Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

Facebook’s own research has found both positive and negative effects, depending on the child’s status among their peers.

The Verge is quick to point out that:

> Instagram makes teen girls feel worse about their bodies

but more discreet in reminding people that fashion magazines, including The Cut (also published by Vox), have the same negative effects and none of the positive ones, like helping gender minority find a safe space, re-socialising people with physical handicaps or anxiety. The critique makes sense —I’m not denying it— but it doesn’t come. from “the algorithm.” It comes from having a lot of money poured into the Instagram creation ecosystem. Instagram has very little control over that as most of it is through brand deals or magazine raising their own profile. That behemoth of money and attention comes from an industry that has decades of well-documented problematic practices behind it, including the unrepentant glorification of using self-starvation and drugs, notably cocaine, to reach unhealthy thinness.

If you condemn Instagram but don’t include that industry among the culprits, you’ll have Snap with unhealthy models, TikTok with unhealthy models, or whatever comes next with unhealthy models.

All these companies know they're a target for accountability now, and even many people inside of them acknowledge a need for reform and possibly restitution. Your comment seems focused on the practical matters of these lawsuits (many of which probably are frivolous or will otherwise be lost), but what really matters are the unsettled societal costs that transcend them.

You may feel that accountability is being "misplaced", but it's much bigger than ambulance chasers and grandstanders. People are genuinely concerned about real problems and are hungry for some kind of action on them.

Unfortunately the studies are reasonably solid. They aren't double-blind control group studies but they are correlative, so not the highest most pure studies. Social media use seems to be heavily correlated with depression and other markers of mental illness and struggle.

That isn't very surprising - social media networks are designed for "engagement" and that comes from strong negative emotions. If you constantly bombard someone with a drip feed of negative emotions.. that probably does them harm.

This doesn't mean the litigants will prevail because correlation and causation aren't 1:1 but it's probably a good idea to push your kid away from social media by explaining this to them.

Suicides seem to have gone up and social media use might have something to do with it.

https://news.byu.edu/intellect/10-year-byu-study-shows-eleva...

> Girls who used social media for at least two to three hours per day at the beginning of the study—when they were about 13 years old—and then greatly increased their use over time were at a higher clinical risk for suicide as emerging adults.

https://socialmediavictims.org/mental-health/suicide/

> Over the last ten years, there has been a significant rise in the risk of teenage suicide. Although several factors play a role in an individual’s choice to take their life, recent studies have established connections between mental health issues such as depression and suicidal ideation, and social media usage.