The life-and-death reality anti-social-media lawsuits are evading

Court cases against social media platforms rely on wildly exaggerated claims of imagined harm but present almost no evidence of real harm.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt and colleagues, along with several state attorneys general and scores of plaintiffs, post selected excerpts from social-platform internal documents to accuse Snapchat and TikTok (following Facebook/Meta in 2021) of causing “industrial level harms” to teenagers.

The issue is far larger than that. Just as lawsuits and leaks have exposed damning internal documents of Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Church, Big Sports, universities, Boy Scouts, school boards, police misconduct investigators, etc., Haidt likewise condemns the “dozens of quotations from internal reports, studies, memos, conversations, and public statements in which Snap [and, earlier, TikTok] executives, employees, and consultants acknowledge and discuss the harms … to many minors who use their platform.”

These harms, Haidt continues, include “addictive, compulsive, and problematic use; drugs and guns; child sexual abuse material (CSAM); sextortion; in-person sexual predation and assault; cyberbullying; and knowledge of harm and underage use, and lack of action.”

Sounds bad. Given that TikTok and Snapchat have at least 30 million users under age 18 in the United States over 20 total years of operation, one expects these lawsuits to drop the other shoe: cases and research documenting thousands of real victims compelling evidence shows were injured, raped, killed, and mentally damaged because of Snapchat, TikTok, and social media platforms.

After all, proving real damage is essential to damage suits. Complainants presented solid evidence that at least 16,000 victims were abused by 7,000 Catholic personnel in the U.S. Over 58,000 claimants, with 12,000 victims so far substantiated, were credibly abused by 8,000 Boy Scouts personnel. The single-campus University of Michigan athletics abuse scandal produced more than 1,000 adjudicated victims. The single-entity Team USA abuses have 250 named victims and counting. “Hundreds of police have sexually abused kids,” a Washington Post investigation of police misconduct investigations shows.

In 2023 alone, child abuse investigators substantiated 21,000 psychological abuses, 44,000 sexual abuses, 63,000 violent abuses, and 65,000 multiple maltreatments, along with 2,000 homicides from violence and criminal neglect victimizing children and teens, 95% inflicted by parents and caretakers.

True numbers are far higher. The Centers for Disease Control’s 2023 survey of 20,000 teens age 13-18 found that 29% had parents/caretakers who abused drugs/alcohol, 33% who inflicted violent abuses, 40% who suffered “severe” mental health problems including suicidality, and 61% who inflicted emotional abuses. The CDC tied these parent/caretaker-inflicted abuses and troubles to 89% of teens’ suicide attempts, 84% of teens’ drug overdoses, and two-thirds of teens’ mental health problems. Meanwhile, the CDC associated even “frequent social media use” with barely a blip.

The institutional response?

Having worked in child abuse reporting and prevention advocacy and research, I’ve seen the same organizational response again and again. When an abuse allegation surfaces, organization leaders (often socially and politically prominent) ignore and deny it as long as they can. When finally forced to confront the allegation, they rally to protect the accused adult, offering paths to quiet obscurity and transfer to other locales while focusing indignant attacks and ostracizations on the child or teen victim and reporting adults.

That’s my definition of “industrial level damage.”

Despite these mammoth, documented abuses, no movements seek to ban children and teenagers from church, Scouts, sports, families, schools, police contacts, and similarly derelict institutions. Apparently, their “body counts” – large, but still greatly undercounted – aren’t sufficient.

Nor am I advocating such bans. Banishments cause harm in and of themselves because they prevent users from needed access to services while diverting attention from higher-level institutional crimes. If pursued rationally, everyone would be banned from everything.

Is social media somehow worse, then?

After lawsuits’ panicked rosterings of the dangers teenagers potentially might encounter online and social-media executives’ indifference to user well-being, literally no evidence is presented that these have actually harmed real teenagers.

The six “real-life” cases cited for Snapchat (none are cited for TikTok; I found one potential case) consist of the following: two cases of teens who allegedly suffered unhealthy influences on social media and fatally overdosed on fentanyl; two teens who were murdered in 2018 by a gun allegedly obtained through Snapchat by adult shooters age 18, 23, and 26; one “25-year-old (who) used Snap Map to hunt down and sexually assault a 16-year-old in Florida” he tracked “unbeknownst to the teen;” and one teen’s suicide “two psychologists” opined “was triggered by cyberbullying” (bullies unknown).

That is, of the 6 Snapchat cases over 7 years, three involved adult perpetrators, one an unknown perpetrator, and three self-inflicted deaths about which no details are provided. Unlike the extensively adjudicated civil and criminal cases against churches, Boy Scouts, schools, sports organizations, etc., the cases presented in social-media lawsuits assert but never present contexts to show that social media played a causal or even contributing role.

For an example of omitted context, CDC numbers show 84% of cyberbullied teens are also emotionally abused much more often by parents and adult caretakers. Real-world abusers cannot be stopped by hitting a <block sender> tab. In order to blame social media for suicides and overdoses, one would have to eliminate far more plausible family and institutional causes,

When plaintiffs’ sink to dredging up a gun obtained on Snapchat by over-21 adults who could easily have acquired it from thousands of offline sources, or push grossly lunatic claims that “Snapchat… has caused thousands of American teens to die from fentanyl overdoses,” these suits start looking like transparent money-grabs by exploitative interests with no more honesty than they attribute to social media moguls.

Fentanyl is not a teenage “scourge”

I don’t mean to dismiss tragedies, whatever the number. But here’s the reality teens face.

Over the last 7 years, the CDC reports 388,000 fentanyl deaths (ICD10 death code T40.4, synthetic narcotics), indeed an “epidemic.”

Figure 1: Percentage of total fentanyl overdose deaths by age group, 2018-2024

Source: CDC 2025.

You can review thousands of articles on fentanyl and not find one that shows what the simple figure above does: the biggest fentanyl menace to children and middle/high-school youths by far is not their own overdosing, but that of grownups around them.

In the real world teens live in — not the unreality social-media panickers concoct — fentanyl overdose deaths (which exploded from the mid-2010s into the 2020s) peak at age 30-39, followed by 40-49 and 50-59. This pattern is also evident in these age groups’ soaring drug/alcohol-related deaths and hospital emergencies in the U.S. (doubling to 5.2 million among parent ages in 2023) and across the developed world. Similarly, criminal arrests also peak at age 30-39 and remain high into the 40s, as do suicides.

Those are the ages parenting and raising middle and high schoolers. Yet, baffled experts just can’t fathom what possibly could be making teens more depressed and anxious. “What on earth happened in the early 2010s such that there is now an international youth mental health crisis?” Haidt wonders. His stock answer: it’s just got to be social media. Nothing else could be troubling teens’ otherwise perfect lives.

Overall, it is astonishing how few teens die from a powerful drug that is far more damaging to their parents and grandparents, the most likely sources of the lethal drugs a few teens do obtain. In a country bent on reducing preventable deaths, we’d be studying how teens are keeping themselves safe in the fentanyl epidemic, not inciting baseless scapegoating.

Here’s a real fentanyl tragedy causing many hundreds of childhood fatalities: CDC figures show 2.7 times MORE toddlers ages 0 to 4 (exposed to drugs via household grownups) die from fentanyl poisoning than teens ages 10 to 14 (who are hyped as in such terrible online danger that all must be banned from social media). What a shock truthful comparisons would be – if anyone cared enough about kids to raise them.

What about psychological damage?

Even advocacy documents designed to prove social media is hazardous wind up showing it is a surprisingly safe environment for even the youngest teens. For example, the Australian eSafety Commissioner’s official report explicitly commissioned to justify banning under-16 youth from social media actually found “nothing” problems teens reported experiencing over 6 months of social media use:

· 56%: ZERO negative incidents

· 70%: ZERO encounters with strangers

· 80%: ZERO inappropriate content

· 84%: ZERO exclusions from social groups

· 85%: ZERO threats or abuse of any kind.

But who cares about facts (even their own), or real teen security? The Australian government, pretending that teens bask in 100% safety offline, manufactured an anti-youth anti-social-media panic. In the real world teens occupy, Australian family grownups can’t begin to match the safety record of social media. Social service agencies in that not-big country investigate 1,200 cases of child abuse every day and have removed 45,000 abused children from parents. That’s “industrial level damage.”

All right, so assume the worst

According to the legal briefs cited above, social media platforms are deploying “addictive” algorithms to direct teenagers to harmful sites packed with pornography, fentanyl and guns, predatory adults, cruel bullies, and destructive messages available to anyone of any age or vulnerability.

If so, the best evidence shows teenagers are admirably resisting those perfidies.

Even after a decade of bombardment by relentless messages (several times a day on most news sites) that social media is wrecking their mental health, only 14% of U.S. teens reported to Pew Research in 2025 that social media negatively affects them. By teens’ own accounts, social media is uniquely safe compared to the dangers of offline life.

In the week when Haidt’s After Babel site posted its indictment of Snapchat, the San Francisco Chronicle’s review of secret documents showed the city’s Catholic Archdiocese actively covered up hundreds of real cases of sexual abuses of children by its personnel, leaving children exposed to more predation – just in one city. TikTok, Snapchat, and Facebook dangers aren’t even in the same universe as the mammoth damage done by real-world institutions to children and teens.

Of course, adolescent life, like adult life, isn’t about always staying safe. That’s why teens, like adults, need to learn to identify and protect themselves from hazards life imposes beginning at young ages and persisting into adulthood. Social media’s dangers, while seldom injurious or lethal, do exist, mainly in the widespread and permanent nature of online information.

Social media provides ideal buffered environments for teens to learn the kinds of rewards and perils they will face in the offline world, ones a tragic number already experience before adolescence. Instead of attorneys’ general and other plaintiffs’ grandstanding with sensational anti-youth, anti-social-media court splashes, real reformers should be pushing the Online Privacy Act protections afforded citizens of other Western nations. The OPA would do far more to protect teens and adults from corporate predation than all the child-saving nanny-culture restrictions.