The eleven-year-old girl was followed by a therapist for her addiction to social networks.
Last July in Connecticut, an eleven-year-old girl killed herself because of social media. Addicted to social platforms, and victim of cyberbullying, the victim sadly echoes the revelations of Frances Haugen last year about the Facebook Files. Supported by an aid group, her mother finally chose to sue Snapchat and Meta, the group that owns Instagram.
Too young for networks
It must be said that from the height of his eleven years, Selena was too young to access social networks. Remember that in France as in the United States, the “digital majority” to have your own personal account is 13 years old. However, it is easy to circumvent this ban, to the point that many young people are now registered on Instagram, TikTok or Snapchat without having the required age. It is in particular on this point that the mother of the young victim decided to attack Meta. After her daughter has “struggled for more than two years with an extreme addiction to Instagram and Snapchat”to the point of being followed by a specialized therapist, she now accuses social networks of not not enough to supervise their (very) young audience.
However, addiction to social networks is not a new subject. Whether it’s TikTok, Snapchat or Instagram, social networks aimed at the youngest work like real addictive machines, with a cleverly oiled algorithm, in order to encourage its users to spend ever more time on their platform. Obsessed with her online presence, Selena had gradually developed sleep and eating disorders, but also school absenteeism.
More recently, the young girl also had to face harassment online, from her classmates, but also from strangers. The complaint thus reveals that it would have been “solicited for sexually abusive content by adult male Instagram and Snapchat users”and victim of revenge porn. So many dramas made possible by the lack of verification of the age of users of the platform, details the complaint filed Thursday in a Californian court, by the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC), a legal defense group based in Seattle.
Recall that a few months ago, Meta suspended its Instagram Kids project after the revelations of the Facebook files on the harmful effect of the platform around the mental health of adolescents.
