The Wake County School System is the latest entity suing social media giants Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META), Snapchat (NYSE: SNAP), TikTok, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and others, alleging that they’ve left school systems to deal with the psychological toll their apps take on children.
Wake County’s school board unanimously voted to join a lawsuit against social media companies in February. The lawsuit filed this month, which also names YouTube, TikTok owner Bytedance and others, claims “children are suffering an unprecedented mental health crisis fueled by [social media companies’] addictive and dangerous social media products.”
The lawsuit claims the companies deployed “studied efforts” to induce kids to compulsively use products like Instagram and Facebook, operating their platforms “in ways that exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of their users into spending more and more time on their platforms.”
The lawsuit claims it was all about profit, as “adolescents and children and central to" their business models. It cites statistics that show more than a third of 13- to 17-year-old kids report using one of the social media companies’ apps “almost constantly,” and that more than half of them would struggle to cut back on their social media use.
Most of the companies named in the lawsuit did not immediately return a request to comment on the case. In an email, a Snapchat spokesperson said its app "was intentionally designed to be different from traditional social media, with a focus on helping Snapchatters communicate with their close friends."
"While we will always have more work to do, we feel good about the role Snapchat plays in helping close friends feel connected, happy and prepared as they face the many challenges of adolescence," the statement says.
A statement from Google said, “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work. In collaboration with youth, mental health and parenting experts, we built services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls. The allegations in these complaints are simply not true.”
The lawsuit also cites statistics such as a 57 percent increase in suicide rates for youth and a 117 percent increase in emergency room visits for anxiety disorders, and points to the companies as sharing the blame, having “rewired how our kids think, feel, and behave.”
Wake County, "like many school districts across the state and country, is at a breaking point,” the lawsuit says.
The district's lawsuit was filed April 5 by attorney Janet Ward Black of Ward Black Law. It's part of a growing trend of legal action against social media platforms. Meta Platforms, owner of Facebook and Instagram, has been targeted by patients via privacy lawsuits aimed at hospital systems across the country (including in the Triangle).
Lawmakers in Washington and across the country are also scrutinizing the companies. The House of Representatives in Congress recently passed a measure that would equate to a ban on TikTok, should the platform not be sold to a company without ties to China.