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In 2013, eleven-year-old Alexis Spence, a fifth grader, joined Instagram after her classmates made fun of her for not having a social media account.1 She was two years under the platform’s minimum age requirement to open an account, but other user content showed her how to obtain a parent’s passcode to disable parental blocks to the social media platform.2 On her tablet,3 she made her Instagram app icon look like a calculator to hide it from her parents.4 After joining the app, Alexis was confronted with algorithm-driven content portraying underweight models and links to extreme dieting websites that glorified anorexia nervosa, negative body image, and self-harm.5 When she was twelve years old, Alexis drew a picture of herself crying on the floor next to her phone with words like “stupid,” “ugly,” and “fat” emanating from the screen, and “kill yourself” in a thought bubble.6 She saved pictures of anorexic models as “motivation” to look at whenever she felt hungry.7 Months after opening the Instagram account, Alexis started showing signs of depression and her parents sought mental health treatment, but she refused to continue to see a therapist after a handful of initial sessions.8 In Instagram posts she shared in spring 2018, Alexis wrote: “I hate myself and my body….Please stop caring about me, I’m a waste of time and space.”9 Alerted by school counselors to the posts, Alexis’s parents had her hospitalized.10 Alexis was suffering from an eating disorder, anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts.11
As a result of Alexis’s exposure to Instagram’s toxic algorithm practices, she underwent years of professional counseling through in-patient and out-patient programs, participated in eating disorder treatment services, used a service dog, and required ongoing medical attention to ensure she did not relapse.12 In June 2022, at the age of nineteen, the Social Media Victims Law Center filed a personal injury lawsuit on behalf of Alexis in California federal court alleging that Meta Platforms, Inc. (Meta), Instagram’s parent company, purposely designed its social media platform to addict young users, and that Meta steered her down a years-long path of physical and psychological harm.13
Social media algorithms that push extreme content to vulnerable youth are linked to a...