Why Tacoma Public Schools could sue over TikTok, Instagram and other social media
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- Hundreds of plaintiffs, including school districts, are suing social media giants.
- The cases being brought across the U.S. allege that platforms are addictive and harmful.
- Tacoma Public Schools’ board has authorized the district to enter federal litigation.
The board of the largest school district in Pierce County has authorized joining federal litigation targeting the social-media giants behind platforms such as TikTok and Instagram for allegedly designing addictive products that harm students.
Tacoma Public Schools could sue Meta, ByteDance and other major corporations in federal court in Northern California, where hundreds of plaintiffs, including school districts and local governments, have joined the multi-district litigation (MDL) — a federal legal process consolidating similar but separately filed lawsuits.
“The crux of the litigation is the way that certain social-media algorithms and products are designed has a negative impact on students in public school districts across the country,” Malik Gbenro, general counsel for Tacoma Public Schools, said during Thursday’s board meeting.
The board voted Thursday to give the district permission to participate as a plaintiff or claimant in the MDL, according to the approved resolution.
“(N)umerous school districts and other governmental entities in Washington and throughout the United States have asserted or are considering claims against certain social-media companies and related entities concerning alleged harms to students and school districts arising from the design, operation, marketing, promotion, and use of social-media platforms,” according to the resolution.
Plaintiffs in the litigation allege social-media platforms were designed and operated “in ways that maximize screen time, promote compulsive or excessive use, amplify harmful content, and contribute to adverse mental-health, safety, disciplinary, attendance, and educational impacts affecting students and schools,” the resolution said.
There are 1,000 individual plaintiffs, more than 400 school districts and 43 attorneys general involved in the litigation based in Oakland, California, according to the Social Media Victims Law Center, which is representing some families.
“The federal social media addiction litigation is about accountability for design choices — features intentionally engineered to target and addict young users,” Matthew P. Bergman, founding attorney for the law center, said in a statement to The News Tribune.
Meta and other social-media companies agreed last month to collectively pay about $27 million to a Kentucky school district to settle a bellwether case in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, multiple news outlets reported. Bellwether trials, or representative cases, help to shape the settlement value of subsequent cases and offer insight into how juries respond to the allegations, according to the Social Media Victims Law Center.
As part of the Kentucky school district settlement, neither Meta (Instagram and Facebook), Snap (Snapchat), Alphabet (YouTube) nor ByteDance (TikTok) admitted liability nor were forced to make any changes to their platforms, Reuters reported.
In March, a jury in Los Angeles County Superior Court awarded $6 million against Meta and YouTube in a suit filed by a woman, identified as KGM, who claimed she became addicted to social media as a young girl and that it worsened her depression. She was represented by Bergman and others in that state court case.
“We’ve already seen what happens when juries hear the evidence. In Los Angeles, the KGM verdict held Meta and YouTube liable for addictive design features, and in New Mexico another jury found Meta’s products violate state law by harming kids’ mental health,” Bergman said. “Together, these verdicts make one thing clear: these companies knowingly targeted and addicted young users, and they will be held accountable.”
Social-media companies, including Meta, ByteDance and Snap, have denied wrongdoing in court-filed responses to the lawsuits lodged in federal court.
In a January post on its website, Meta defended its record of supporting parents and teenagers, disputing that Meta platforms have harmed teenagers or that Meta prioritized growth over kids’ well-being.
“Recently, a number of lawsuits have attempted to place the blame for teen mental health struggles squarely on social media companies,” the post said. “But this oversimplifies a serious issue.”
“Clinicians and researchers find that mental health is a deeply complex and multifaceted issue, and trends regarding teens’ well-being aren’t clear-cut or universal,” the post continued. “Narrowing the challenges faced by teens to a single factor ignores the scientific research and the many stressors impacting young people today, like academic pressure, school safety, socio-economic challenges, and substance abuse.”
Some Pierce County school districts are already plaintiffs in the federal litigation, including Franklin Pierce and Clover Park, court records show. Washington is among the many states that have sued.
On Thursday, Tacoma Public Schools Superintendent Joshua Garcia told board members that the resolution authorizing the district to join the litigation was directly connected to one of the board’s goals: exploring where electronic devices were helpful and harmful.
“One of the things that you have continually explored is, it’s not necessarily the device. It’s some of the platforms on the device that are bringing potential anxiety to students, that are distractions in classrooms,” Garcia said. “As a step of that, this is an opportunity for you to expand and explore that to say, ‘Are these platforms potentially bringing harm to our students and should we continue to find ways to mitigate that impact?’”
In a master complaint filed three years ago in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, intended to set forth the potential claims that plaintiffs might assert in the MDL, social-media companies were accused of recklessly pursuing a “grow-at-all-costs” strategy over the past decade and ignoring the mental and physical health risks to children.
“In a race to corner the ‘valuable but untapped’ market of tween and teen users,” the complaint alleged, “each Defendant designed product features to promote repetitive, uncontrollable use by kids.”
