New York City Sues Social Media Giants Over Addictive Features

Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc., ByteDance Inc., and Google LLC all deliberately designed social media products to be addictive to adolescents and created a youth mental health crisis that is straining city resources, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by the City of New York.

The complaint is the latest addition to sprawling litigation against technology companies across multiple jurisdictions and courts. The city’s complaint targeted features on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

The companies designed, marketed, and distributed their platforms to “maximize the number of children,” using “algorithms that wield data as a weapon against children and fuel the addiction machine,” according to the complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The lawsuit brings claims for public nuisance and negligence. New York is asking the court damages and an injunction against contributing to public nuisance.

Social media addiction lawsuits “fundamentally misunderstand how YouTube works and the allegations are simply not true,” said José Castañeda, a Google Spokesperson. “YouTube is a streaming service” rather than a “social network where people go to catch up with friends.”

The other defendants didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The city’s suit is separate from multidistrict litigation encompassing thousands of similar addictiveness lawsuits from state attorneys general, school districts, and individuals against the same defendants. That MDL was assigned to Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Earlier this year Rogers denied the tech giants’ bid for immediate appellate review of her decision allowing public nuisance claims to proceed.

Intermittent Variable Rewards

The NYC complaint highlights features such as endless scroll, intermittent variable rewards that are tied to user-specific data, and strategically timed notifications that are all used to keep children on the companies’ platforms.

“All of these features worked together and individually to addict young users to social media and to create the youth mental health crisis” that New York City public schools and hospital systems are battling now. Intermittent variable rewards work like slot machines to keep users coming back, the complaint said. The platforms are designed to withhold and release rewards on a schedule that algorithms determine is optimal for heightening users’ cravings for the platform, the lawsuit said.

These practices are “particularly effective and dangerous for adolescents given that their brains have not completely matured” and because teen brains haven’t finished developing impulse control or executive function, according to the complaint.

The city also highlighted how apps like Instagram and Snapchat “exploit reciprocity” by telling users when messages are seen so teens feel obligated to respond and heightening young people’s need for social comparison.

Snapchat’s “snap streak,” which tallies users that interact with each other every day, and the “like” features create artificial forms of feedback that “neurologically alter” perceptions of online posts, the complaint said. The filing also pinpointed many of the platforms’ appearance-altering filters that underscore conventional beauty standards as contributing to widespread body image issues among adolescents.

All of these features have force the city to “expend significant resources addressing these harms and providing education and support” to students, parents, and New York City residents, the complaints said.

In addition to the Corporation Counsel of the City of New York, the city is represented by Keller Rohrback LLP.

The case is The City of New York v. Meta Platforms Inc., S.D.N.Y., No. 1:25-cv-08332, complaint filed 10/8/25.