Rio Rancho teen's suicide prompts suit against social media giants

Jul. 9—The parents of a Rio Rancho teenager who took her own life in 2020 have filed a lawsuit accusing Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok of causing their daughter's death by designing products to be addictive to children even though the companies knew social media can harm a child's mental health.

Children's developing brains are particularly vulnerable to digital psychological tools designed by social media makers, according to the complaint filed Tuesday in state District Court in Santa Fe, which alleges the platforms purposefully leveraged that for economic gain.

"The unconscionable business model of [the defendants] is to create and sustain addiction to their social media products in millions of minors and then manipulate and control the behavior of these minors to generate billions of dollars in advertising revenue," the complaint says.

"[The defendants] hired the brightest minds in the industry to design ... [products] to create and sustain addiction in their users ... using digital psychological tools ... such as likes, follows, tags, notifications and reminders as well as powerful algorithms," the lawsuit states. "... [The defendants] manipulate children to engage in a repetitive and dopamine-driven feedback loop of viewing, watching, sharing, liking and tagging photographs, videos and stories."

Santa Fe attorney Joleen Youngers represents the estate of the 17-year-old girl — identified in the complaint only by her initials — who died of a self-inflicted gunshot two years ago during a mental health crisis exacerbated by a sexual assault and her parents' decision to take away her cellphone and access to social media, according to a complaint.

The social media companies did not respond to emails sent to press contacts Friday seeking comment on the case.

According to the lawsuit, the girl began using Instagram — now owned by Meta, the parent company of Facebook — and Snapchat on an iPod Touch when she was only 9 or 10 years old.

While the social media giants generally have policies prohibiting kids under 13 from creating accounts, the reality is — and the companies have known for years — that children use their products, but they have allowed the practice to continue without implementing any safeguards, the lawsuit alleges.

The Rio Rancho girl got a smartphone when she was 12 or 13, the lawsuit says, and her use of social media platforms accelerated because of her near constant ability to access the internet.

She became addicted, as the companies intended, the lawsuit says, "oftentimes staying up most the night" using Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.

She lost interest in other activities and her schoolwork, and other relationships suffered. On occasions in which she was denied access to social media, the suit says, she experienced withdrawal symptoms including anger, irritability, anxiety and sadness.

While in high school, the lawsuit says, the girl was "bullied and blackmailed" by "at least" two teenage boys "who used Snapchat to torment her."

Taking advantage of her already vulnerable mental state, the complaint says, the boys — both minors named as defendants in the complaint — convinced her to send explicit photographs of herself, which they later used to blackmail her into granting them sexual favors.

Snapchat's auto delete function — posts automatically disappear after 24 hours — and lack of filters to detect nudity makes the platform especially enticing to underage users who want to elude parental supervision and control, the lawsuit says.

Twenty-eight percent of TikTok users are under 18, according to the suit.

During the first week of July 2020, the suit alleges, one of the boys used direct messaging on social media to set up a meeting with the girl in Santa Fe, where he sexually assaulted her and another girl.

The teenager was despondent in the days following the incident, the lawsuit says, and July 8, 2020, her parents, unaware of her recent trauma, took away her phone and access to social media.

"That night [she] committed suicide by shooting herself with a 12-gauge shotgun," the complaint says.

"The explosion of social media platform use by children ... resulted in the emergence of the current mental health crisis among children and teenagers," the lawsuit says, citing a 2018 Pew Research Center study that found 45 percent of high school students reported using social media daily and 24 percent reported being online "almost constantly."

Suicide rates among children ages 12 to 16 increased 146 percent in the United States between 2007 and 2018, according to the lawsuit.

Meta internal documents show the company referred to teen users as addicts and said "we make body image worse for one in 3 teen girls," according to the product liability lawsuit, which seeks an unspecified amount of actual and punitive damages from the defendants.

Texas-based attorney Anthony Bruster, who filed the complaint on behalf of the girl's parents, said there isn't a lot of established law in the realm of suing social media platforms for causing death or injury.

"There are a couple of dozen of these cases that have been filed in the last few months around the nation," he said. "This is the first in New Mexico, but I expect to file several others in the next few weeks. ... It's sort of a cutting-edge but growing area of the law, an attempt basically to hold the social media companies accountable."