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- A school district in Seattle is suing to combat the negative impact of social media on young people.
- The district said apps like TikTok and Instagram “exploited the vulnerable youth brains.”
- The move comes a year after a whistleblower accused Facebook of downplaying harm to teens.
The Seattle school district has filed a lawsuit against a social media company to address student mental health issues, according to the Associated Press.
Seattle Public Schools follows the companies that created several popular apps such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat as students suffer mental health crises as a result of their use, according to the AP. says there is.
According to the Associated Press, “Defendant tapped into the fragile brains of young people to engage tens of millions of students across the country in a positive feedback loop of overuse and abuse of Defendant’s social media platforms. The complaint further states that the app’s content is “too often harmful and exploitative.”
A lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court on Friday accused Facebook whistleblower Francis Haugen of deliberately harming a teenager, but instead chose to put profits first, accusing the company of It’s been over a year since he accused Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of refusing to create solutions to deal with user division and harm, such as changing algorithms. I’m here.
In its complaint, SPS said that over the decade from 2009 to 2019, students in the district saw an average 30% increase in feelings of being “very sad or hopeless” for more than two consecutive weeks, nearly every day. said to have reported. Social media use can be linked to depression, low self-esteem and loneliness among teenagers, leading to the phenomenon of cyberbullying, insiders previously reported.
The complaint seeks to circumvent Section 230, a controversial Internet law that prevents technology companies from being held accountable for the words users may place on their platforms. The law requires service providers to make “good faith” efforts to control content and to consistently remove content that is not federally protected, such as violations of copyright law or SESTA and FOSTA regulations. provide Good Samaritan protection to
“Plaintiffs do not claim that defendants are responsible for what third parties say on defendants’ platforms, but rather defendants’ own actions.” “Defendant actively endorses and promotes content that is harmful to young people, including content that promotes anorexia and eating disorders.”
The lawsuit, which AP called “novel,” appears to circumvent Section 230’s legal protections by focusing on corporate behavior rather than user-generated content.
It’s unclear if other US school districts have taken similar steps, but hundreds of families have filed lawsuits against social media companies over the mental health of their young users, reports CBS News. increase.
“The King County Council recently allocated additional resources to school-based services, but taxpayers bear the burden of the mental health crisis created by social media companies, as explained in the complaint. It shouldn’t,” the school district said in a news release. ”
Seattle Public Schools, Meta, Snapchat, TikTok and Google did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment. Keller Rollback declined to comment further.
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