Peninsula school district sues social media giants
A school district in San Mateo County has joined the parade of lawsuits accusing Facebook, Instagram, Google and other social media platforms of designing their systems to addict youngsters, harming the youths and their schools while boosting the companies’ advertising revenues.
“This case represents one of the most serious issues facing the nation’s children, adolescents and teenagers — perhaps the most serious mental health crisis they have ever faced,” lawyers for the San Bruno Park School District said in a damage suit filed in federal court on Friday. The district has about 2,000 students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, as well as SnapChat, TikTok and other media giants “purposefully designed their platforms to be addictive and to deliver harmful content to youth,” the suit alleged.
As a result, the board’s lawyers said, communities are experiencing an “unprecedented flood of cases” of mental and emotional trauma among youths, including “uncontrollable anxiety, feelings of extreme sadness and hopelessness, depression, lack of interest in activities that used to give joy, suicidal ideation, and plans/attempts at suicide.” According to the suit, a nationwide survey found that 1 in 10 teenagers reported having tried to kill themselves in 2021.
A similar suit was filed in March by the San Mateo County Board of Education, represented by the same law firm, Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy. Both suits have been assigned to U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of Oakland, who is handling such cases nationwide.
Hundreds of those cases have been filed by individuals, and Gonzalez Rogers ruled last month that their suits could proceed, denying the companies’ motion to dismiss most of the claims against them.
Lawyers for Meta, Facebook and Instagram had argued in court filings that “there is no legal duty to prevent ‘addictive’ online services.” But Gonzalez Rogers, while not deciding whether the youths’ rights had been violated, said the platforms’ alleged actions were not protected by freedom of speech or by a federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, that shields online platforms from liability for the content they post.
Most of the allegations against the companies involve their own conduct, the judge said — for example, failing to notify parents that their children are using the platforms, making it hard for users to delete their accounts and using notifications and other techniques “to increase addictive use.”
A Los Angeles judge issued a similar ruling in October allowing youths to sue the social media companies in state courts. “Where a provider manipulates third-party content in a manner that may injure a user, Section 230
does not provide immunity,” said Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl.
In response to the San Bruno suit, José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, said Monday, “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work. In collaboration with youth, mental health and parenting experts, we built services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls. The allegations in these complaints are simply not true.”
According to the suit, however, the companies’ response has been to “blame the victim” and misrepresent their own actions. The lawyers quoted Jennifer Stout, vice president for global public policy at Snap Inc., who told a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 2021 that “there is no content (in SnapChat) that is hurtful.”
The suit accuses the platforms of creating a “public nuisance,” conduct that harms the public health. It also seeks triple damages for racketeering, alleging that the companies have conspired with one another to promote and conceal their goals of increasing their profits through actions that harm children.