How pressure against social media companies could play out in court
Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker told a Philadelphia crowd in 2017 the website’s design was “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” He said he and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s creator, knew this. Parker gave a warning. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
Seven years later, experts say America’s children are experiencing an unprecedented mental health crisis fueled in part by social media. And although protecting children from the potential harm of social media has wide bipartisan support, no solutions have been put in place to meaningfully counteract the problem.
In recent years, groups have turned to the courts to try to get companies to change their practices. Across the country, dozens of states and hundreds of young people, parents and school districts are involved in a complex and overlapping web of legal actions against social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.
It’s still early, and both sides have traded blows. As University of Tennessee College of Law professor Alex Long puts it, it’s been a mixed bag for both parties.
“They’re still in the game,” Long said of both the plaintiffs and the social media companies. “They’ve got every incentive to keep going.”
Here’s what lawyers and legal and medical experts have said about the mental health crisis and legal fight, and what they think it will take to ultimately make children safer online.
‘Their business isn’t more important than kids’
Up to 95% of teens aged 13-17 in the United States report using social media, according to an advisory from the U.S. surgeon general. Most report daily usage and around a third say they use it “almost constantly,” with most logging 3.5 hours a day on social media. The risk for mental health problems, including anxiety and depression, skyrockets when children and adolescents use social media more than three hours a day, the advisory stated.
Measures like the Kids Online Safety Act and other bills aimed at protecting kids online are still working their way through the U.S. House and Senate. A Tennessee bill requiring minors to have parental consent to create social media accounts has passed the Tennessee Senate and will go to the House, which already passed an earlier version of the bill. Several states have passed similar, albeit more restrictive, laws, although they have been blocked in court.
Lawsuits argue that social media platforms have specific defects that are harming children — either through addiction and worsening mental health, or by making it easy for predators to find children. Some of those claims are bolstered by internal studies done by the social media companies themselves on how they affect users.
Many lawsuits brought by minors and their families ask for compensation for the harm they say they’ve experienced, from developing eating disorders to attempting suicide, while also asking the companies change their practices such as implementing more thorough age verification, instituting more parental controls and changing features they say make the platforms addictive.
Tennessee is involved in cases against Meta and TikTok in the Davidson County Chancery Court. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti took TikTok to court in March 2023 over the company’s alleged failure to produce documents his office requested for an investigation.
Skrmetti called the push against social media companies a “50-state effort,” with Tennessee and Colorado chairing a multistate investigation of the platforms.
“The biggest driver for me is getting the companies to change their behavior,” he said. “Their business isn’t more important than kids.”
On another legal front, more than 650 school districts have sued social media companies recently through two consolidated cases in California. One of the districts is Metro Nashville Public Schools.
MNPS spokesperson Sean Braisted said that teachers see the harm caused by the companies in classrooms everyday and that MNPS “bears the costs of dealing with the bullying and harassment, inattention to academics, behavioral problems, discipline issues, and threats linked to social media.”
The lawsuit asks that the companies fund “prevention, education, and treatment for the effects of excessive and problematic use of social media in schools,” Braisted said.
Case draws comparisons to JUUL, opioid litigation
Joseph VanZandt, an attorney at Montgomery, Alabama, law firm Beasley Allen that is playing a leading role in federal lawsuits over social media, sees similarities to another case he worked on against electronic cigarette maker JUUL.
“We are dealing with a youth addiction epidemic,” VanZandt said. “We’re dealing with the fallout of what happens when companies target young individuals and cause harm to them.”
When accused of addicting children to their sites, the companies typically push back. The way Skrmetti sees it, though, “if it’s not addiction, it’s something that sure looks an awful lot like addiction.”
The JUUL case and some other examples of this type of legal challenge, called mass-tort, like litigation against opioid manufacturers have resulted in millions or billions of dollars in settlements to the plaintiffs. Others, like litigation against firearm manufacturers for their role in American gun violence, have not been as successful. Long said