To hold the digital companies behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat responsible for the teenage mental health crisis, a public school district in Seattle has launched a creative lawsuit.
Seattle Public Schools on Friday submitted the case to the U.S. District Court. According to the 91-page complaint, the social media behemoths are accused of creating a public nuisance by marketing to kids.
They are charged with escalating behavioral and mental health problems like anxiety, depression, disordered eating, and cyberbullying; making it harder to educate students; and pressuring schools to take measures like hiring more mental health professionals, developing lesson plans about social media's effects, and providing teachers with more training.
Tens of millions of students across the country were allegedly drawn into positive feedback loops of excessive use and misuse of the defendants' social media platforms, according to the complaint. It said that "defendants have skillfully abused the impressionable brains of children." Even worse, the defendants regularly select and disseminate damaging and predatory information to children.
Although federal law, notably Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, helps protect online businesses from liability resulting from content that third parties publish on their platforms, the lawsuit claims that this protection does not apply to the tech giants' activities in this case.
According to the complaint, defendants should be held responsible for their deeds rather than what third parties may have said about them on their platforms. Defendants knowingly encourage risky behaviors in children, such as reading literature that supports anorexia and eating disorders.
Google and Snap said in emails sent out on Sunday that they had made efforts to safeguard young users of their platforms.
For people who could be experiencing a mental health or emotional crisis, Snap developed an on-app assistance system called Here For You in 2020. It also has enabled settings that allow parents to see who their children contact on Snapchat, but not the substance of those messages. Additionally, it now includes more information on the new 988 crisis and suicide hotline in the United States.
The firm promised in a written statement that it would "continue striving to ensure our platform is safe and to give Snapchatters coping with mental health concerns resources to help them deal with the challenges affecting young people today."
Google, which owns YouTube, has also offered parents the option to create reminders, impose screen time restrictions, and ban particular sorts of information from appearing on their children's devices, according to José Castaeda, a Google representative.
Castaeda stated, "We have substantially invested in ensuring that children enjoy a safe experience across all of our platforms and have established robust protections and specialized features to promote their well-being."
Requests for comments from Meta and TikTok were not immediately responded to.
The complaint claims that from 2009 to 2019, there was an average 30% increase in the percentage of Seattle Public Schools students who reported feeling "so gloomy or hopeless" virtually every day for at least two weeks.
The school district is asking the court to impose a cease-and-desist order, grant damages, and require the companies to pay for programs that treat and prevent people from using social media in an unhealthy or excessive way.
Hundreds of families are suing the companies over the harm social media has brought to their children, but it's unknown if any other school systems have filed a lawsuit identical to Seattle's.
Frances Haugen, a Facebook whistleblower, made public internal data from the company in 2021 that showed the company was aware of Instagram's negative effects on kids, including how it damaged their body image and worsened eating disorders and suicidal thoughts. She said that the platform prioritized profits before user security and kept its own studies hidden from investors and the public.
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