NEW YORK - New York City Mayor Eric Adams said on Feb 14 that his administration has filed a lawsuit against social media companies including Meta Platforms’ Facebook and Instagram for fuelling a mental health crisis among youth.

The lawsuit, filed in the California Superior Court, also includes Alphabet’s YouTube, Snap Inc’s Snapchat and ByteDance’s TikTok. It alleges that the companies intentionally designed their platforms to “purposefully manipulate and addict children and teens to social media applications”.

Meta, TikTok and YouTube already face hundreds of lawsuits filed on behalf of children and school districts over the addictiveness of social media.

“Over the past decade, we have seen just how addictive and overwhelming the online world can be, exposing our children to a non-stop stream of harmful content and fuelling our national youth mental health crisis,” Mr Adams said in a statement.

Social media companies have come under intense scrutiny as regulators push them to protect children from harmful content.

In January, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apologised to families at a United States Senate hearing about the impact that social media has on children.

A Meta spokesperson said the company wanted teens to have “safe, age-appropriate experiences online”, while TikTok said it will continue to work to keep the community safe by tackling industry-wide challenges.

“We’ve built services and policies to give young people age-appropriate experiences, and parents robust controls. The allegations in this complaint are simply not true,” Google’s spokesman Jose Castaneda said in a statement. REUTERS