A Maryland public school board said it is filing a legal claim against Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, for negatively affecting the mental health of young students.
Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) filed a nearly 200-page lawsuit against the social media companies for allegedly targeting children with apps that were designed to be addictive, reported Fox Business.
School administrators accused the apps’ parent companies, Meta, Snap Inc., Byte Dance, and Google, of gross negligence and of deliberately creating a public nuisance, citing a worsening mental health crisis amid a rise in cyberbullying among teenagers.
The lawsuit alleged that they designed the platforms without fully understanding the consequences on children’s mental health, which has caused a jump in eating disorders, depression, and suicidal intention among students.
The school board’s filing does not specify the amounts of damages, but it seeks financial compensation for the burden placed on the county for providing additional mental health services.
The Maryland county itself has also requested that a jury award punitive damages.
PGCPS’ lawsuit joins two other Maryland school systems in Cecil and Carroll counties and those in California, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
Social Media Apps Causing Severe Mental Health Crisis Among Schoolchildren
“Our primary goal is to ensure the safety and well-being of our children, allowing them to learn and receive the highest quality education possible,” said PGCPS school board chairwoman Judy Mickens-Murray, in a press statement.
“Unfortunately, students in our district and throughout the nation are confronting unparalleled mental health and learning challenges caused by their addiction to social media, intensified by detrimental algorithms and features. It is imperative that these companies take responsibility for their role in this crisis affecting our youth.”
“Defendants’ growth is a product of choices they made to design and operate their platforms in ways that exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of their users into spending more and more time on their platforms,” read the filing.
“These techniques are both particularly effective and harmful [to] young users. Defendants have intentionally cultivated, creating a mental health crisis among America’s youth.”
The school board accused the social media companies of “recklessly” ignoring the impact on students’ psychological and physical health over the past decade to “corner the valuable but untapped market” of children at all costs.
The tech firms had allegedly designed features on their products to promote repetitive, uncontrollable use, to get kids addicted, the filing said.
The lawsuit states that social media apps were deliberately set up to exploit children easily since “they lack the same emotional maturity, impulse control, and psychological resiliency as adults.”
“As a result, they are uniquely susceptible to addictive features in digital products and highly vulnerable to the consequent harms,” the school board argued.
Federal Legislation Pending as Big Tech Defends Products
In response, Google spokesperson Ivy Choi told FOX 5, a local affiliate, that these “complaints are simply not true.”
“Protecting kids across our platforms has always been core to our work,” Choi said.
“In collaboration with child development specialists, we have built age-appropriate experiences for kids and families on YouTube and provide parents with robust controls. The allegations in these complaints are simply not true,” she added.
Earlier this year, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that children aged 13 and younger were too young to use social media, despite being the minimum age to use popular apps like Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram.
“It’s a time when it’s really important for us to be thoughtful about what’s going into how they think about their own self-worth and their relationships—and the skewed and often distorted environment of social media often does a disservice to many of those children,” said Murthy.
Meanwhile, legislators like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) introduced separate bills in February to implement age requirements for social media platforms to reduce their harmful impact on children.
