Social Media Lawsuit

- It was a sight, - Sorry.

- [Liz] That years later still brings a mother to tears.

- She was almost dead.

She was so close.

So I think she had shorts and a body suit on and I just started crying.

It was wintertime.

So she was wearing coats and when I saw her, it just blew my mind.

I just couldn't believe how far it had gotten without being noticed.

- [Liz] Latisha Herrera's teenage daughter Catherine explains how the lens she saw herself through was similar to a type of body dysmorphia.

- I struggled with a very, very intense eating disorder.

And this past year I was at the lowest weight I've ever been.

I was hospitalized three different times in one year.

- [Liz] Instead of help, they found a system of revolving doors.

- Finding resources for recovery when it comes to like certain facilities and actual medical treatment is extremely, not only difficult but wildly expensive.

- And they kept telling her she was fine.

That was the worst part.

She was fine.

'Cause it wasn't till a different doctor came in and was like, if you send her home, she's gonna die.

She had all these huge goals and all these big plans that she wanted to do with her life and then it just kind of was gone.

She was gone.

- [Liz] Catherine say she was fueled mostly by her social media feed.

- I think I got my first phone when I was like eight-ish, free reign.

Every bit of information I could ever want at my fingertips.

When I was that young, it was pretty much a lot of like gaming, and then eventually, social media pushes certain ideals to you.

It started off as like healthy lifestyle, but it started developing into a lot more harmful diet culture and eating disorder type of content.

- [Liz] Catherine says the more she watched, the more the algorithm would send similar content her way.

- What I didn't recognize is that there is a line of when it is healthy to when these types of habits become disordered.

- I didn't know if she was gonna wake up in the morning.

It was very, very scary to think that she could be gone, and for what?

Okay, somebody's gotta take responsibility for it somewhere.

I mean, us parents as well.

But the stuff that they're allowing on social media for kids as young as seven is not okay.

- [Liz] There's now a law in the books that requires minors in Utah to have parental permission before they can sign up for social media sites, but Catherine isn't sure how that law would've helped her.

- They asked like, oh, how old are you?

You have to be at least 13 to use these apps.

And I just put in a different year.

- [Liz] Today she's a part of a growing group of families looking to hold the owners of social media sites accountable by suing.

- I know it's hard to like monitor the millions and billions of posts that go out every single day, but it's still discouraging to see that this content can still be posted.

It feels at times almost inescapable.

However, I know that even though there is a lot of negative content out there, there's a ton of positive content too.

- [Liz] And that's where her focus is today.

Catching up on moments lost while warning others about the dark side of social media.

- Even though I have transformed my feed and like have unfollowed and blocked those negative accounts, every once in a while I still get pushed those videos.

With recovery, a lot of people are scared of the weight gain, but you're not only gaining weight, you're gaining experiences, memories, friends, just life.

You're gaining your life back.