In a major development that has become a public debacle, the big United States social media companies are currently facing lawsuits brought by public entities that seek to hold them accountable for a huge societal problem — in their case, the mental health crisis among youth.
It was reported that the new lawsuits, one by the public school district in Seattle recently, with a second filed by a suburban district and almost certainly more to come — face an uncertain legal road.
According to local reports, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments next month over the extent to which federal law protects the tech industry from such claims when social media algorithms push potentially harmful content.
However, it was stated that even if the high court were to clear the way for lawsuits like Seattle’s, the district has a daunting challenge in proving the industry’s liability.
In their remark, the tech industry insists there are many ways social media’s effects on teen mental health differ from, say, big pharma’s role in pushing opioid addiction.
Harping on the development, vice president and general counsel of the tech industry trade association NetChoice, Carl Szabo said “The underlying argument is that the tech industry is to blame for the emotional state of teenagers, because they made recommendations on content that has caused emotional harm”.
The VP added that “It would be absurd to sue Barnes & Noble because an employee recommended a book that caused emotional harm or made a teenager feel bad. But that’s exactly what this lawsuit is doing.”
In a most recent development, Seattle Public Schools sued the tech giants behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, alleging they have created a public nuisance by targeting their products to children.
It was reported that the districts blame the companies for worsening mental health and behavioral disorders including anxiety, depression, disordered eating and cyberbullying; making it more difficult to educate students; and forcing schools 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.
In a statement, Seattle Superintendent Brent Jones said “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”.
“We are confident and hopeful that this lawsuit is a significant step toward reversing this trend for our students.”
It is imperative to note that the Federal law — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 — helps protect online companies from liability arising from what third-party users post on their platforms. But the lawsuits argue the provision, which predates all the social media platforms, does not protect the tech giants’ behavior in this case, where their own algorithms promote harmful content.
More so, that’s the issue in Gonzalez v. Google, the parent company of YouTube, set for argument at the Supreme Court on Feb. 21. In that case, the family of an American woman killed in an Islamic State group attack in Paris in 2015 alleges that YouTube’s algorithms aided the terror group’s recruitment.
It was clarified that even if the high court’s decision makes clear that tech companies can be held liable in such cases, the school districts will still have to show that social media was in fact to blame.
According to Seattle’s lawsuit, from 2009 to 2019, there was an average of 30% increase in the number of its 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.
However, VP Szabo noted that Seattle’s graduation rates have been on the rise since 2019, during a time when many kids relied on social media to keep in touch with their friends throughout the pandemic. If social media were truly so harmful to the district’s educational efforts, the graduation rate wouldn’t be rising, he suggested.
Speaking on the development, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law in Silicon Valley, Eric Goldman said “The complaint focuses on only how social media harms kids, and there might be evidence of that”.
“But there’s also a lot of evidence that social media benefits teenagers and other kids. What we don’t know is what the distress rate would look like without social media. It’s possible the distress rate would be higher, not lower.”
However, the embattled companies have insisted that they take the safety of their users, especially kids, seriously, and they have introduced tools to make it easier for parents to know whom their children are contacting; made mental health resources, including the new 988 crisis hotline, more prominent; and improved age verification and screen time limits.
In a statement, Anitigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety said “We automatically set teens’ accounts to private when they join Instagram, and we send notifications encouraging them to take regular breaks”.
“We don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, and of the content we remove or take action on, we identify over 99% of it before it’s reported to us.”
Experts believe that the Seattle litigation has the potential to enact massive change, prompting questions about the appropriateness of addressing big societal issues in court rather than through lawmaking.
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