As part of our It’s Not You, It’s Them content series, we partnered with Design It For Us to share stories of how social media and Big Tech have impacted Gen Zers.
I was 16 when I got Instagram. Nobody sat me down and explained what I was signing up for, partly because my parents didn’t know, but mostly because the people who built it were counting on that.
A Los Angeles jury just found Meta and Google liable for the mental health damage done to a young woman who started using their platforms as a small child. Good. But the verdict isn’t even the most important part of what came out of that courtroom. The internal documents are.
Meta’s own employees described Instagram, in writing, as a drug. Someone on the inside watching it happen wrote, “We’re basically pushers.” Another memo laid out the company’s strategy for teen growth: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.” They were talking about us as young girls. They wrote it down. They kept going.
And the math backed them up! By 2015, Instagram had over four million users under 13. They weren’t even supposed to have accounts. Their internal data showed 11-year-olds were four times more likely to return to the app than kids using competing platforms.Â
Instagram’s own researchers found that 32% of teen girls said Instagram made them feel worse about their bodies when they were already struggling. That finding went to leadership. Instead of taking action to fix it, Meta set a goal to push average daily usage from 40 minutes to 46 minutes by 2026.Â
They saw what it was doing to girls and decided the answer was more time on the app.
I keep coming back to that 32% figure because it’s not just describing a fringe case, but a near-majority of teen girls (just like me a few years ago) who were actively being harmed and kept coming back anyway because that’s what the product was designed to make them do. The lonelier you were, or the more insecure you were, the more useful you were to the algorithm.
Justice was served, and Instagram was declared guilty of creating addictive features that contribute to harming young people. But the fight isn’t over.
Instagram operates all over the world. The same features a jury just ruled harmful are live right now for girls who have no legal protection, no pending legislation, nothing. When governments drag their feet on regulation, they decide to let this harm keep happening to girls all over the world.
We already know what these companies knew and when they knew it. The question now is what we are going to do about it.