Instagram and Facebook's parent company, Meta, purposely designed its platforms to get children addicted and knowingly allowed underage users to hold accounts, according to a lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed against Meta by the attorneys general of 33 states. It alleges that the social networking company knew — but never disclosed — that it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram, but only disabled a fraction of those accounts.

The lawsuit also alleges that in 2021, Meta received over 402,000 reports of user accounts under the age of 13, of which 164,000 were not terminated. Meanwhile, no decision has been made on another 2.5 million accounts of minors who have been reported by people seeking their closure.

This and other incidents are said to violate the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act, which requires social media companies to notify and obtain parental consent before collecting data from children's accounts.

According to the lawsuit, Meta knowingly created products that are addictive and harmful to children. Company documents cited in the lawsuit described several Meta officials admitting that the company designed its products to exploit weaknesses in youth psychology, including a May 2020 internal presentation titled "adolescence basics," which highlighted some weaknesses of young brains that could be exploited for product development.

Meta said in a statement that the lawsuit misrepresents its work over the past decade to make the online experience safe for teenagers, noting that it has "over 30 tools to support them and their parents."