Lawsuit: Boy Joined Instagram, Killed Himself Within 48 Hours

Levi Maciejewski, a 13-year-old boy in Pennsylvania, killed himself within 48 hours of signing up for Instagram last year, his family says in a lawsuit against Meta that accuses the company of "matchmaking children to adult predators." Levi and 16-year-old Murray Dowey of Scotland, who also died by suicide, were victims of sextortion scams enabled by the social media platform, the families say in the lawsuit filed in Delaware state court. Both boys were allegedly contacted by strangers posing as romantic interests, pressured into sending explicit images, and then threatened unless they paid or shared more, NBC News reports.

The lawsuit cites internal Meta documents revealed in other litigation. It says company research showed large numbers of teens receiving sexual advances from strangers and estimated that making teen accounts private by default would have prevented millions of unwanted direct-message interactions daily. According to the suit, internal debates over teen privacy pitted policy, legal, and safety teams against a "growth" group that worried stronger protections would hurt engagement. "This was a foreseeable consequence of the deliberate design decisions that Meta made," lead attorney Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, tells NBC.

"You always suspected that the likes of Meta were profits over everything, but to see it written down and to see that they probably could've saved your son it like a punch in the gut," Dowey's mother tells the BBC. "It makes me so upset and angry." Her son Murray, who joined Instagram when he was 10, apparently bypassing age filters, died in 2023. Levi's death was ruled a homicide due to sextortion, WGAL reports. Authorities believe the deaths are linked to criminal gangs in West Africa but nobody has been charged in either case.

Meta, which is facing multiple similar lawsuits, says it has made changes, including Instagram's 2021 move to default younger teens to private settings, which was later expanded to a wider default. The families criticize the changes as half-measures. Tricia Maciejewski, Levi's mother, tells NBC that she believes Instagram is a defective product that is still unsafe for teens, even after Meta's changes. "They told me it was safe for my 13-year-old, too. So would I trust them? Now? Absolutely not," she says.