that provide mental health services to young people ,” the 327-page lawsuit states.
The health care and hospital systems, public schools, and the city itself claim that, in an effort to maximize youth participation, corporations have neglected the mental health of young people.
Meta, along with Facebook and Instagram, is named in the lawsuit, along with TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, while Google, through its subsidiary YouTube, is also involved.
The city claims the companies have caused a “public nuisance” in the form of a mental health crisis among young people and accuses them of negligence for designing and marketing their youth-targeted platforms “in a way they know will cause serious harm.”
” Defendants’ platforms have triggered depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicidal tendencies among thousands of children, including young people in the New York plaintiffs’ community, to which the New York plaintiffs must respond,” they wrote . “Defendants have created a veritable national crisis.”
New York City had previously filed a lawsuit against social media companies in California in February 2024. A spokesperson said the city withdrew that lawsuit to file a similar case in New York, allowing it to participate in the multidistrict federal litigation.
Social media companies have long faced rigorous scrutiny regarding youth use of their platforms and their impact on them. Numerous states, including New York, have filed similar lawsuits against TikTok and Meta, accusing them of harming children’s mental health.
Google spokesman José Castañeda said in a statement that the lawsuit “fundamentally” misunderstands how YouTube works and suggested that the allegations are “simply not true.”
“ YouTube is a streaming service where people watch everything from live sports to podcasts to their favorite creators, primarily on TV screens, not a social network where people go to meet up with friends ,” Castañeda said.
Tech executives have been repeatedly subpoenaed by Congress to answer questions about their handling of children’s online safety.
The CEOs of Meta, Snap, TikTok, social media platform X, and Discord appeared before a Senate committee in January 2024, during which Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg turned around and apologized to families in the audience who had lost children to social media-related causes.
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