When B.C. teenager Amanda Todd sat in front of her computer and detailed the relentless bullying and extortion she'd faced on social media, it sent a shock wave to parents around the world.
Twelve years later her family is joining others in a lawsuit alleging those dangers persist for kids online. Only a few weeks after posting the viral video, 15-year-old Todd died by suicide in October 2012. "Why isn't life safer for kids?" her mother Carol Todd asked, in an interview from Port Coquitlam.
"Why are there more kids being harmed?" The lawsuit was filed in the Los Angeles County Superior Court earlier this month on behalf of 11 families — two of whom are Canadian — who say their children suffered physical and mental harms because of social media platforms. It alleges that some of the world's largest technology companies knowingly designed and marketed defective products to kids in order to boost engagement numbers. Some kids took their lives after they were targeted by strangers in sextortion, where a person threatens to expose sexually compromising information or images.
Others developed eating disorders, depression and had to be hospitalized. The lawsuit names tech juggernauts Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — along with Snapchat, TikTok's parent company ByteDance, Discord and Google, which owns YouTube. "What happened to these children was neither an accident nor a coincidence.
It was a foreseeable result of deliberate design decisions that they m.