Seattle Schools Files Lawsuit Against Social Media Companies
Update 3:
The Times has another story on this lawsuit by SPS with some compelling quotes plus another Washington state district has followed suit. (Bold mine)
Seattle Public Schools on Friday sued the tech giants behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, alleging they have created a public nuisance by targeting their products to children. The Kent School District south of Seattle followed suit Monday.
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. Yet there is little risk to the school district because a private law firm filed the complaint on a contingency basis in which the firm is paid only if the case succeeds.
Like the tobacco, oil, gun, opioid and vaping industries before them, the big U.S. social media companies are now 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.
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.
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.
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. Seattle’s lawsuit says that from 2009 to 2019, there was on average a 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.
But Szabo pointed out 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.
“The complaint focuses on only how social media harms kids, and there might be evidence of that,” said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law in Silicon Valley. “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.”
end of update
Update 2:
Here is a link to the lawsuit filing. Among the statements:
- They cite a quote from President Biden on social media and youth:
In his 2022 State of the Union Address, President Joe Biden also called attention to the harm social media has wrought on youth and implored all to “hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit.
- SPS states that as of the 2022-23 school year they have:
133 school counselors, 21 social workers, 62 psychologists, 87 nurses
I will just note that most nurses' primary function is physical health, not mental. (Yes, the two parts of health are linked but for the purposes that SPS is stating, mental health is not what the district's nurses are primarily addressing.)
However, they do not state what increase this is from, say from 2019, a year they use elsewhere in the filing.
- The notorious SBIRT "Check Yourself" mental health screener for middle school students is referenced. Not sure that's best reference given it's an unvalidated screener.
- SPS wants a jury trial.
- "Logic, common sense, justice, policy and precedent indicate Defendants' unfair and deceptive conduct has caused the damage and harm complained of herein."
Update: interesting research findings here. (Bold mine)
This study explores the effect of in-person schooling on youth suicide. We document three key findings.
First, using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990-2019, we document the historical association between teen suicides and the school calendar. We show that suicides among 12-to-18-year-olds are highest during months of the school year and lowest during summer months (June through August) and also establish that areas with schools starting in early August experience increases in teen suicides in August, while areas with schools starting in September don’t see youth suicides rise until September.
Second, we show that this seasonal pattern dramatically changed in 2020. Teen suicides plummeted in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began in the U.S. and remained low throughout the summer before rising in Fall 2020 when many K-12 schools returned to in-person instruction.
Third, using county-level variation in school reopenings in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021—proxied by anonymized SafeGraph smartphone data on elementary and secondary school foot traffic—we find that returning from online to in-person schooling was associated with a 12-to-18 percent increase teen suicides. This result is robust to controls for seasonal effects and general lockdown effects (proxied by restaurant and bar foot traffic), and survives falsification tests using suicides among young adults ages 19-to-25.
Auxiliary analyses using Google Trends queries and the Youth Risk BehaviorSurvey suggests that bullying victimization may be an important mechanism.
end of update
From The Seattle Times:
Seattle Public Schools is suing the tech giants behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, asserting the companies are substantially contributing to a youth mental health crisis.
The lawsuit argues the tech companies have violated Washington’s public nuisance law and says SPS seeks “the maximum statutory and civil penalties permitted by law.”
Claiming that school districts are “uniquely harmed” by the youth mental health crisis, the lawsuit states that SPS has had to “divert resources and expend additional resources” to hire counselors, train teachers to recognize mental health issues, and educate students on the dangers of social media platforms, among other measures.
“While the King County Council recently allocated additional resources for school-based services, taxpayers should not bear the burden for the mental health crisis social media companies have created, as explained in the complaint,” said a news release from Keller Rohrback, the law firm representing SPS. “This lawsuit aims to hold these companies accountable for their actions and set youth mental health trends back on the right trajectory.”
The district using the Seattle law firm Keller Rohrback.The lawsuit comes after whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed in 2021 internal studies from Facebook that showed the platform knew its Instagram app negatively affected teenagers. Hundreds of families are currently suing the social media companies, according to CBS News.
Keller Rohrback also represented the district when it joined other school districts to sue e-cigarette firm Juul Labs and Altria in 2019.
In the coming months, SPS will decide whether it wishes to participate in a global settlement Juul Labs reached last month covering thousands of lawsuits from school districts, city governments, individuals and families of Juul users, and Native American tribes.
SPS plans to continue litigating against Juul Lab’s largest investor, the tobacco giant Altria, according to Keller Rohrback attorney Felicia Craick.
Some of the comments at the Times:
It’s almost as if SPS has spare bandwidth to take this on since they have 40 student classes, were unable to start school on time, are losing students who have the resources to get a better education elsewhere, and can’t even figure out a bus program.Does SPS ban phones in their schools. If not, they really don’t have a leg to stand on.Although I agree that these companies significantly contribute to problems with youth… it mostly comes down to a parenting problem. Time for the jelly fish parents to get a backbone and not allow their kids on social media.I have three kids one at each grade level. We don’t use social media for this exact reason… and out HS Junior made the choice for herself. We talk WITH (not at) them regularly about it and spent time when they were young watching and talking through the problem and watching the Netflix show “The Social Dilemma.”
It’s called being a good parent. I don’t need our local public school system to parent for me. I chose that job when I met my wife. Be responsible, train your children with the values you want THEM to have and live out. It’s never perfect, just like I am not, but it’s a responsibility as much as a privilege.Don't they have something better to do... Like actually teaching the kids?SPS, support you 100 percent on this. Social media needs to back off the kids. They know better.Do we sue car companies for teens who speed and endanger others?Do we sue the TV networks for airing shows where bullying is shown?This is such a stupid lawsuit. Get hardcore with banning phones on campus if you want to try to do something about social media.
One comment of special interest is this one:
That 60 Minutes segment [about the parents' lawsuit], published one month ago, leads you to the focus of the story, Seattle attorney Matt Bergman and his new Seattle-based Social Media Victims Law Center. Matt is an attorney not to be trifled with and has a treasure trove of evidence already assembled, damning evidence that has been successfully litigated.
It appears there will be many players in this story.
Who should be holding these companies accountable for not trying to protect underaged users?
Is SPS trying to get attention and have more districts join forces with them?
Worth asking - how much is this costing in time and money for SPS? Is this the best use of that time and money? The district clearly feels overwhelmed with the mental health issues of their students and wants a major source of despair for those students to be held accountable AND change their practices.
I welcome your thoughts.
Comments
And c’mon SPS, your school environment itself is a source of mental anguish for kids and teens. Laying it all at the feet of Big Social Media is disingenuous.
Try Again
SPS parent
If this is a problem of social networks in schools, ban phones in the classrooms and block the sites on wifi. If this is a problem outside of school, it's not really their domain to worry about.
There may be an assertion of financial harm due to an increased demand for mental health resources at school as a result of social network use outside of school. But what's next, suing video game companies, record companies, shopping malls?
This kind of action should be taken by the FTC if necessary through regulatory vehicles like COPPA, FERPA, etc. Hard to understand why SPS feels the need to go it on their own.
If social media platforms didn't document and disclose all of the evil things they've done, including knowingly targeting and exploiting preteen and teen users and knowingly exposing them to harmful content, then I would be in the camp saying SPS will never win.
But no, the social media companies are in fact that arrogant and, frankly, that stupid that they've done all the same idiotic things that Juul did and that the tobacco companies did. They've documented their conduct, policies, and strategies in incredible, brutally honest detail. And that's only what's known publicly at the moment.
SPS stands a really, really good chance of winning this case or at least a very favorable settlement.
Now, the social media platforms are going to argue in their defense that SPS has done all or most of the harm, itself. SPS will be called to task publicly for the harms it has also done to preteens and teens, especially during one of the world's longest pandemic school closures (18 months), and the way SPS and our teachers' union organized students' online days and interactions will be shown in court to have directly harmed students too.
But it won't be enough. The evidence against the social media platforms is profoundly compelling, copious, detailed, and too evil to easily defend.
On the Merits
PTA's and PTSA's can and should set up Mastodon accounts on existing instances, or at least get off corporate social media and go back to blogs and newsletters so families don't have to use social media to find stuff out.
I wish more education advocates would get on Mastodon, too, including you, Melissa! The learning curve is not steep, but the tone is much healthier and more constructive.
-Ditch the Platforms
Iffy
You'd be right except that the social media platforms themselves have in-house research showing exactly those things! It's not that they caused ancillary harm to preteens and teens; they documented, themselves, how they intentionally and willfully and strategically inflicted specific harm on those groups in order to drive addictive online behaviors and generate ad revenue.
Without the information and data the social media platforms have created themselves, this lawsuit wouldn't go anywhere, you're right. But it's specifically because the needed documentation to succeed exists that this lawsuit has a decent chance.
Their sense of impunity and entitlement is breath-taking. They didn't even really try to hide what they were doing.
-On the Merits
Not that I care personally. Put Facebook and Tiktok on the rack and stretch -- fine with me.
But interesting to note -- Louisiana recently passed a law requiring its residents to supply state ID to access online pornography. The stated goal was to prevent access by minors, but a side-effect is that it's much more difficult to use porn anonymously in the state. You have to disclose your identity to the provider. I can't wait to see how Seattle progressives feel about that case. Something similar would presumably be needed to truly restrict social media use (or some aspects of it) to adults. Is that what SPS wants? (Fine with me; I am making popcorn.)
Louisana's law sounds insane, especially for adults.
Amanda, again, I think that SPS has things to answer for on their end. They could win but the court could give fewer dollars because SPS needs to clean up their own house.
Are there credible, scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles and research paper that highlight the damage done to people, adults, and children, through usage of social media? Absolutely yes. One in particular is a worldwide study that’s been going on for ages and tracks rates of youth depression, which has always been measured as stable until the widespread adoption of social media, when depression rates are significantly increased.
That being said, the issue far too beyond the scope of Seattle public schools, and their 90 page filing was not compelling. Comparing it to the lawsuit against Juul, the smokeless tobacco product brand, is ridiculous: cigarettes and the like have absolutely no beneficial use, only harmful effects, whereas social media do have positive attributes *when used responsibly*.
How ironic that the elephant in the room is that social media stands in for the poor education children endure in the classrooms of SPS. How many Seattle children have turned to YouTube to watch Kahn Academy in order to get decent math instruction? My own kids watched science videos to learn physics, chemistry, and biology. They also watched clever history videos, on topics ranging from the Middle Ages, the Gutenberg press, and Japan. And finally, they watch music videos in the world language they were studying. these freely available resources on the web are especially important for families who cannot afford private tutors to make up for the educational needs that aren’t being met because of bad textbooks, overcrowded, classrooms, relatively inexperienced teachers, who have been brought in through a revolving door due to problematic administrations driving good teachers away or rigged budgets that artificially RIF teachers only to have buildings need to hire FTE late in the game, when highly desirable, experience, staff are not available to be hired.
And on the personal side, they’ve used Instagram to keep in touch with family that lives out of town, and they’ve used Instagram to get tips on their hobbies. My point is it’s not all negative.
Interesting that discord was not in the lawsuit, but that’s another tool kids use in schools for their clubs, four example. Some clubs also use slack.
It’s not that I don’t think they are problems in social media that require that or public policy, clearly there are. But I don’t think it’s Seattle Public School’s job to be the entity that spends time, money, to tackle this problem, especially because they have so many other internal issues that need their attention. Test scores have plummeted since Covid, and that must be what is their first priority, educating the students they do have.
If SPS wanted to place a rhetorical yet impactful lawsuit before the courts on behalf of students harmed, it would be INFINITELY better for them to sue the maker of the gun and the maker of the bullets, the seller of the gun and the seller if the bullets, and the owner of the gun and bullets that murdered a student in their building just this year. Those parties bear some responsible for the worst harm possible to a child, loss of life, together with harming each and every surviving child and staff in that building, who suffered mental duress and emotional pain. Sue them. That would be making a statement.
Blue Bus
It looks like SPS is letting an outside personal injuries type lawyer rep them; that attorney would get a cut of any settlement but SPS isn’t using any resources on this, other than time and documentation requested of this attorney. Agree it is a bit of a long shot for all the reasons you mentioned.
Bird Walk
-Seattlelifer
Doctor Doctor
A recent news article called attention to the fact that Seattle is boasting about 1)increasing graduation rates (despite the fact that the district passed just about everyone during the pandemic) and 2) SPS's claims that ALL students are taking advanced classes (probably Honors for All type).
The district has a steep climb against titans and they were foolish and lazy not to form a coalition. It appears that the law firm representing SPS will work on a contingency fee. Still, district staff must work on lawsuit- despite outcome.
Well the Kent School District has since joined the suit. Expect more to follow.
Following
Yes! I've been wondering the same thing. Why are students pushing for more school counselors (who don't necessarily even have degrees in psychology, let alone licensing to practice psychotherapy) when what they need are actual mental health services through their insurance?
Following
Move On
You’re kind of making the same point: why after a school shooting did kids likely with some adult direction advocate for more school counselors? What they really wanted in talking to them was mental health services. There’s a misunderstanding somewhere about what the kids think they’re asking for and what they got, no?
Mitt