If you are eligible, you may be entitled to recover compensatory damages. This could include money to cover medical bills related to your treatment, compensation for lost past and future earnings if you missed work due to the impact, and damages for pain and suffering. You could also potentially recover damages, including statutory damages, under your state’s consumer protection law for deceptive business practices.

If you are eligible and join this case, you will have to provide additional, detailed information on your Instagram use, including how often you used Instagram and what features you used. You will also be asked to provide information specific to how your Instagram use negatively impacted your health, including information about medical history, diagnoses, and treatment sought/received.

In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a story about its investigation into Meta’s (owner of Facebook and Instagram) own internal research that demonstrated it knew that Instagram negatively impacted millions of its teen users. These studies showed that Instagram’s algorithms tended to push younger users “down a toxic rabbithole of content” and made it difficult to log off, even when users wanted to do so. Despite Meta’s private knowledge of these studies, Meta consistently downplayed the app’s negative effects on teens, and refused to make its research public or available to academics or lawmakers who asked for it.

In 2021, because of the Washington Post’s reporting, eight state attorneys general announced an investigation in Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, focusing on whether the company violated consumer protection laws by promoting the app and other social networking products to children and teens. Specifically, the investigation looked at the techniques Meta uses to increase the frequency and duration of use of the app by younger users, and the harms that may be caused by this increased use.

Following the investigation, a coalition of 41 states and D.C. filed a lawsuit against Meta in federal court, alleging that the company engaged in a “scheme to exploit young users for profit” by misleading them about the safety features and prevalence of harmful content, harvesting their data and violating federal laws on children’s privacy. State officials claim further that the company knowingly deployed changes to keep children on Instagram to the detriment of their well-being, violating consumer protection laws.

A class action lawsuit against Meta/Instagram has also recently been filed in the Northern District of California, alleging similar claims by parents on behalf of their children who were negatively affected by Instagram’s harmful practices.

Scientists are continuing to study the effects of excessive social media consumption on mental and physical health, overall, excessive social media consumption, especially by younger users, is associated with increased reports of depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, low self-esteem, body image issues, eating disorders, increased alcohol consumption, and insomnia. The risk of experiencing these symptoms is even higher among those users that experience cyberbullying, cyberstalking, or sexual harassment on social media platforms. In one example reported by the Wall Street Journal, a 19-year-old Instagram user wanted to exercise more. She searched Instagram for workouts and found some that she liked. As a result, Instagram’s algorithm filled her “Explore” page with photos of how to lose weight, the “ideal” body type, and what she should and shouldn’t be eating. The user claimed her feed continued to be overloaded with this type of information every time she used Instagram.