Moms believe social-media beauty filters led to daughters suicides | Latest Tech News
Laurie Schott and Victoria Hinks both misplaced their teenage daughters to suicide. And both blame social media.
More particularly, they believe platforms like Instagram and TikTok acquired their kids addicted, then fed them a regular diet of “beauty” content — including influencers who manipulate pictures to perfection — that led the ladies to believe their own seems to be may never measure up.
“It was nonstop telling her that she wasn’t good enough, even though she didn’t look for that content,” Schott told The Post of her daughter, Annalee. “So many data points were put together to create an algorithm for that poor child that could kind of sense that she was struggling.”
Lori Schott’s daughter Annalee took her own life after, her mother said, social media degraded her vanity. Schott has been attending the KGM social media trial — and holding vigil exterior, to honor her daughter. Getty Images
Annalee was just 18 when she took her own life in November 2020. Afteward, Schott, who lives in Merino, Colorado, discovered her daughter’s journal, which was full of heartbreaking admissions.
“Tonight was one of the worst nights I’ve had in a while,” Annalee wrote in February 2020. “I was sitting on my bathroom floor telling myself how much I hated myself. Nobody is going to love me unless I look the part. I look at other girl’s profiles and it makes me feel worse.”
Schott sees the entry as the smoking gun — proof that social media exacerbated her daughter’s insecurities. After Annalee’s death, her mother scrolled through her social media feeds and realized she had been focused with a stream of content about beauty, self-improvement and even self-harm.
“She was so obsessed with the world of self comparison, because everything that was coming on her Instagram was about beauty products and beauty comparison,” Schott said. “I always told her, it’s about what’s on the inside not what’s on the outside, but they made her believe she was broken.”
Schott is one of a number of mother and father who have been conserving vigil exterior the Los Angeles Superior Court, where a landmark case is enjoying out.
After Annalee’s death, her mother scrolled through her social media feeds and realized she had been focused with a stream of content about beauty, self-improvement and even self-harm. “She was so obsessed with the world of self comparison,” Lori Schott said. Courtesy of Lori Schott
A 20-year-old California lady, identified as KGM, is suing Meta and Google, alleging their platforms have been intentionally designed to addict kids. (TikTok and Snapchat already settled in the case.)
Last week, KGM testified that beautifying filters, which Instagram rolled out in 2017, brought about her to expertise physique dysmorphia. Meta has denied sole fault in KGM’s mental health challenges, arguing that she had other points at home that contributed to her deteriorating mental state.
Also at the courthouse is Victoria Hinks, a Marin County, California, mother who misplaced her 16-year-old daughter Alexandra, identified as Owl, in August 2024.
Victoria Hinks’s daughter Alexandra — identified as Owl — took her own life in 2024, at age 16, and her mother blames social media. Courtesy of Victoria Hanks
“She was a beautiful girl, so beautiful, and social media just let her down a dark path,” Hinks told The Post. “The more she was on social media, it’s like it turned her into a different person.”
The household made Owl wait until she was 13 to signal up for social media, and Hinks’ husband, a software program engineer, set up heavy obligation parental controls to monitor her usage.
It still wasn’t enough.
“She got around everything,” Hinks recalled.
Hinks acquired access to her late daughter Owl’s (above) cellphone and discovered eating disorder content on her feeds. Courtesy of Victoria Hanks
Like KGM, who said on the stand last week that she would “go into a panic” without her cellphone, Hinks said her teen was on apps like Instagram and TikTok nonstop.
“At one point, we had to take the door off her room to make sure that she wasn’t on it at night,” the mother said. “And when we had to take her phone away at night, it was like taking drugs away from an addict.”
What she didn’t know was what her daughter was trying at — and being served by a focused algorithm: content about eating problems and self-harm.
“When I look through her phone as her 1772492977, I see all the stuff that was being served up really just normalizing depression and glamorizing suicide,” she said. “The ‘skeleton bride diet,’ and these creepy, very anorexic looking girls, it affected her self esteem for sure. She made herself throw up. She would ask me, ‘Are my eyes too far apart?’ And, like, where would she even get that?”
Owl had been utilizing beauty filters as a approach to improve her options, including some excessive ones. Courtesy of Victoria Hanks
According to Hinks, Owl’s notion of actuality was formed by the unattainable beauty requirements she noticed on social media. And the teenager started making use of filters to her pictures to make it seem like she’d had intensive cosmetic surgery.
“She used beauty filters, thinking she wasn’t pretty enough,” Hinks said. “She did some sort of filter where she Kardashianized herself, and she just looked horrific with these lips and cheekbones and eyes. She didn’t look like the same person.”
Schott and Hinks have been among the mother and father who slept in a single day in the rain not too long ago to secure a spot inside the courthouse when Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri testified about the protection of the app for kids.
Lori Schott was one of a number of mother and father who slept exterior a Los Angeles courtroom to hear the Instagram CEO testify in a landmark trial. Getty Images
Schlott said she was devastated listening to attorneys for KGM confront Mosseri with inside communication displaying Instagram’s mum or dad company, Meta, was conscious of harms brought about to younger people.
“What cracked me was them showing the internal communications,” she said. “As a parent whose daughter left journals about how she felt, about her self-comparison, about her mental health, all I could see is my daughter’s life, and her emotional state passing in front of me. All I could see was her journal quotes.”
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri testified in the KGM trial as Schott and Hinks appeared on. AFP via Getty Images
The grieving mothers both see KGM’s trial as vindication.
“They move fast and break things. What they broke was my daughter, and so many other children,” Schott said. “I don’t care if there’s one kid or a hundred kids. Fix it, and be accountable.”
Hinks believes a win in court can be just the start.
“This is our chance at accountability for these tech companies,” she said. “But it has to be coupled with legislation, because I’m afraid that, even if the plaintiffs prevail, the companies will say it’s the cost of doing business then go back to business as usual.”
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