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A 23-year-old Long Island girl is suing Meta in a “David and Goliath battle,” claiming that being on Instagram as a tween caused her to experience depression, anxiety, self-harm and an eating disorder.
Although Alexis Spence’s claim was already filed when a Los Angeles jury awarded a 20-year-old plaintiff, known only as KGM, $6 million Wednesday in a similar lawsuit against Meta and Google, there is expected to be a flood of similar cases.
Alexis says Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who testified in person at the Los Angeles courthouse, can’t possibly understand what girls like KGM and herself went through on his platform.
“I think it’s very difficult for Mark Zuckerberg, an old man, to speak on the experiences of young girls,” she said. “You knew how much money you would get by getting all of these depressed prepubescent girls addicted before they even had a shot.”
Alexis opened an Instagram account at age 11 without telling her parents. Instead, she went under their radar by hiding the app on her phone’s home page and disguising it as a calculator app.
She signed up because she wanted to see content about Webkinz, a popular internet game that allows kids to virtually care for physical stuffed animals they purchase.
“I really enjoyed watching the videos people made with their Webkinz,” Alexis, who is applying for a master’s degree in applied behavioral analysis, told me. “I wanted to participate in what was sold to me as a creative outlet, but really all it did was teach me a plethora of maladaptive coping mechanisms.”
Her algorithm quickly developed a mind of its own.
“It’s showing you dogs and funny memes, then it starts to show you models, then it starts to show you healthy recipes, then it starts to show you more models, and then it slowly turned into eating disorder material,” she recalled.
At age 11, Alexis encountered dieting tips tagged with the hashtag #ana. She clicked on it, not realizing that it was shorthand for “anorexia.”
“I literally had no idea what I was clicking on because I was 11 years old,” she recalled. “I had no idea what anorexia was … At first these pictures were inspiration, like ‘I want to look like that one day,’ but very slowly my confidence went completely out the window.”
By 13, Alexis said, she was depressed, self-harming and struggling with a serious eating disorder that left her hospitalized after she took too many laxatives.
Her mother, Kathleen Spence, was completely bewildered by what was happening. She didn’t know her daughter was on Instagram — let alone that she was being fed hellish content.
“We didn’t understand what was happening with her,” Kathleen told me. “We did everything we were supposed to. We would go through her phone. The phone wasn’t allowed in the room. It’s very easy to blame the parent, and I think that’s what the social media companies are doing.”
At one point, Alexis even punched a hole through her wall when her phone was confiscated.
Kathleen believes that new parental controls on apps like Instagram and TikTok are a modest step in the right direction but still not enough. “It’s just a Band-Aid on a bullet hole,” she said.
Meta did not reply to a request for comment.
Alexis and her parents filed a lawsuit in 2022 against Meta in the District Court for Northern California, claiming that Meta knowingly harmed young people like her. The family, whose claim is active, has new hope from two major victories in court against Big Tech.
On Tuesday, Meta was ordered by a jury to pay $375 million in damages in a case brought by the Attorney General of New Mexico, claiming the company failed to protect kids from would-be predators. And the KGM result, which also found Google’s YouTube at fault, is considered a bellwether for the legal theory that social media was defectively designed to harm children.
While KGM’s trial was about personal harm, the AG of New Mexico went after Meta on consumer protection grounds. Put together, these two types of cases signal increased legal options for families wanting vindication from social media platforms that, for years, ran largely unchecked.
Attorney and author Josh Hammer told me it’s “impossible to say” how much similar cases could cost Big Tech companies, but he expects KGM’s victory opens the door to more similar cases.
“I think this absolutely could also open up the floodgates,” Hammer said. “Big Tech is now firmly on guard and they know they cannot continue to lure in vulnerable young Americans with their deliberately addictive algorithms.”
The Spence family’s suit claims that Alexis, once a “confident and happy child,” was derailed by social media. The lawsuit also includes some of her diary entries from childhood. In 2013, she wrote: “On Instagram, I [reached] 127 followers, ya! Let’s put it this way, if I was happy about 10 followers then this is just AMAZING!”
Another entry from her at age 12 features a drawing of a melancholy girl sitting on the ground next to her phone. A thought bubble hangs over her that reads “go die,” “worthless” and “stupid,” among other insults.
Kathleen considers their case “a David and Goliath story,” but she’s optimistic considering the result out of Los Angeles. The family told The Post that they are “so happy and gratified that social media companies are being held liable for their dangerous actions and design.”
Congress is actively weighing legislation meant to protect children online, including the Kids Off Social Media Act which could institute mandatory age verification to access platforms. The UK and Australia have implemented similar laws.
“We hope to see the social media platforms continue to be held accountable for their actions both in court and, hopefully, also in the halls of Congress,” Alexis and Kathleen said in a statement to The Post. “We want to live in a world where no other children suffer like Alexis did.”
Alexis says she’s “proud” of KGM, who she considers a “role model.”
