Laurie Schott and Victoria Hinks both lost their teenage daughters to suicide. And both blame social media.
More specifically, they believe platforms like Instagram and TikTok got their children addicted, then fed them a steady diet of “beauty” content — including influencers who manipulate photos to perfection — that led the girls to believe their own looks could 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.”
Annalee was just 18 when she took her own life in November 2020. Afteward, Schott, who lives in Merino, Colorado, found 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 mom scrolled through her social media feeds and realized she had been targeted 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 several parents who have been keeping vigil outside the Los Angeles Superior Court, where a landmark case is playing out.
A 20-year-old California girl, known as KGM, is suing Meta and Google, alleging their platforms were deliberately designed to addict children. (TikTok and Snapchat already settled in the case.)
Last week, KGM testified that beautifying filters, which Instagram rolled out in 2017, caused her to experience body dysmorphia. Meta has denied sole fault in KGM’s mental health challenges, arguing that she had other issues at home that contributed to her deteriorating mental state.
Also at the courthouse is Victoria Hinks, a Marin County, California, mom who lost her 16-year-old daughter Alexandra, known as Owl, in August 2024.
“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 family made Owl wait until she was 13 to sign up for social media, and Hinks’ husband, a software engineer, set up heavy duty parental controls to monitor her usage.
It still wasn’t enough.
“She got around everything,” Hinks recalled.
Like KGM, who said on the stand last week that she would “go into a panic” without her phone, 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 mom 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 looking at — and being served by a targeted algorithm: content about eating disorders and self-harm.
“When I look through her phone as her 1772491131, 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?”
According to Hinks, Owl’s perception of reality was shaped by the impossible beauty standards she saw on social media. And the teen began applying filters to her photos to make it look like she’d had extensive plastic 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 were among the parents who slept overnight in the rain recently to secure a spot inside the courthouse when Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri testified about the safety of the app for children.
Schlott said she was devastated hearing lawyers for KGM confront Mosseri with internal communication showing Instagram’s parent company, Meta, was aware of harms caused to young 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.”
The grieving moms 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 would 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.”
