Recently, a number of lawsuits have attempted to place the blame for teen mental health struggles squarely on social media companies. But this oversimplifies a serious issue. Clinicians and researchers find that mental health is a deeply complex and multifaceted issue, and trends regarding teens’ well-being aren’t clear-cut or universal. Narrowing the challenges faced by teens to a single factor ignores the scientific research and the many stressors impacting young people today, like academic pressure, school safety, socio-economic challenges, and substance abuse.
Despite this complexity, plaintiffs’ lawyers have selectively cited Meta’s internal documents to construct a misleading narrative, suggesting our platforms have harmed teens and that Meta has prioritized growth over their well-being.
These claims don’t reflect reality. The evidence will show a company deeply and responsibly confronting tough questions, conducting research, listening to parents, academics, and safety experts, and taking action.
Our Record of Supporting Parents and Teens
Most teens today use social media to stay close to friends and family, express themselves, build community, and find support if they need it. Still, we recognize and share parents’ concerns around teens having safe, age-appropriate experiences on social media. That’s why we want to collaborate with parents to help teens use social media in a meaningful way, with the right protections, oversight, and guardrails.
Over the years, we’ve listened to parents and our community to understand the challenges they’re facing and respond with new tools, features, and resources to support them. For example:
- In 2017, we built integrated suicide prevention tools to support those who may be struggling.
- In 2020, when we saw the need for faster access to support, we developed intelligent ways to share resources with people searching for suicide or self-injury content.
- In 2021, we restricted adults from starting private chats with teens they’re not connected to on Instagram and Messenger. We also announced default private account settings for users under 16 in the US (and 18 in some countries) when they sign up for Instagram, as well as notifications encouraging teens under 16 already on Instagram to switch to a private account.
- In 2023, we began prompting teens to take time away from our apps and enable them to set daily limits for their use.
- In 2024, we launched Instagram Teen Accounts with built-in protections to limit who can contact them and the content they see, and give parents the ability to set time limits. And in 2025, we expanded them to Facebook and Messenger. We also added additional protections to Instagram Teen Accounts, including safety features in DMs, giving teens more information about who they’re chatting with.
- More recently, we revamped Instagram Teen Accounts content settings, inspired by 13+ movie ratings. This means that teens will see content on Instagram similar to what they’d see in an age-appropriate movie, by default. Teens can’t opt out of this default setting without a parent’s permission, and we’ve also introduced an even stricter setting for parents who prefer a more restrictive experience for their teen.
- Also in 2025, we went further to address online bullying in schools by giving teachers, educators, and administrators a prioritized system for reporting instances of teen safety issues.
- And, as concerns about AI safety emerged, we announced protections for teens in our AI products, including designing them to respond safely to prompts about self-harm, suicide, and disordered eating. We also announced that we’d introduce new controls that let parents see how their teens are interacting with AI.
These are just some of the protections we’ve built for teens to give parents peace of mind that their teens have automatic restrictions in place. Parents know their teens best and should have the final say over how they engage with technology.
Today, parents can use supervision features to set their teens’ time to as little as 15 minutes a day, block usage at certain times throughout the day, see who their teens are messaging, and more.
We also collaborate with law enforcement, experts, and our industry peers to address potential threats and develop educational programs to empower teens and parents to take control of their online experience. This includes:
- Supporting the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to develop Take It Down, a tool that helps prevent teens’ intimate images from being shared online.
- Launching awareness campaigns to educate teens and their parents on sextortion, and working with Childhelp on a first-of-its-kind safety curriculum for US middle schoolers.
- Working with the Tech Coalition as a founding member of the Lantern program, which allows participating companies to share signals about predatory accounts so they can all investigate and take action.
- We cooperate with law enforcement by alerting them when we become aware of someone at imminent risk of harm and responding to valid legal requests for information. In 2024, we received over 9,000 emergency requests from US authorities and resolved them within an average of 67 minutes — and even more quickly for cases involving child safety and suicide.
- We work with Mental Health Coalition alongside other industry peers as a founding member of Thrive, which allows tech companies to share signals about violating suicide or self-harm content and stop it spreading across different platforms.
What Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Ignore
Social media provides important benefits for teens. It can create a sense of belonging, especially for those who might struggle to find community elsewhere. It can open opportunities that they wouldn’t have had otherwise, like helping them grow a following for their art or music pursuits, show their athletic talents to potential recruiters, or even start a small business.
The science backs this up. As well as showing that social media does not have a population-level impact on adolescent mental health, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus report devotes an entire chapter to the potential benefits of social media for teens.
There is also new evidence that rates of teen depression, suicidal thoughts, and behaviors in the US has begun to decline, even as social media usage increases or stays the same. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services’ National Survey of Drug Use and Health, the prevalence of major depressive episodes among 12-to-17-year-olds fell from 21% in 2021 to 15% in 2024. Serious suicidal thoughts in 12-to-17-year-olds fell from nearly 13% in 2021 to 10% in 2024.
While social media might be a convenient target, if we ignore the many other factors that affect teens’ well-being, we might miss an opportunity to address root causes that could actually be more impactful, such as academic pressure, family dynamics, and school safety.
Any honest conversation about teen well-being must consider the scientific data, as well as potential risks and benefits — not just headlines or anecdotes.
Continuing to Put Teens and Families First
The plaintiffs’ lawyers will try to paint an intentionally misleading picture of Meta with cherry-picked quotes and snippets of conversations taken out of context. The full record will show a company that has consistently put teen safety ahead of growth for over a decade.
We’ve made countless decisions to keep teens safe that could hurt engagement and growth, like making all teen accounts private by default, and allowing parents to place time restrictions on their teen’s Instagram usage. With Teen Accounts, teens who were placed into the new protections saw less sensitive content, experienced less unwanted contact, and spent less time on Instagram over night.
These restrictions may hurt our bottom line — and they’re not always popular with teens either. But we put them in place anyway because they are the right thing to do.
We’re proud of our record. We will defend ourselves in court against claims that misrepresent the facts and ignore the work we’ve done. We’ll also keep doing what matters most — improving our products to keep teens safe and give parents peace of mind.