US school district's suit: Tech giants harm teens' mental health

Seattle's public school district has filed a lawsuit against some big tech companies, claiming their social media platforms are responsible for the mental health crisis among youth.

The complaint filed Friday says social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok have violated Washington state's public nuisance law and created a public nuisance by targeting their products to children.

The district asks the court to order remedies, including monetary damages and funding for prevention education and treatment for excessive use of social media.

The school district includes more than 100 schools and serves about 50,000 children. The complaint says that from 2009 to 2019, there was on average a 30 percent increase in the number of students who reported feeling "so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row" that they stopped doing some typical activities.

"Defendants have successfully exploited the vulnerable brains of youth, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse of Defendants' social media platforms," the complaint says.

The suit blames those companies for worsening the students' mental health and behavioral disorders, including anxiety, depression, disordered eating and cyberbullying.

They said it has made it more difficult to educate students and forced them to take steps such as hiring additional mental health professionals, developing lesson plans about the effects of social media, and providing additional training to teachers.

"Youth in plaintiff's community are experiencing the same mental health crisis observed nationally," says the complaint.

Nearly 1 in 10 Americans and almost 1 in 5 adolescents and young adults reported having depression in 2020, but most of the victims were not seeking help, resulting in an "escalating public health crisis", according to a recent study published by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The idea that social media companies should be held accountable for the potential damage their products cause to young people surfaced after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021 testified that the tech giant is aware that some of its platforms are harmful to certain populations, including teenagers, but targets them anyway.

Many families have filed similar lawsuits against the tech companies, including more than a dozen blaming them for suicides.

The New York City public school system, the largest in the US, also has pushed back against the impact of social media on students' lives. The schools have banned their students from accessing the ChatGPT artificial intelligence program to generate text.

Google, which owns YouTube, responded to the allegations by saying they have invested heavily in creating safe experiences for children across their platforms and have introduced "strong protections" and "dedicated features" to prioritize their wellbeing.

For example, through Family Link, parents can set reminders, limit screen time and block specific types of content on supervised devices, said Google.

Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, said it has "more than 30 tools to support teens and families, including supervision tools that let parents limit the amount of time their teens spend on Instagram, and age verification technology that helps teens have age-appropriate experiences".

Agencies contributed to this story.