Leon County Public Schools could become the latest school district to join more than 600 others suing social media companies over alleged negative impacts to student mental health.
The Tallahassee, Fla., school board will vote Wednesday night on a recommendation from the superintendent to pursue litigation against Meta, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, and other social media companies for “marketing practices making the platforms addictive,” according to a meeting agenda cited by CITC.
The agenda states those practices have led to “additional costs to schools in addressing issues related to the addiction” and attorneys representing the district would “receive 33% of any monetary or non-monetary recovery.”
If approved by the board, Leon County schools would join hundreds of other districts nationwide that filed similar lawsuits last year.
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In the first lawsuit filed by Seattle Public Schools in January 2023, officials claimed they were forced to hire additional mental health professionals to address a roughly 30% increase since 2009 in students who were “sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row,” CITC reports.
Attorney William Shinoff, who is representing four Arizona districts, told AZCentral in September more than 600 school districts have filed similar lawsuits nationwide, including at least 10 in the Grand Canyon State.
One complaint filed by Mesa Public Schools points to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data that shows persistent feelings of hopelessness among high school students jumped by 40% between 2009 and 2019, while suicide rates among youth between the ages of 10 and 24 jumped by 57% nationwide between 2007 and 2018.
The complaint links those trends to a dramatic rise in social media use among teens since 2008. It cites a 2022 Pew Research Center study that found about 20% of teens use YouTube “almost constantly,” while the figure was 16% for TikTok, 15% for Snapchat, 10% for Instagram, and 2% for Facebook, AZCentral reports.
Mesa Public Schools Superintendent Andi Fourlis told the news site the issue has led to bullying, and contributes to chronic absenteeism for both students bullied and those responsible. It has also had a “huge, huge mental anguish in many of our children” who compare their lives to what they’re seeing on social media, he said.
That means schools are “shifting taxpayer dollars into … mental health supports … when we’re reacting to a problem that has been created by those who are making billions of dollars,” Fourlis said.
The lawsuits are in addition to an ongoing investigation into TikTok’s business practices by bipartisan group of state attorneys general that found “TikTok had a secret archive of tens of thousands of recorded internal Zoom meetings that it initially failed to disclose for nearly a year and a half.
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“Those videos, some of which lawyers from attorneys general offices reviewed, showed that TikTok executives and employees knew and discussed how their platform addicts and harms children, that the safety features TikTok promotes to parents are ineffective, and that TikTok’s business goals are more important to the company than concerns about children’s safety,” according to a statement from North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, who is leading that effort.
A judge in December ordered TikTok to turn over lists of all Zoom recordings as part of that investigation.
Lawmakers in several states, meanwhile, are pursuing legislation to require adult identification to access social media platforms. Similar legislation is pending in Congress.
Other efforts to curb the impact of TikTok have come from lawsuits filed against the company by Utah, Indiana and Arkansas that allege the video-sharing platform is exploiting youth.
“What these children (and their parents) do not know is that TikTok is lying to them about the safety of its app and exploiting them into checking and watching the app compulsively, no matter the terrible effects it has on their mental health, their physical development, their family, and their social life,” Utah Attorney General Sean Ryes wrote in an October filing cited by Reuters.
The issues with students using social media has convinced many schools and districts to simply ban student phone use altogether, with nearly all that have reporting significant positive benefits for learning and student behavior.
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