School districts file lawsuits against social media companies, alleging harm to students
WASHINGTON (TND) — School districts are increasingly turning to the court system to address the negative impacts they see social media has on American kids.
Across the country lawsuits are being filed against big tech companies for allegedly creating a toxic environment that’s harmful to kids in the name of profit.
“Social media companies are making a tremendous amount of money off of addicting our kids and exposing them to really harmful content and they should be held accountable,” said Josh Golin, executive director at Fairplay.
Seattle Public Schools was one of the first to file a suit in January against TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat and their parent companies.
The lawsuit says the companies use psychologically harmful techniques to attract young users, noting a drastic increase in suicides and mental health ER visits. It also alleges the platforms are responsible for worsening mental health and behavioral disorders — including anxiety, depression, disordered eating and cyberbullying — and making it more difficult to educate their students.
“They’re not able to be effective instructors to these children because of the distractions and harms and toxicity of social media,” said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington.
According to Keller Rohrback, the law firm that filed on behalf of Seattle Public Schools, the harms to students “include, but are not limited to, intentionally designing, marketing, and operating their exploitive social media platforms to be extremely popular with youth users, despite research confirming the severe and wide-ranging effects of social media on youth mental health.”
Similar lawsuits have now been filed by districts in Florida, New Jersey Pennsylvania.
A lawsuit filed in San Mateo, California cites a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that shows 57% of teen girls feel persistently sad or hopeless — up from 36% feeling that way in 2011. The suit places the blame squarely on big tech.
"As outlined in the Complaint, there is hard science behind the claim that social media is fueling a mental health epidemic in school-age children; every day schools are dealing with the fallout, which includes distracted students, increased absences, more children diagnosed with ADHD, cyber-bullying that carries into the classroom, and even physical damage to our San Mateo Schools,” said Nancy Magee, San Mateo County Superintendent.
“It is fantastic to see the schools stepping up,” Golin said. “They see it every day, they see how this is affecting their students' mental health, they see how it’s affecting their students' behavior.”
In response to the Seattle lawsuit, a Google spokesperson sent a statement to Sinclair station KOMO News saying, “We have invested heavily in creating safe experiences for children across our platforms and have introduced strong protections and dedicated features to prioritize their well-being."
Utah is now the first in the country to enact state laws limiting use of social media between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. and requiring kids under 18 to get parental permission to sign up for the platforms. The legislation also seeks to prevent tech companies from luring kids to their apps using addictive features.
Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed off on the pair of measures last month, saying, “We remain very optimistic that we will be able to pass not just here in the state of Utah but across the country legislation that significantly changes the relationship of our children with these very destructive social media apps,”
On top of the issues with children, Congress is also debating what to do about TikTok and the national security concerns that stem from a Chinese-owned company having access to American user data and content. An all out ban of the wildly popular app in America remains on the table. According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, half of Americans want to ban TikTok.
