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A California court allowed school districts to sue social media companies including Facebook and TikTok over accusations they harm the mental health of children and therefore force the districts to spend more resources to tackle such issues faced by students.
The judgment came as part of a multidistrict litigation that consolidated hundreds of complaints filed by school districts, local government entities, and state attorneys accusing social media platforms of harming children. The defendants in the case are Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Google’s YouTube, ByteDance’s TikTok, and Snapchat.
A motion was filed by defendants in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California seeking to dismiss the complaints from school districts and government entities. In a court order issued on Oct. 24, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers allowed certain claims related to harm to minors to proceed.
Plaintiffs allege that the defendants “deliberately designed their social media platforms to foster compulsive use and addiction in minors, whose mental and physical health deteriorated,” the order noted.
The school districts claim that the algorithms forced them to expend “substantial financial resources to mitigate the mental health and consequent behavioral issues their students suffer as a result of social media addiction.”
Furthermore, the school districts said the platforms failed to implement robust age verification processes to determine user age, did not implement effective parental controls or set up parental notifications, failed to create adequate processes that allow users to report suspected child sexual abuse material, published geolocation information of minors, recommended minors’ accounts to adult strangers, and used algorithms to promote “addictive engagement.”
The overuse of social media by students resulted in “significant disruption” in school operations, impeding their ability to educate children in a safe and secure manner, the districts argued.
Forty-one percent of school districts added staff to focus on student mental health, 46 percent created or expanded mental health programs for students, 27 percent added student classes on social, emotional, and mental health, and 56 percent offered teachers professional development to help them deal with students facing mental health issues, the order noted.
School districts claimed that social media platforms “deliberately targeted school-aged children with knowledge of the impact their conduct could have on schools.”
