The Washington Post chronicles a story played out in countless households across America. At age 11, Alexis Spence secretly downloaded Instagram, using advice from other users on how to evade detection by her watchful parents and the company’s age algorithm. She developed an addiction that kept her awake late at night scrolling through feeds that glorified anorexia and self-harm. Eight years later, she is still struggling with a host of mental health conditions – anxiety, depression, an eating disorder, and suicidal thoughts that led to hospitalization – and her parents are suing the company they say is responsible.

The Spence family is citing information made public by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower. In 2021, Haugen, exposed Facebook’s internal documents to the press in what have been called the Facebook Papers. Haugen had worked for Facebook on the civil integrity team but became frustrated with the company’s lack of progress in fixing the social network’s problems; instead she quit, instead deciding to release documents publicly to pressure Facebook to change.

In them, Facebook discussed its own internal research on the effect its apps had on teens, noting their marked negative effect on the mental health of young women in particular. One slide acknowledged that “we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”

That was the experience of the Spence family, who are among a growing group of families suing Meta, arguing that “the company not only addicted them or their children, but did so knowing the harms it could pose.” The Spence’s lawyer Matthew Bergman, who has twenty-five years of experience suing asbestos companies, founded the Social Media Victims Law Center. “When I read the Facebook Papers, it made the asbestos companies look like choirboys,” he said. “It’s one thing to manufacture a product that you know or should have known is unsafe; it’s another thing to intentionally addict children, knowing that their frontal cortexes are undeveloped, with the sole intention of maximizing your profits.”

Although Mark Zuckerberg adamantly denies the allegations and stresses the steps his company has taken to address child safety, whistleblower Haugen testified to Congress in the fall of 2021 that the company “prioritized its bottom line over the safety of its users.”

In response to Haugen’s testimony, Director of Policy Communications Lena Pietsch released a Facebook statement:  “We don’t agree with her characterization of the many issues she testified about. Despite all this, we agree on one thing; it’s time to begin to create standard rules for the internet. It’s been 25 years since the rules for the internet have been updated, and instead of expecting the industry to make societal decisions that belong to legislators, it is time for Congress to act.”

The Spence family’s lawsuit alleges that the company “purposefully does not verify or check email account authenticity, at least in part so that it claim plausible deniability as to the millions of young children using its application that are below the age of thirteen.” Alexis Spence, like many tweens, easily obtained illicit accounts using a fake email address and a school email without an inbox. The Facebook Papers show that Meta saw “finstas” or fake Instagram accounts as a potential growth driver for the company. On one of these fake accounts, Alexis was continually exposed to content that damaged her mental health, even after her parents discovered her initial account.

Alexis battled mental health conditions for years, while her parents and mental health professionals searched for the cause. It was not until the Facebook Papers came out that the Spences realized what they were up against. “Behind closed doors,” says Kathleen Spence, “Facebook had documentation: how addicted these kids were and how they can keep them more addicted and how they can get them to have multiple accounts.”

The lawsuit alleges that parents like Kathleen Spence can do “everything right,” but the internal documents show social media companies actively undermining parents’ efforts to protect their children. “She did everything a reasonable parent would be expected to do,” Bergman said, “But these products were explicitly designed to frustrate those efforts, to Alexis’s disadvantage.”