Meta, Facebook, Instagram Exploitation of Minors Class Action

Facebook claims to connect people: “It’s what we do.” This class action sues Meta Platforms, Inc. and related companies (Faceboook Holdings, LLLC, Facebook Operations, LLC, Facebook Technologies, LLC, and Instagram, LLC), alleging that they permit children younger than thirteen to sign up easily, produce addictive or compulsive behavior in them, and target by gender in ways that are harmful.

The complaint alleges, “Surveys indicate that forty-five percent of children older than nine but under the age of thirteen use Facebook on a daily basis—despite the fact that federal law prohibits sites like Facebook from having users under the age of thirteen.” Similarly, it says, forty percent of this group use Instagram. The complaint alleges that this is possible because they do not require age to be verified in any meaningful way.

The complaint quotes Facebook as saying it “include[s] robust safety tools” and “take[s] into account the unique need of teenagers who use our service.” It has also claimed that it does not want its products to be addictive, but the complaint claims that the opposite is true: “A series of recent bombshell revelations … have revealed that Meta intentionally designed and developed their products to work in ways that Meta knew to be problematic for and highly detrimental to their minor users’ mental health.”

Furthermore, the complaint alleges that the sites’ Newsfeed feature differentiates by gender: “Whistleblower revelations show that Meta’s newsfeeds perniciously reinforce gender stereotypes regarding appearance and body image, to users of all genders—though with particularly devastating effects of per-adolescent girls.”

The complaint discusses differences in the brains and brain chemistry of children and adolescents. It claims that these make “pre-adolescents … more emotional, more responsive to rewards, and more susceptible to boredom” and more prone to thrill-seeking behaviors, among other things, without the social, mental, and communal stabilizer factors that adults have developed.

The complaint claims that Meta saw these differences not as things that require protection but as an opportunity for itself, and that it exploited them to increase profitability.

Two classes and a number of state subclasses have been defined for this action:

• The Nationwide Unjust Enrichment Class is all persons under the age of thirteen who have Facebook or Instagram accounts and have used them for at least twenty-five hours at the time the class is certified in this case.
• The Nationwide Unruh Civil Rights Act Class is all persons under the age of thirteen who have Facebook or Instagram accounts and have used them for at least twenty-five hours at the time the class is certified in this case.
• The Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and Virginia Subclasses are all persons under the age of thirteen in each respective subclass state who have Facebook or Instagram accounts and have used them for at least twenty-five hours at the time the class is certified in this case.

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Minors
Tags: Children/Minors, Civil Rights, Unjust Enrichment