Like the tobacco, oil, gun, opiate, and e-cigarette industries, Major US social media companies are now facing lawsuits Submitted by public entities seeking to They are blamed for a huge social problem: in their case, the mental health crisis among young people.

But the new lawsuits — one filed by a Seattle public school district last week, another filed by a suburban district on Monday, and almost certainly more — face an uncertain legal path.

In the first, a school district filed a lawsuit against the tech giants that own TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat to hold them accountable for a youth mental health crisis. In a 91-page lawsuit filed Friday in federal court, It has been argued that social media companies have created a public nuisance by targeting their products at children.

Social media has been blamed for a decline in mental health and behavioral disorders, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders and cyberbullying; complicating the work of educating students; and forcing schools to take steps such as hiring more mental health professionals, developing curricula on the effects of social media, and providing additional training for teachers.

“Required They successfully used the vulnerable brain of youth“Ten million students across the country are being drawn into positive feedback loops due to the excessive use and abuse of the defendants’ social media platforms,” ​​the lawsuit states. “What’s worse is that the defendants’ content created and targeted at young people is often harmful and exploitative.”

Meta, Google, Snap and TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While a federal law — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — helps protect Internet companies from liability for what third parties post on their platforms, The lawsuit claims the measure doesn’t protect the companies’ conduct in this case.

“Plaintiffs do not allege that Defendants are responsible for what third parties said on Defendants’ platforms, but rather for Defendants’ own conduct,” the lawsuit states. “The defendants positively advise us and Share content that is harmful to young people, such as promoting anorexia and eating disorders“.

The lawsuit states that between 2009 and 2019 was an average The number of students increased by 30% from the Seattle Public Schools district, who reported feeling “so sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row” to the extent that they stopped their usual activities.

The school district is asking the court to order the companies to stop creating a public nuisance, to pay restitution and to pay for preventive education and treatment for excessive and problematic social media use.

While hundreds of families have filed lawsuits against the companies over the harm their children have suffered through social media, it’s currently unknown if other school districts have filed similar lawsuits in Seattle.

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The US Supreme Court is set to examine next month how well a federal law protects the tech industry from such lawsuits when social media algorithms spread potentially harmful content.

Even if the Supreme Court allows a lawsuit like the one in Seattle, the district faces The enormous challenge of demonstrating sector responsibility.

And the tech industry argues that social media’s impact on adolescent mental health is in many ways different from, say, Big Pharma’s role in fueling opioid addiction.

“The basic argument is that the tech industry is to blame for the emotional state of teenagers because it recommended content that caused emotional harm,” said Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of tech industry trade association NetChoice. “It would be foolish to sue Barnes & Noble because an employee recommended a book that caused emotional harm or made a teenager feel bad. But that’s exactly what this lawsuit does. “

“Our students – and young people around the world – are on the lookout Unprecedented difficulties in learning and living, exacerbated by the negative effects of increased screen time, unfiltered content and the potentially addictive qualities of social media.Seattle Superintendent Brent Jones said in an emailed statement Tuesday. “We are confident and hopeful that this lawsuit is an important step toward reversing this trend for our students.”

The argument that federal law does not protect the tech giants’ behavior in this case, in which their own algorithms promote harmful content, is also at issue in the case. The case of Gonzalez v. Google, YouTube’s parent company, which will appear before the Supreme Court on February 21. In this case, the family of an American woman killed in a gang attack Islamic State In 2015, in Paris, it was claimed that YouTube’s algorithms helped recruit the terrorist group.

If the Supreme Court’s ruling finds the tech companies liable in this case, school districts will have to prove that the social networks were at fault.

But Szabo noted that Seattle’s graduation rates have been on the rise since 2019, a time when many kids relied on social media to stay in touch with friends during the pandemic. If social media were really that detrimental to the district’s educational efforts, the graduation rate wouldn’t have gone up, he said.

“The lawsuit focuses only on how social media harms children, and there may be evidence of that,” said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law in Silicon Valley. “But There is also a lot of evidence that social media benefits teenagers and other children. which We don’t know what the misery rate would be without social media. It is possible that the distress rate was higher, not lower.”

The companies insisted that they take the safety of their users, especially children, seriously and implement tools to make it easier for parents to know who their children are connecting with; make mental health resources more visible, including a new 988 crisis line; and improved age verification and screen time limits.

“We automatically set teens’ accounts to private when they join Instagram and send them messages that encourage them to take regular breaks,” said Anitigone Davis, Meta’s head of global security, in an emailed statement. “We don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, and of the content we remove or take action on, we catch more than 99% of it before it’s delivered to us.”

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen Revealed in 2021 Internal studies show that the company knew that Instagram had a negative effect on teenagers By lowering your body image and worsening eating disorders and suicidal thoughts. This was claimed by Haugen The platform prioritized security and hid his investigations from investors and the public.

Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit that works to insulate kids from commercialization and marketing, says that while social media benefits some students, it doesn’t remove the serious harm it causes to many.

“The costs to student mental health, the time it takes for schools to monitor and respond to social media drama are huge,” Golin said. “It’s ridiculous that schools are being held responsible for the damage these social media platforms are causing to young people. No one sees the kind of cumulative effects that social media causes. As much as school districts do.”

Both cases are filed in Seattle District Court, but they are based on state law violation of public order, A broad and loosely defined legal concept whose origins date back to at least 13th century England. In Washington, public nuisance is defined in part as “any unlawful act or omission in the performance of duty” that “disrupts, injures, or endangers the safety, health, comfort, or recreation of a substantial number of persons.

Complaints about disorderly conduct helped the tobacco industry reach a 1998 settlement with states worth $246 billion over 25 years. But the disorderly conduct law has also, at least in part, been the basis for lawsuits by state, city, county or tribal governments to hold oil companies responsible for climate change, the gun industry responsible for gun violence, the pharmaceutical industry for opioids. Crisis and vaping companies like Juul, teenagers vaping.

A large number of court processes are ongoing. Juul Labs agreed last month to settle thousands of lawsuits — including 1,400 from school districts, cities and counties — worth $1.2 billion.

The Seattle lawsuit has the potential to lead to massive changes, raising questions about the desirability of solving big societal problems in court rather than through legislation. However, the risk to the school district is minimal because the private law firm files the lawsuit on a case-by-case basis, with the firm only getting paid if the case is successful.

Jolina Quarez, senior privacy and technology policy advisor for Common Sense Media, which aims to keep media safe for children, said she was pleased the school district filed a disorderly conduct lawsuit against the technology companies.

“People are tired of Congress doing anything.”“, he said.

(Courtesy of AP)

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