Nevada is taking on three social media companies in state court over alleged harms to youth mental health and well-being.
Attorney General Aaron Ford announced on January 30 that his office, in conjunction with three private law firms, filed civil actions against five social media platforms— Snapchat, TikTok and Meta-owned Facebook, Instagram and Messenger—alleging that the platforms’ algorithms “have been designed deliberately to addict young minds … and caused young people harms to mental health, body image, physical health, privacy and physical safety.”
Ford tells the Weekly that, through these legal actions, his office is working to address addictive features of social media and its negative impact on youth. And time is of the essence—it’s one of the reasons Ford decided to go it alone in these legal actions instead of signing onto a mulitstate lawsuit filed in federal court in California in October.
“We’ve alleged violations of Nevada law … and we think that Nevada judges should be the ones who make those important decisions,” Ford says. “We have the ability to get to trial quickly in Nevada, which is important because the epidemic is getting worse, not better.”
Ford’s office is arguing that social media companies violated Nevada laws on deceptive trade practices, product liability and negligence. The legal actions play out against a backdrop of increased calls for accountability from social media companies. At a January 31 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, CEOs from major social media companies apologized to family members whose children had died due to factors including drug overdoses and suicide.
“Obviously, Mr. [Mark] Zuckerberg’s apology is something of note. But we think there’s much to be done yet to ensure that children will be protected from these harmful products,” Ford says. “We’re looking for things like time restrictions and additional parental controls. We want to be certain that there are changes to account creation and maintenance, including improvements to existing age restrictions and age verification enhancements; make publicly available data and research; and also establish third-party monitors to ensure that these products are proper for use by our youth.”
If the attorney general’s office wins in court, Nevada’s settlement could then be used to address the alleged harms of social media.
“What I wanted to do is to be able to afford the resources so that experts in the area … can be able to utilize these resources in order to help our youth recover from, for lack of a better phrase, what they’ve been subjected to.”
WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY
Not only is the youth mental health “epidemic” getting worse, as Ford says; it’s been going on for quite some time. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy first sounded the alarm on a “national youth mental health crisis” in December 2021 and in May 2023 issued an advisory on the risks social media poses to adolescents. The advisory acknowledges that a “lack of access to data and lack of transparency from technology companies have been barriers to understanding the full scope and scale of the impact of social media on mental health and well-being.”
The surgeon general’s advisory points to several scientific studies showing correlations between social media and cyberbullying-related depression, body image, disordered eating and poor sleep quality. It also cites cases in which childhood deaths were linked to suicide- and self-harm-related content and risk-taking challenges on social media platforms.
Southern Nevada school psychologist Jessica Shearin remembers the first time she realized social media could be extremely dangerous for kids. Six years ago, she had an encounter with a group of fifth-grade girls who were in a “Snapchat suicide pact.”
“They were all saying that they wanted to die by suicide; they all wanted to harm themselves. And we were facing a pretty big issue. … Snapchat deletes the messages either immediately, or within 24 hours. So we didn’t have any physical evidence of it,” Shearin says.
“Finally, one or two of them came forward. We were able to get to the root of the problem. And that was my first experience where I was like, ‘Wow, these kids are getting very savvy with social media and using it in a way that is really detrimental.”
Unfortunately, it’s not an isolated incident. Social media has been used to share self-harm and suicide-related content, which can “normalize” these behaviors for adolescents, according to the Surgeon General. For example, the blackout challenge, which circulated on TikTok daring users to hold their breath or choke themselves with household objects until they passed out, has been connected with the deaths of several children.
Shearin, who is also the president of the Nevada Association of School Psychologists, says she and her colleagues are also seeing higher rates of anxiety and depression in adolescents. “They’re using this as a medium to get some feelings out or look for social acceptance … [But] social media can create this sense of comparison. And through the act of always comparing … they’re creating an entire reality from that. And that leads to self-critical thoughts,” she says.
It’s not just psychologists who’ve noticed a connection between social media and poor mental health outcomes. The Nevada Office of Suicide Prevention has adjusted its training programs to focus on “the pervasive influence of social media and the internet on suicide over the past decade.” The adjustment was prompted by an investigation of 44 deaths by suicide that found “electronic device addiction” to be a contributing factor in several of the deaths.
“In June 2019, the Office of Suicide Prevention took a significant step in acknowledging the impact of social media on suicide. This realization stemmed from an in-depth investigation into 44 deaths by suicide which occurred in Clark County between 2016 and 2018. The Clark County Child Death Review team meticulously examined these cases, uncovering electronic device addiction as a contributing factor in several instances,” the Office of Suicide Prevention said in an email to the Weekly.
Shearin says research has likened excessive use of social media to addiction. Features like endless scrolling, disappearing content, likes, shares and push notifications are designed to keep the user on the app.
Moreover, such addiction studies have focused mostly on adults. Less is known about the impacts on the developing brains of adolescents.
“For an adult with a fully developed frontal lobe … we see adults are becoming addicted to social media platforms. … That’s what’s so scary, is we have no idea what this does to a developing brain,” Shearin says.
She adds that even though people have become more aware of the harms of social media, it’s difficult to establish direct connections between too much social media use and poor health and safety outcomes.
“Social media companies need to be held accountable for what they’ve created, and how children have been able to access it. But, it’s so hard to point to it and say, ‘Yes, I 100% know definitively that this child is acting this way, because they spend this much time on their phone.’”
The Weekly reached out to the social media companies Meta, Snapchat and TikTok for their comments on the Nevada litigation. A Snapchat spokesman provided the following statement.
“Snapchat was intentionally designed to be different from traditional social media, with a focus on helping Snapchatters communicate with their close friends. Snapchat opens directly to a camera—rather than a feed of content that encourages passive scrolling—and has no traditional public likes or comments. While we will always have more work to do, we feel good about the role Snapchat plays in helping close friends feel connected, happy and prepared as they face the many challenges of adolescence.”
TikTok declined to provide a direct comment and directed to policies listed on their website including age-restricted features, content levels, parental controls, screen time management tools, community guidelines and enforcement measures.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
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