Family sues Meta, blames Instagram for daughter’s eating disorder, self-harm

Alexis Spence spiraled into depression and anxiety, and her eating disorder worsened, while using Instagram, the lawsuit claims.

A California family is suing Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, claiming that the tech giant helped fuel their daughter’s eating disorder, self-harm and thoughts of suicide over several years.

The lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California earlier this week, alleges that Alexis Spence was able to create her first Instagram account at the age of 11 — two years before she reached the platform’s minimum age requirement of 13, reports NBC News.

Almost immediately, Spence was flooded with an echo chamber of dangerous posts that glorified self-harm and anorexia, and created an addiction to the app for the preteen, the lawsuit states.

The Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC), a legal resource for parents of teenage victims harmed by social media addiction and online abuse, filed the lawsuit on behalf of Alexis and her parents, Kathleen and Jeffrey Spence, according to a press release via Business Wire.

The lawsuit relies heavily on internal Meta documents that were leaked by a whistleblower late last year, called the Facebook Papers. In the documents, Meta refers to preteens as “herd animals” who “want to find communities where they can fit in.”

It alleges that when Alexis opened her first Instagram account in 2013 the then-fifth-grader was directed to sites and information promoting eating disorders. Scared that her parents might find out, “Alexis was able to find other users’ content explaining how to download an application that would disguise her Instagram icon as a calculator icon to hide her social media accounts from her parents,” the press release reads.

By May 2014, Alexis opened a second Instagram account using her school email address, and was still able to use the account despite not being able to access her email inbox to authenticate the account. Meanwhile, Meta continued to implement features and functions that increased her exposure to harmful content.

Documents publicly produced for the first time in the lawsuit show that Meta “references the practice by teen users opening multiple accounts to evade parental authority as a ‘value add proposition,'” states the SMVLC.