‘Wave’ of litigation expected as schools fight social media corporations

About 40 and counting school districts across the country are suing social media corporations over claims that their apps are addictive, damaging to students’ mental health, and causing adversarial impacts on schools and other government resources.

A lot of these lawsuits, which were originally filed in quite a lot of court jurisdictions, were consolidated into one 281-page multidistrict litigation claim filed March 10 within the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Plaintiffs within the case include school districts, individuals and native and state governments. In total, there are about 235 plaintiffs.

The product liability grievance seeks unspecified monetary damages, in addition to injunctive relief ordering each defendant to treatment certain design features on their platforms and supply warnings to youth and fogeys that its products are “addictive and pose a transparent and present danger to unsuspecting minors.” 

Attorneys representing plaintiff school districts said this master grievance allows districts to share legal resources for similar public nuisance claims against social media corporations in an try to recoup money spent addressing the youth mental health crisis.

Individual district lawsuits describe actions taken by school systems to deal with student mental well-being, akin to hiring more counselors, using universal screeners and provding lessons on resilency constructing. In its lawsuit, California’s San Mateo County Board of Education also explains the way it needed to reallocate funding to pay staff to deal with bullying and fighting, hire more security staff, and to research vandalism. 

Schools are on the front lines of this crisis, said Lexi Hazam, an attorney with Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein and co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs’ consolidated grievance. 

Districts “are sometimes having to divert resources and effort and time from their educational mission to be able to address the mental health crisis amongst their students,” said Hazam. Students’ mental health struggles are caused largely by social media design features that “deliberately got down to addict” youth, she said. 

The design features, the multidistrict litigation said, “manipulate dopamine delivery to accentuate use” and use “trophies” to reward extreme usage.

But major litigation like that is more likely to take a few years to resolve, in accordance with legal experts. The lawsuit is in its early stages, and the court will soon consider motions to dismiss. If the case proceeds, it can move into the invention phase, where opposing parties can request documents and knowledge that won’t already be available.

One legal expert said getting involved within the case may very well make school districts vulnerable to legal motion by parents who forged blame on them for not doing more to support students’ mental well-being. The case also discounts the positive features of teens’ social media use, said Eric Goldman, law professor and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law. 

“Here’s the explanation why not every school district goes to enroll — first, because I believe at the least some school districts realize that social media is probably not the issue. The truth is, it could be a part of the answer,” Goldman said.

The more likely reason why districts shouldn’t participate, Goldman said, is because schools can be “admitting to their parents that they are not doing an excellent job to administer the mental health needs of their student population.” 

Reducing risks

The lawsuit — often called the Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation — was filed against Meta Platforms Inc., which operates Facebook and Instagram, in addition to the businesses behind Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. 

There is no cost to highschool systems to hitch the litigation for the reason that plaintiffs’ law firms are working on contingency, meaning they’re paid only in the event that they prevail, in accordance with several plaintiffs attorneys. 

Per the lawsuit, the social media platforms exploit children by having “an algorithmically-generated, infinite feed to maintain users scrolling.” 

The result, the grievance said, is that youth are scuffling with anxiety, depression, addiction, eating disorders, self-harm and suicide risk. Individual school district cases folded into this litigation also claim the social media corporations’ platforms have contributed to highschool security threats and vandalism. 

“Defendants’ decisions have generated extraordinary corporate profits — and yielded immense tragedy,” the master grievance declares. 

The lawsuit notes the widespread use of social media amongst teens, in addition to details troubling statistics showing increases in youth suicide risk, anxiety and chronic sadness. 

In response to a request for an interview or statement, Meta Head of Safety Antigone Davis, emailed, “We wish to reassure every parent that we now have their interests at heart within the work we’re doing to offer teens with secure, supportive experiences online.”

The opposite defendant corporations didn’t reply to requests for interviews or statements. 

Davis’ email said Meta has developed greater than 30 tools to support teens and their families, including ones that confirm age, allow parents to make your mind up when and for the way long their teens use Instagram, routinely sets latest Instagram accounts to personal for those under 16, and send notifications encouraging teens to take regular breaks.

Meta has also invested in technology that finds and removes content related to suicide, self-injury or eating disorders before it’s reported by users. On the corporate’s Safety Center webpage, it states that it has never allowed people to have a good time or promote self-harm or suicide. Meta also removes fictional depictions of suicide and self-harm, in addition to content that shows methods or materials. 

“We do, nonetheless, allow people to debate suicide and self-injury because we would like Facebook and Instagram to be places where people can share their experiences, raise awareness about these issues, and seek support from each other,” the webpage says. 

Davis said, “These are complex issues, but we’ll proceed working with parents, experts and regulators akin to the state attorneys general to develop latest tools, features and policies that meet the needs of teens and their families.”

At Meta’s annual shareholder meeting on May 31, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten sought approval of a resolution to require an independent audit of the corporate’s risk management practices. In pre-recorded remarks, Weingarten said the teachers union members’ pensions are “significant shareholders of Meta Platforms.”

A May 4 AFT press release said pension funds by which AFT members participate hold a combined 30 million shares of Facebook, valued at $6.3 billion.

Concerns for those pensions have led AFT to turn out to be “increasingly alarmed” concerning the company’s business practices, particularly about failures to mitigate public safety risks, Weingarten said in her pre-recorded remarks. 

“Controversies that stem from a ‘move fast and break things’ business model are of particular concern to teachers, who too often find themselves on the front lines coping with the harms brought on by the corporate’s social media products,” she said.

Federal response

A big majority of respondents in a recent poll of 1,804 registered voters said social media corporations and state and federal governments should do more to make sure the online safety of kids and youths. The survey was conducted by Hart Research Associates.

Meanwhile, on May 23, the federal government took several steps to attract attention to concerns about youth social media use. The U.S. Surgeon General issued a public health advisory, which recommends policymakers, technology corporations, researchers, families and youth take steps to raised understand the complete impact of social media use, including methods to “maximize the advantages and minimize the harms” of those platforms.

On the identical day, the White House announced the creation of an interagency task force for assessing and stopping online harms to children and youths, in addition to steps to boost the privacy of scholars’ data to deal with concerns concerning the monetization of that non-public data by corporations. 

“There may be now undeniable evidence that social media and other online platforms have contributed to our youth mental health crisis,” the White House announcement said. 

David vs. Goliath

Seattle Public Schools is certainly one of the plaintiffs within the multidistrict litigation. Greg Narver, general counsel for the varsity system, said the district doesn’t initiate litigation calmly. Within the 4 years he’s worked for the district, it has been the plaintiff in just one other case — a grievance against Juul e-cigarette company that was settled in April.  

“From my standpoint, there is a problem and we’re searching for solutions,” Narver said of the teenager mental health crisis. The issue, he said “shouldn’t be just the welfare of individual students however the effect on the entire way we operate our district, the strain on our providers and our counselors, and the entire student health department.”

The district acknowledges there are positive features of social media, but Narver said “the conduct that we’re complaining about that we predict creates this public nuisance is one which feeds this addictive nature, that sort of preys on the adolescent and preteen mind and creates just terrible outcomes and stressors on their life from suicidal ideation, eating disorders [and] violence, and we’re searching for an answer.” 

Dean Kawamoto, an attorney at Keller Rohrback representing Seattle Public Schools and a number of other other districts on this case, called the consolidated lawsuit unique since lots of the plaintiffs are school districts. 

”I believe it does speak to the magnitude of the issue and the dearth of ready solutions that they will the court system,” he said.

“While you take a look at the demand and the necessity for these mental health services, and you then take a look at what’s happening with school budgets and financing, you might want to do something to try to scale back the number of youngsters that need assistance,” Kawamoto said.

School districts are the most important provider of youth mental health services, he said, but when districts attempt to litigate this individually against the social media corporations, it will be a David vs. Goliath scenario given the for-profit corporations’ access to legal resources. 

“Goliath is probably going going to place up an enormous fight.”

Aelish Marie Baig, an attorney with Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, is representing several plaintiffs, including government organizations like Broward County Public Schools in Florida and Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  Bucks County was the first government entity to hitch the multidistrict litigation against the social media corporations. 

Baig predicts a “wave” of litigation as more school systems and native and state governments join the grievance. These cases, she said, represent significant litigation on par with those against tobacco, vaping and opioid corporations. 

Social media corporations, Baig said, are “deliberately exploiting [children’s] psychology, their neurophysiology, and so they do that by designing and operating their social media platforms in ways in which they know are harmful to you.”

‘Only a contributing factor’

There is a universal awareness that youth are facing greater pressures and stress today, but some query whether there may be enough causality to litigate against social media corporations for these problems. 

“It just baffles my mind to think that we will isolate one think about our complex society and say that should be fixed,” law professor Goldman said. “And the worst thing is I believe school districts are only going to pat themselves on the back and say, ‘We fixed the issue.'”

“We’re facing systemic long-term growth and demand for mental health services, and social media is possibly at most only a contributing factor to that,” he said.

NetChoice, a nonprofit organization that advocates free of charge expression on the web, wrote in a press release earlier this 12 months that Seattle Public Schools’ claim is a “moral panic lawsuit.” 

“Rising rates of mental illness in American youth is an incredibly serious matter,” NetChoice said. “But as an alternative of trying to deal with the basis causes of the issue, the Seattle School District’s grievance wrongly points fingers at American businesses in a fashion which can not ultimately profit Seattle’s youth.”

Goldman said the narrative that social media is inherently toxic and harmful to teens ignores that these platforms are a crucial a part of their lives and that there are advantages to their use. 

Teens spend about 8.3 hours a day on screen media, in accordance with Common Sense Media. A 2021 survey by the organization that gives technology and entertainment recommendations for folks and schools found that social media use amongst children ages 8-12 was increasing. The minimum age for many social media accounts is 13, the report on the survey points out.

For teens, social media use is a way for them to attach with other, said Laura Tierney, founder and CEO of The Social Institute, in a press release earlier this 12 months. The Social Institute promotes ways for youth to have positive and healthy interactions on social media. 

Tierney added that through social media, texting and gaming, students are capable of hang around with their friends, construct relationships, stay informed on current events and pursue their passions.

A recent American Psychological Association health advisory for social media use amongst adolescents said the platforms are usually not inherently helpful or harmful to youth. The advisory points to research describing how some teens with mental health concerns may profit from opportunities with social media to socialize, particularly those teens who experience adversity or isolation once they are offline. 

The APA also really useful that social media features be tailored to the social and cognitive abilities of youth users and that their exposure to harmful content be minimized, reported and removed. The advisory added that technology shouldn’t drive users to one of these content.

If the plaintiffs prevail and social media corporations must change design features, it could spell the top for these corporations, said Goldman. State laws limiting social media use are threats to the companies as well, Goldman said. 

Recent laws in Utah would require social media corporations to get parental consent for users under the age of 18 and to have a default setting that blocks overnight access for minor users. The businesses also will probably be prohibited from targeting minors’ social media accounts with addictive designs or features, in accordance with a press release from the governor’s office. 

TikTok — the social media site most favored by teens, in accordance with one survey — will probably be banned in Montana starting Jan. 1, 2024. The state’s move on this direction was out of concern that user’s private data was going to be misused by “foreign adversaries,” in accordance with an announcement by the state. ByteDance, the corporate that owns TikTok, is a Chinese company. 

Plaintiffs’ attorney Hazam said the master grievance doesn’t say that every one social media is inherently evil. “The issue is that these corporations have used reams of knowledge that they pull from young users to design very high-powered, sophisticated algorithms, to addict them to their platforms and keep them taking a look at them as much as possible for so long as possible,” Hazam said.

Searching for many solutions

One academic in the sphere said the defendant corporations within the case should ask what school systems are doing to coach teens on healthy social media habits. 

“If [school] boards wish to help cut down on problems, get ahead of the issue and take a look at to chop it off on the pass,” said Charles Russo, Joseph Panzer Chair in Education within the University of Dayton School of Education and Health Sciences and research professor of law within the university’s School of Law.  “But you may’t just throw your hands up and say, ‘It’s all social media’s fault.’ If we all know there is a problem, we got to do something to deal with it.”

Seattle counsel Narver said the youth mental health problem is so pervasive that the district is trying to deal with it from many alternative angles, including participating on this lawsuit. 

The district’s grievance filed in January said that in an effort to deal with the youth mental health crisis in Seattle, it has hired additional staff, developed resources and conducted skilled training regarding students’ mental, emotional and social health. It has also created lesson plans to show concerning the dangers of social media misuse. 

“We’re doing our greatest,” Narver said. “You are fighting some really hard and powerful forces. These are a number of the richest corporations on this planet we’re talking about, and so they have very strong economic incentives to proceed with business as usual.”