Teenagers are experiencing a mental-health crisis. And though the science is messy and the matter isn’t settled, many suspect that social media is, in some substantial way, tangled up in the problem. Following this instinct, legislators and regulators at both the state and federal levels have suggested a slew of interventions aimed at protecting young people from the potential harms of social platforms. Many of these efforts have so far fallen short on legal grounds, and broadly speaking, the status quo remains.

This week, we learned of a new approach intended to protect kids from Big Tech. On Tuesday, a joint lawsuit was filed against Meta by the attorneys general of 33 states, deploying consumer-protection laws to try to hold the company accountable for harming young people. It claims that Meta deliberately got children and teenagers “addicted” to its platforms, that this addiction directly causes physical and mental harm, and that the company lied about it.

[Read: Why American teens are so sad]

“Just like Big Tobacco and vaping companies have done in years past, Meta chose to maximize its profits at the expense of public health,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a press release. The Big Tobacco comparison has been made a number of times since fall 2021, when the whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked to the press internal Meta documents about Instagram and Facebook. Among them were the results of studies showing teenagers candidly reporting the negative effects that social media was having on their lives. When they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. They had noticed increased anxiety and depression among their peers, and they considered Instagram to be one of the causes. Haugen’s so-called Facebook Files preceded the attorneys general investigation, which were announced several weeks after their release.

The suit is worth reading closely. As an effort to address incredibly serious social problems, it’s surprisingly slapdash. Our window into the case may be limited—many of its 233 pages are at least partially redacted, some blotted out entirely—but what is visible clearly relies on familiar, flawed tropes. It doesn’t engage seriously with the thorny question of just how social media affects kids and teenagers, and instead reads somewhat like a publicity stunt. Experts told me that the legal arguments made in the suit, even without knowing what is in the redactions, are not particularly convincing.

“I’m sympathetic overall to the dangers that social media pose to kids and how platforms have been poor stewards of their responsibility,” Mark Bartholomew, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law specializing in technology and the law, told me. “But when I look at the law … I do think it’s a stretch.” There are a couple of problems, he said. First, although social-media use might be a compulsive behavior, there is no official diagnosis for such a thing as social-media addiction. Second, proving that deception played a role in consumers’ use of Meta products will also be a challenge. That argument hinges on Meta’s public assurances that its products are safe, as well as the notion that consumers have taken that at face value to the point where they have been genuinely misled. “It’s hard to show that people were deceived,” Bartholomew said. “That they thought Instagram was one thing and it turned out to be another.”  

In connection with these arguments, the suit puts forward the idea that Meta deliberately presents young users with content that will “provoke intense reactions,” such as “bullying content” and content related to eating disorders or violence. The problem with these arguments isn’t that they are unfair; it’s that the notion that Meta would deliberately hurt the people it wants to keep on its platforms is both extremely hard to prove and easy to deny. (Young people absolutely are bullied through Instagram, and they certainly might see harmful content there—as with any internet platform, it’s impossible to argue otherwise. But does Meta display such material on purpose to lock users into the platform? Not exactly.) “Teens don’t want to be exposed to harmful content or hurtful interactions, and advertisers don’t want their ads showing up alongside content that isn’t appropriate for teens,” Liza Crenshaw, a Meta spokesperson, told me, arguing that the attorneys general had misunderstood Meta’s “long-term commercial interests.”

[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens]

Experts agreed that another aspect of the case feels considerably more cogent: namely, that Meta has violated the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. “That part’s more concrete,” Bartholomew said. “At least, it’s a little harder for Meta to wriggle out of.” COPPA prohibits tracking the online activity of children under the age of 13, or collecting their personal information, without explicit parental consent. If Meta has what COPPA terms “actual knowledge” of kids younger than 13 using its services, it’s violating the law. (“Instagram’s Terms of Use prohibit users under the age of 13. When we learn someone potentially under 13 has created an account, we work to remove them if they can’t demonstrate they meet our minimum age requirement,” Crenshaw said in a comment.)

Berin Szóka, a lawyer and the president of the libertarian-leaning think tank TechFreedom, highlighted one place where the suit’s argument could hold water: the complaint that, on Instagram’s sign-up page, where it asks for a new user’s birthday, the menu previously would automatically suggest a birth date 13 years prior. “That’s not a neutral age gate. That encourages the answer of Yes, I’m exactly 13 years old,” he told me. Meta recently changed this age gate, but it could be fined retroactively, and the attorneys general could ask to have some kind of continued supervision of the company’s COPPA practices. This would be a significant win, even if other elements of the suit are dismissed.

Most of the details in this part of the suit are redacted, so it’s possible that the states found new evidence of current lawbreaking activity as well. What is visible to the public so far is a bit ridiculous, however. For instance, to prove that Meta knows that kids use its apps, this suit cites the simple fact that various kid-oriented brands and media personalities (Lego, Hot Wheels, SpongeBob SquarePants, JoJo Siwa) have Instagram pages. The evidence in a similar (settled) case against YouTube was far more direct: While publicly denying that kids used YouTube, YouTube was also taking meetings with toy companies such as Mattel and Hasbro and literally pitching itself as a “leader in reaching children age 6–11,” as well as the “#1 website regularly visited by kids.”

Where does this leave us? Mostly, wondering what broader outcome the states are hoping for. The attorneys general say Meta has used “powerful and unprecedented technologies” to “ensnare” youth and teens. That might be a common rhetorical point in popular discourse, but it would require a lot of work to prove. And by far the weakest part of their argument comes when the states try to substantiate the claim that, as New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a press release, Meta is “to blame” for the mental-health crisis among kids and teenagers.

In the clearest statement of their position, the attorneys general write: “Increased use of social media platforms, including those operated by Meta, result in physical and mental health harms particularly for young users, who experience higher rates of major depressive episodes, anxiety, sleep disturbances, suicide, and other mental health concerns.” There is just one citation on this line, to a public Google Document maintained by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business (and a contributor to The Atlantic). That document summarizes dozens of studies with different findings, some of which contradict one another. Which ones are the attorneys referring to? They don’t say.

Later, they do cite a specific 2022 study by Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski, well-known researchers in the field. They found that young people are vulnerable to decreases in life satisfaction (quantified with a questionnaire) as a result of excessive social-media use in particular age windows. (For girls, ages 11 to 13; for boys, ages 14, 15, and 19.) In the lawsuit, the attorneys summarize the study as finding that “going through puberty while being a heavy social media user interferes with a sensitive period for social learning.” This is not an accurate representation of that study at all. “We did not show that social media interferes with social learning,” Orben said when I emailed her the page of the lawsuit that cited her paper. In fact, the words social learning don’t appear in the study at all.

Bartholomew offered a theory of the case. “AGs get a certain amount of deference in the courts,” he told me. This isn’t a private class-action suit that can be quickly thrown out. “It’s unlikely to be dismissed anytime soon, and I think the main point here is to make some waves.” Maybe that’s fine. But neither the mental-health crisis nor the expansive power of social-media companies will be seriously dealt with this way. Whatever the intentions of this suit, it’s not striking anywhere close to the crux of our problems.

The war between Israel and Hamas has progressed at such speed, with body counts mounting by the hour, that it can feel like the chasm of human grief it is leaving behind has gotten relatively little attention. In Israel, the society I know better, every individual seems to be connected to someone who was murdered or has been kidnapped. In Gaza, death surely feels inescapable. I have been worried about this reverberation of pain almost from the moment I learned what Hamas had done—that a grief this overwhelming will harden people such that generations will have to pass before any political resolution feels remotely possible.

“The whole country has PTSD,” was the first thing the Israeli writer Etgar Keret texted me a week after the attack. I realized that he was the person I most wanted to speak with. Keret has long been an impish figure on the Israeli literary scene, writing very short, absurdist stories for three decades, contemporary fairy tales that are allegorical and often gut-punching. What Keret hasn’t tried to do is be the voice of Israel. Unlike a generation of writers before him who were comfortable with this role—famously, Amos Oz, David Grossman, and A. B. Yehoshua—Keret is more concerned with how humans survive being human. Possibly, this is why his stories have had such universal appeal, regularly featured on This American Life.

Since the October 7 attack, Keret has been writing what he calls “war notes”: short thoughts, observations, and outlines of stories jotted down as if on scraps of paper meant to be shoved deep in a pocket or thrown away. One of them, “Signs of Life,” found its way onto the front page of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest paid daily newspaper, and a version even appeared in English on the actor Molly Ringwald’s Instagram feed. Keret composed the paragraph-long text for a young girl whose father had been killed. “Close your eyes, and allow yourself, just for a moment, to simply feel the pain. To hesitate. To be confused. To feel sorrow. Remorse,” he wrote. “You still have your whole life to spend persecuting, avenging, reckoning. But for now, just close your eyes and look inward, like a satellite hovering over a disaster zone, searching for signs of life.”

I spoke with Keret about how to find these signs of life. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: Israelis are used to dealing with terrorist attacks—it’s been a part of their reality for a very long time. But this felt different, and I’m curious if you can articulate why.

Etgar Keret: I think the experience of every Israeli citizen on that Saturday was this terrible intimacy with the war. At first there was a real lack of information, which left two points of view. Either the point of view of a family trapped in a room calling live to the television channel, saying “Send help, I can hear them murdering someone outside; they’re entering; they’re throwing a grenade here; my daughter is already dead.” And you hear this live, so you’re in this point of view of somebody who’s being massacred. And the other point of view was on Telegram, where you could see Hamas massacring people. But this was at such a primal level—not about territory, not about ideology. This was the plan, to bring the killing to us. Many times, people say to the survivors, “I can’t imagine what you felt when you were there.” But in a weird way, when I go and meet families who survived the attacks on the kibbutzim, I almost feel that I was there with them.

The idea behind putting it all on Telegram as it was happening, it was almost like presenting the pilot episode of a genocide, that every Israeli who sees would think they’re next: I’m burning this house down. I’m murdering this woman. I’m coming for you. The people they massacred, among them were Bedouin, Israeli Arabs, Filipino workers who help elderly people, Thai agricultural workers. It was about murdering in the most horrible way all the people who are in this area.

Beckerman: This must be having a profound effect on people’s psyches right now.

Keret: That’s why I described it to you as the entire country suffering from PTSD. I was on the street and I saw someone’s kid imitating the sound of an alarm siren, and his father snapped at him, and you could see that the kid didn’t understand what his father wanted from him; he was just making a sound—woo woo woo. I heard a fight between a parent and their child, and the child said, “Daddy loves the soldiers more than he loves me.” You can really feel it with children that they are aware their parents are acting strange. They don’t understand where they are. Where is their open heart?

Beckerman: What other kinds of responses are you seeing from people you know?

Keret: There is this feeling that reality has changed and that we have to adapt. And the people I appreciate the most are doing it slowly. The right answers don’t jump out at them. Here’s one story, for example.

There is this guy on my street who I like. He works with kids and teenagers, where he teaches them robotics with Legos. And the other day he calls me, and he never calls me, and he starts speaking, and in the beginning, I didn’t even understand what he was talking about. And then gradually he says that he’d been volunteering with a group of teenagers who are Israeli Arabs—Palestinian citizens of Israel. So he had been working with them for two years, and they grew very close together. And he said they were one of the most amazing groups and they won a championship. They went overseas. And he was their coach, so they were a little bit like a family. And then he called me, basically, just as he was looking at those kids’ Facebook pages. And there were photos taken from Telegram of horrible, graphic things—I don’t even want to repeat—of people being murdered in horrible ways, and he says he sees them posting them and kind of saying, Haha, you know, Yeah, shows them. And when he talked to me, I felt that on some level, he could say, I’m an Israeli; they betrayed me. But he wasn’t talking like that at all. It was a little bit like a parent discovering that his child is a sex molester or something, or enjoys watching snuff films. It was really like this searching thing, like, What didn’t I understand? How do I explain this?

Beckerman: How do you approach this as a writer, as an artist? What do you see as your tools for helping?

Keret: My parents were Holocaust survivors. And I think in many ways, they almost trained me for this moment. I had learned that the world can turn and change really quickly. One of the things my mom told me, she said, when everything’s stable, you can lean on whatever you want. But when things start shaking, lean on yourself—connect to your emotions; be reflective. And another thing that my father told me has become a mantra, even when I speak with people in the kibbutzim. When I was a child, I wasn’t the smartest kid. They had taught us about the Holocaust in school, and one day I asked my father if the Holocaust was the worst time of his life. And he said to me, “There are no good times and bad times. There are only hard times and easy times.” And he said, “All my life, I ran after the easy times. But one thing I have to admit: It was the difficult times when I’ve learned about myself most.” And I think that there is something to that. This will never justify all the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians that are happening these days.

I haven’t been writing any stories. Instead, I write these crazy notes. One was a synopsis for a story about an alien world whose energy comes from the pain of human beings, and then suddenly one of their power plants shuts down, and they say, “We need much more juice.” So they release the October 7 attacks and then we’re bombing Gaza, and then, you know, all the dark parts of town are suddenly lit.

I’m thinking that the only thing we can win from this opportunity is to reflect, to reboot. When you look at Israel and Palestine, we’ve been in the same loop pretty much since [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu came to power. Netanyahu believed in this policy of divide and conquer. And the idea is, If I keep Hamas, if I give it a little strength, it will be a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority; maybe it will be a way of stopping a Palestinian state. But this is an idea that is like a pagan ritual in which Hamas attacks us, we attack them, then we shake hands and another suitcase with money comes from Qatar. He believed that he could dance with the devil, and now this exploded in our face.

Beckerman: It seems to me, though, that what has been special about your war notes is that they look past politics to the human beings who are suffering now, at their grief.

Keret: When I visit with the survivors of the kibbutzim, I don’t talk about politics at all. I feel as if I’m coming as a representative of humanity—failed humanity, but still, humanity—in the sense that I come there as somebody who has been left intact, a guy who can laugh at a joke, some proof of existence. And I really feel that I don’t have anything to give to them, you know, talent-wise, just this idea of trying to conduct some kind of dialogue or perspective that is not hatefully reductive, but that allows for ambiguity and confusion.

Beckerman: Was this the motive behind the war notes?

Keret: It started with me just writing things that I saw. I go to meet the kibbutz people, and the woman that shows us and takes care of us, she has a baby on her hip. And she keeps going around and doing stuff with the baby on her. I have a herniated disc, so I noticed this. We were there for more than four hours, and all the time she had the baby. And when she walked us to the car, I wanted to say something nice. So I said, “Oh, your baby didn’t cry even one time; you’re so lucky to have such a baby.” “No, no, it’s not my baby,” she said. “The baby belongs to a woman whose family was massacred, and she’s not functional. So somebody said, ‘Will anyone take the baby?’ So I took the baby.” So it’s basically kind of writing those things down. Just to be sure that, later on, I won’t think I made them up, you know?

Beckerman: But you’re sharing them, like the one that Molly Ringwald shared on Instagram and that Yedioth Ahronoth, the Israeli newspaper, ran on the front page?

Keret: This particular note, the first person I sent it to was a teenager whose father was murdered. And she read it, and then told me she read it at his funeral. And it’s strange, because, you know, when I looked at Molly posting, you know, there is something about this text, because it says Look inside you; try to see what you’re feeling. Everybody thinks it’s about him or her. But I was writing for a girl whose father was murdered.

[Read: I was a child in a war]

Beckerman: Do you think there’s something about ephemeral writing? It’s not meant to be published necessarily; it’s writing almost in its purest form, where it’s providing a kind of catharsis, but it’s not about polishing it or making it perfect for someone else.

Keret: Right now, these feel like notes in the sense that there is some kind of raw energy or an attempt to remind myself of this moment. But it’s all a bunch of thoughts and anecdotes. I can tell you one. Some of the kibbutzim were really hit hard, like places like Kfar Aza had a huge massacre. But there were kibbutzim like Nir Am that were attacked, but no one was kidnapped and the attackers were held off from entering the kibbutz. And when I came to read to the children of the kibbutzim, there was this really nice dad from one of the less affected kibbutzim, and he said to me that he basically moved to the kibbutz a very short time ago from the city. And he said that when he went with his wife, he saw a beautiful house he loved, in Kfar Aza. And his wife said, “No, I want to be in Nir Am; it’s easier with the car.” And he said, “Yeah, but this is a nicer house.” And somebody said to him, “Look, you know, a nice house. Every house is nice. But it’s nicer when the people living in it are happy. Do what your wife wants.” And then he said, “I listened to my wife, and all my family is alive. And if I would have moved to Kfar Aza, I’d be in hell right now.” I think of these things because my parents were Holocaust survivors; this arbitrariness was familiar to them, the things that you did that saved you, the things that you did that would cause your death.

And the thing about kibbutzim, these are communities that don’t always respect privacy. At one gathering, a group of kibbutz members said to a young girl, “Come on, come on, tell him what you said when you heard the terrorist, when you heard him outside.” And she said, “No, no, no, I don’t want to.” They said, “No, come on, tell him, it’s funny.” So this girl told me about the moment when she heard terrorists inside the house shooting. She whispered when she told me this, but her thought was, There are so many books that I haven’t read yet. I don’t want to die stupid.

There are dozens of stories like this. So for me, I think that all those stories that I collect, they’re kind of proof of humanity. Saying, like, these are not victims, they’re people living; they’re doing pranks; they’re making fun of each other.

Beckerman: They still have humor.

Keret: It’s not even humor, because it’s not funny, but it’s acknowledging some kind of humanity in an inhuman situation. And my mom, we lived in a city where everybody was of Iraqi descent. So my mom was really one of the only Holocaust survivors in our town. And whenever they would ask her to come to Holocaust-memorial ceremonies to speak as a survivor, she would say, “I think you got it wrong. I passed the Holocaust. I don’t work in the Holocaust.” She resisted this idea of the Holocaust as a grand event, a giant jigsaw puzzle, and that her role was to be a tiny piece. She said, “No, I’m a human being. I will not be reduced to these stories. You can shoot children in black-and-white; I’ll stay in color.”