Facebook, Instagram-Parent Meta Sued By US School Board For Allegedly Addicting Students

The complaint also accuses social media companies of racketeering, gross negligence, conspiracy, and unfair competition.

The San Mateo County Board of Education has filed a complaint against several social media companies, including Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. The complaint alleges that these companies are responsible for a mental health crisis among students by addicting them to their platforms. The school board is diverting resources from traditional teaching goals to address psychological problems that have "no historic analogue," including rising suicide rates. The complaint also accuses the companies of racketeering, gross negligence, conspiracy, and unfair competition.

The school board's complaint is similar to a lawsuit filed in January by the Seattle public school district, which also alleged that social media companies designed their platforms to be addictive and to deliver harmful content to adolescents and teens. Other school districts in locales from Florida to Arizona have also filed similar lawsuits, as have scores of individual youths and their parents.

Meta Platforms responded to the complaint by saying it wants teens to be safe online and offers more than 30 safety tools for kids and families, including supervision and age verification technology. The company automatically sets teens' accounts to private when they join Instagram and sends notifications encouraging them to take regular breaks. Meta Platforms also prohibits content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, and identifies over 99 per cent of the content it removes or takes action on before it's reported to the company.

Issues around social media addiction were highlighted at a recent Congressional hearing where TikTok's CEO, Shou Chew, attempted to resist an attempt by US lawmakers and the Biden administration to force the company's Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd., to sell its shares of the unit or block it in the US. The parents of a 16-year-old boy who died by suicide after using TikTok were present at the hearing. The couple is suing ByteDance, alleging that TikTok sent their son more than 1,000 videos related to suicide, hopelessness and self-harm.

The case is being heard in the US District Court for the Northern District of California (Oakland) and is titled San Mateo County Board of Education v. YouTube LLC, 23-cv-01108.