Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc., ByteDance Inc., and Google LLC all deliberately designed social media products to be addictive to adolescents and created a youth mental health crisis that is straining city resources, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by the City of New York.
The complaint is the latest addition to sprawling litigation against technology companies across multiple jurisdictions and courts. The city’s complaint targeted features on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.
The companies designed, marketed, and distributed their platforms to “maximize the number of children,” using “algorithms that wield data as a weapon against children and fuel the ...