It won’t be easy to prove in court, but Seattle schools will try, having sued over the issue. They blame companies like Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc. and ByteDance Ltd., the owner of TikTok Inc., for contributing to the mental health crisis among students and say the addictive apps interfere with their ability to fulfill their educational mission.
The plaintiffs will need to overcome a number of hurdles to prove their point and score large verdicts, legal experts say.It’s not clear whether the schools can put direct blame on social media companies given that students’ poor mental health can also be attributed to a host of other reasons, including the pandemic that resulted in reduced social contact, Goldman said.
The Seattle district’s main source of evidence is academic research showing a connection between the increase of exposure and time on social media platforms for youth and adverse mental health impacts on those kids, according to Dean Kawamoto of Keller Rohrback, another lawyer representing the Seattle School District.
"We’ve developed more than 30 tools to support teens and families, including supervision tools that let parents limit the amount of time their teens spend on Instagram, and age verification technology that helps teens have age-appropriate experiences,” Davis said."We don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, and of the content we remove or take action on, we identify over 99% of it before it’s reported to us.
"This shouldn’t be an open question,” said Catherine Gellis, an internet law attorney who has written appeals court briefs defending Section 230."Section 230 has been on the books for a quarter of a century, and by and large, the courts have interpreted it correctly to be a broadly applicable statute that strongly insulates the helping functions that we need service providers to perform for the internet to work at all.