Schools’ suit claims social media companies are fueling a youth mental health crisis
Oceanside and Coronado Unified are joining a growing number of school districts nationwide in suing the country’s largest social media companies, arguing that their content algorithms and platform designs are addicting children and teens and have caused worsening anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts.
The two San Diego County districts are among 16 districts that filed suit against more than a dozen social media companies Wednesday in San Francisco federal court. The defendants include the tech companies that run Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, WhatsApp, YouTube and Google. The National City and Ramona districts are also plaintiffs in the suit.
The districts argue those companies have fueled a youth mental health epidemic that predates COVID-19 by targeting minors and designing apps in a way that entices people to use them for long periods of time. The plaintiffs cite app features such as likes, comments, rewards and read receipts that it says addicts users to collecting and waiting for social media interactions and effectively encourage them to compare themselves with their peers.
The litigation points to research that has found a host of poor health, behavioral and emotional outcomes associated with heavy social media use, such as depression, low self-esteem, cyberbullying, eating disorders, sleep deprivation and more.
“Social media companies are and have been well aware of the harm they cause,” said James Frantz, a San Diego-based attorney representing the plaintiff districts, in a statement. “It must stop, and we will fight to hold these social media companies accountable for choosing profit over the mental health and safety of children and their families.”
The social media companies that responded to requests for comment by the San Diego Union-Tribune on Thursday said they have taken many steps to regulate content for the sake of safety and well-being of their users.
If elementary schools want a counselor more than two days a week, they have to buy more days using their own money.
Meta, one of the nation’s largest tech conglomerates which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, pointed to dozens of tools it has created to help teenagers and their families, including tools that verify users’ age and limit sensitive content for youth, notifications encouraging teenagers to take breaks from Instagram or from one topic, tools that allow parents to limit their kids’ time on Instagram and monitor their activity, and warnings that display if somebody is preparing to post an offensive comment.
Meta also says it bans content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders and displays resources when a user searches for or posts content related to those topics.
“We want to reassure every parent that we have their interests at heart in the work we’re doing to provide teens with safe, supportive experiences online,” said Antigone Davis, head of safety at Meta, in a statement. “These are complex issues, but we will continue working with parents, experts and regulators such as the state attorneys general to develop new tools, features and policies that meet the needs of teens and their families.”
A Snap spokesperson said the company uses human moderation to review content on Snapchat before it can reach large audiences and works with leading mental health organizations to offer in-app tools and resources for users. The company has said that, unlike other social media platforms that may entail more social comparison or public pressure, Snapchat was designed to help people communicate with their actual friends.
“Nothing is more important to us than the well-being of our community,” the spokesperson said. “We are constantly evaluating how we continue to make our platform safer, including through new education, features and protections.”
Wednesday’s lawsuit is similar to several others that school districts have filed in recent months. Seattle Public Schools was the first major district to do so, in January.
This isn’t the first issue over which school districts have engaged in mass litigation against corporate giants, alleging harm against their students. Hundreds of school districts nationwide had previously sued Juul Labs for its role in the youth vaping epidemic. Juul agreed this week to a nearly half-billion-dollar settlement with six states, including California, for that role.
It’s the largest settlement the embattled electronic cigarette-maker has reached so far for its role in the youth vaping surge.
School districts are affected financially by social media’s hold on young people, Frantz said, because they spend a lot of money and staffing time addressing not just student mental health, but also cyberbullying and social media use during school hours.
“As multiple state and federal reports have recently concluded, there are harmful effects on young people related to use of social media,” said Coronado Unified Supt. Karl Mueller in a statement. “These adverse effects ultimately impact student academic and social development.”
But multiple legal experts said they doubt these school district lawsuits will be successful in court.
Several said they’re not aware of any similar cases having succeeded, noting that others have been thwarted by the federal law known as Section 230 — a portion of a 1996 telecommunications statute that protects social media companies from liability for content that people post on their platforms.
“If we’re moving into a time where 230, either by the courts or by Congress, is peeled back a bit, we can then have the space to be creative and see where these cases go,” said Ellen Goodman, an information policy law professor at Rutgers Law School.
Whether companies can be held liable, despite Section 230, for their algorithms that feed targeted content to users is the subject of a case, Gonzalez vs. Google, that the U.S. Supreme Court heard last month and could decide this summer.
It will also be tough for school districts to prove that the social media companies caused their students’ mental health problems, said Mark Bartholomew, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law who studies technology and advertising regulatory law. There are other factors that can contribute to students’ poor mental health, he said.
“The law really requires a high burden of proof demonstrating that causal relationship,” Bartholomew said. “If you have a bunch of different potential causes, it’s harder to sort out individual parties for responsibility.”
The school districts’ lawsuits rely partly on an argument that social media companies have created a “public nuisance,” a term that has been used in litigation accusing companies of causing societal problems ranging from climate change to gun violence.
Bartholomew said public nuisance lawsuits are more likely to be effective when the damage and cause are clear and tangible — for example, if a company pollutes a river. But he said he is not aware of public nuisance cases where victims were successful in proving intangible harms, like anxiety and depression.
However, Frantz argues that no other cause has fueled the youth mental health crisis as much as social media. School districts that have witnessed the rise in mental health problems directly have argued the same, he said.
Goodman noted research by New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, who has argued that higher anxiety and depression among teens can be attributed to the rise of social media because it surged starting after 2010, the year after the iPhone debuted a front-facing camera.
“His view is that there is clearly a causal connection,” Goodman said.
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