Meta and Snap sued by mother over alleged role in her daughter's suicide | Engadget

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741 (US), 686868 (Canada), or 85258 (UK). Wikipedia maintains a list of crisis lines for people outside of those countries. A Connecticut mother has brought a lawsuit against Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, as well as Snap, claiming the platforms to cause the sort of addiction her late daughter suffered prior to taking her own life at age 11 last July.  Social media companies have been the target of various lawsuits over the years related to alleged harm to minors — oftentimes for failing to adequately prevent that harm, as in the case of teen who was bullied via an anonymous messaging app within Snapchat, leading to his eventual suicide. Tammy Rodriguez is instead making the case that the sort of “stickiness” these platforms are built to engender is inherently harmful, especially to young users like her late daughter Selena.  Selena “struggled for more than two years with an extreme addiction to Instagram and Snapchat,” the suit notes, a claim apparently backed by an outpatient therapist who had “never seen a patient as addicted to social media” during their…
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