She Says Social-Media Algorithms Led to Her Eating Disorder. Now She’s Suing TikTok and Instagram

One day in November 2019, Karen Cusato confiscated Gabby’s phone after an argument and sent her to her room, thinking that her daughter could cool off and they could patch things up in the morning. The next morning, Gabby’s bed was made, but she was nowhere to be found. At first, Cusato and her husband thought she had run away. “Then we found her in the closet,” Cusato recalls. “The scream from my husband is something that I can never unhear.” Gabby had died by suicide. She was 15.

Most days, Cusato blames herself. But she knows this would not have happened if Gabby had not become so addicted to social media. “If she was born 20 years earlier, this would not have taken place,” she says. If Cusato could do it again, she’d buy her daughter a phone without internet access. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think this was what the phone could turn into.”

“I think she felt less than perfect,” Cusato says. “The algorithms were giving an ideal weight for an ideal height, and she was chasing that number, and, you know, she didn’t get to that number that she thought was going to make her happy.” Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder, not just because of the malnutrition involved, but because it’s often clustered with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Carroll says that nearly half of the personal-injury cases represented by her firm in the MDL are related to eating disorders.