The lawsuit names multiple defendants, including Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; ByteDance, which owns TikTok; Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which owns YouTube; and Snap Inc, which owns Snapchat. — dpa
A public school district in Washington is suing TikTok, YouTube, Meta and other social media platforms and says the companies are fueling a mental health crisis among young people.
The lawsuit, filed by Seattle Public Schools on Jan 6 in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle, cites hundreds of statistics about rising mental health issues among young people and the connection to social media use.
Social media companies design their platforms in ways that “exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of their users” to hook them into spending more time on the sites, the lawsuit says.
“These techniques are both particularly effective and harmful to the youth audience Defendants have intentionally cultivated, creating a mental health crisis among America’s youth,” the lawsuit says.
A spokesman for Google, which owns YouTube – the most popular social media platform among youth – said in a statement to McClatchy News that the company has features in place to protect children.
“We have invested heavily in creating safe experiences for children across our platforms and have introduced strong protections and dedicated features to prioritise their well being,” José Castañeda said in a statement. “For example, through Family Link, we provide parents with the ability to set reminders, limit screen time and block specific types of content on supervised devices.”
But Seattle Public Schools, which is the largest school district in Washington, says it has to spend extra resources on mental health services in its schools due to the detrimental effects of social media on its students.
“Our students – and young people everywhere – face unprecedented learning and life struggles that are amplified by the negative impacts of increased screen time, unfiltered content, and potentially addictive properties of social media,” Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Brent Jones said in a statement. “We are confident and hopeful that this lawsuit is the first step toward reversing this trend for our students, children throughout Washington state, and the entire country.”
YouTube and Meta did not respond to requests for comment on Jan 9.
A youth mental health crisis
Rates of mental health issues, including depression, anxiety and suicide, are on the rise among students in Seattle Public Schools and across the country, the lawsuit says.
The total number of hospitalisations among Washington youth primarily diagnosed with psychiatric issues nearly doubled between 2015 and 2021, according to an investigation by the Seattle Times cited in the lawsuit. Also, the number of emergency department visits among Washington residents ages 10-24 involving suspected suicide attempts was “significantly higher” in September 2021 than September 2019, the lawsuit says, citing Seattle and King County Public Health.
In Seattle Public Schools, between 2009 and 2019, there was a 30% increase in students who reported feeling “so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that (they) stopped doing some usual activities,” the lawsuit says.
Trends among youth are similar across the country.
From 2007 to 2018, suicide rates among people ages 10-24 increased by 57%, the lawsuit says, citing a US Surgeon General’s Advisory in 2021. By 2018, suicide was the second leading cause of death for people in that age group.
One in five kids between the ages of 3 and 17 has a “mental, emotional, developmental, or behavioral disorder,” the lawsuit says, citing the advisory.
Defendants are fueling the crisis, lawsuit says
The lawsuit names multiple defendants, including Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; ByteDance, which owns TikTok; Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which owns YouTube; and Snap Inc, which owns Snapchat.
Only Google responded to a request for comment from McClatchy News on Jan 9.
These companies design their products to intentionally be addictive to young users, whose brains are not fully developed and who lack “emotional maturity, impulse control and psychological resiliency,” the lawsuit says.
“(The companies) 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 (their) social media platforms,” the lawsuit says.
The companies design their feeds using algorithms that constantly promote personalised content that keeps the user engaged and makes it difficult for him or her to leave the site, the lawsuit says.
About 90% of children ages 13-17 use social media, with YouTube being the most popular platform and TikTok in second place, according to the lawsuit, which cites Pew Research Center data. Many teens check social media “repeatedly” throughout the day, and nearly 20% of teenagers who use YouTube report they use it “almost constantly.”
The content on these sites can also often be “harmful and (exploitative)” and encourage self-harm and disordered eating, according to the lawsuit.
Antigone Davis, global head of safety at Meta, told Axios in a statement that the company had tools in place to keep young people safe online.
“We’ve developed 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,” the statement says, according to the outlet.
The lawsuit cites multiple studies linking social media use with poor mental health among young people.
Adolescents who spend more time on screens are twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety or need treatment for a mental health condition, according to the lawsuit.
Social media “encourages unhealthy social comparison and feedback seeking behaviors,” increasing symptoms of depression, the lawsuit says.
Impact on schools
School districts are at the front lines of the youth mental health crisis, the lawsuit says. More than 3.1 million children ages 12-17 received mental health services in an educational setting in 2020, according to the lawsuit, referencing the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
More than ⅔ of public schools in the country have reported increases in the percentage of students seeking mental health services since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the lawsuit, citing the National Center for Education Statistics.
Student absenteeism and behavioral issues are also on the rise, the lawsuit says.
This has led to increased costs and exacerbated the burden on public school systems, according to the lawsuit. Many schools have had to hire additional mental health counselors, develop new mental health programs, spend more time training teachers on how to help students with their mental health and increase disciplinary services for students, among other measures, the lawsuit says.
Despite the added attention on student mental health, schools are struggling to keep up with students’ demands. At one Seattle high school, the waitlists to receive mental health services were “astronomical,” the lawsuit says.
The school district is seeking an “order providing for abatement of the public nuisance,” meaning the defendants need to take action to address the concerns with their business models, the lawsuit says. The district is also seeking “actual and compensatory damages” in the maximum amount permitted by law. – The Charlotte Observer/Tribune News Service
