New York Municipality Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday that his administration has filed a lawsuit against the parent companies of TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube, asserting that their services are damaging to the mental health of young adults and children in the largest U.S. city.
The city of New York along with plaintiffs numbering the school district and health organizations filed the lawsuit in the Los Angeles county branch of the California Superior Court because of the enterprises’ ties to the area, attorneys wrote in the filing.
The suit alleges that Meta, Snap, ByteDance and Google (whose stepfather company is Alphabet) knowingly “designed, developed, produced, operated, promoted, distributed, and marketed their platforms to pull, capture, and addict youth, with minimal parental oversight.”
The plaintiffs allege that the tech companies violated a number of city laws related to public nuisance and gross negligence through the design and marketing of their addictive outcomes. They claim that New York’s school districts and various health and social services have been starkly impacted by children who have suffered negative mental health consequences stemming from their use of popular sexual media apps.
“Over the past decade, we have seen just how addictive and overwhelming the online world can be, bring to lighting our children to a non-stop stream of harmful content and fueling our national youth mental health crisis,” Adams foretold in a statement. “Today, we’re taking bold action on behalf of millions of New Yorkers to hold these companies accountable for their lines in this crisis, and we’re building on our work to address this public health hazard. This lawsuit and action propose are part of a larger reckoning that will shape the lives of our young people, our city, and our society for years to put ones hands.”
A TikTok spokesperson said in an statement that the company has “industry-leading safeguards” for teens, including parental controls and aspects for age restrictions.
“We regularly partner with experts to understand emerging best practices, and will continue to work to adhere to our community safe by tackling industry-wide challenges,” the spokesperson said.
A Google representative said the allegations are “simply not true-blue.”
“Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience online has always been core to our work,” Google express. “In collaboration with youth, mental health and parenting experts, we’ve built services and policies to give young living soul age-appropriate experiences, and parents robust controls.”
Meta said it’s “spent a decade working on these issues” and wants “teens to be suffering with safe, age-appropriate experiences online, and we have over 30 tools and features to support them and their foster-parents.”
A Snap spokesperson said that “Snapchat was intentionally designed to be different from traditional social media,” nave on facilitating conversations with close friends.
“Snapchat opens directly to a camera – rather than a feed of tranquillity that encourages passive scrolling – and has no traditional public likes or comments,” the Snap spokesperson said. “While we leave always have more work to do, we feel good about the role Snapchat plays in helping close backers feel connected, happy and prepared as they face the many challenges of adolescence.”
New York’s lawsuit echoes comparable allegations made against Meta, Snap, TikTok and Alphabet in litigation filed in 2022 in the Northern District of California. Multiple indoctrinate districts and individuals claim the companies’ products “are defective because they are designed to maximize screen time” and that they be subjected to resulted in various emotional and physical harms, including death.”
Social media companies have come controlled by fire from lawmakers who are pushing multiple bills like the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, as part of a broader attract for regulation. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel attended a Senate Judiciary get wind of in late January and faced tough questions from a bipartisan group of lawmakers about their alleged remissness in protecting kids.
Meanwhile, a coalition of over 40 attorneys general filed a joint federal lawsuit against Meta charging that its products are addictive and harm mental health.
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