Eleven-year-old Selena was apparently so addicted to Instagram and Snapchat that she suffered depression, eating disorders and sleep deprivation, before eventually killing herself, her mother Tammy Rodriguez claims. The woman, from Connecticut, sued the companies in San Francisco federal court this week.
According to the lawsuit, filed on Thursday against the platforms’ respective parent companies, Meta (formerly Facebook) and Snap, the photo-sharing and messaging apps lack parental control and “seek to exploit users’ susceptibility.” As an alleged result, the girl had “struggled for more than two years with an extreme addiction” and then took her own life in July last year.
While there are terms of service that warn that a person can only create an account from age 13 and older, the platforms lack strong age-verification checks, the lawsuit asserts. The absence of parental controls made it almost impossible for the mother to limit her child’s screen time on the social media, and apparently only caused further confrontations in the family.