Watchung Hills’ federal lawsuit targets Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and others
Can a suburban school district take on billion-dollar social media giants?
The Watchung Hills Regional School District thinks so.
Like the neighboring School District of the Chathams, Watchung Hills has gone to federal court, filing a lawsuit against Meta Platforms and its Facebook and Instagram sites, Snapchat, TikTok, Alphabet and its YouTube site claiming that students "are being victimized and exploited" by the social media companies "who are ruthlessly extracting ever dollar possible with callous disregard for the harm to mental health."
Robert Morrison, president of the Watchung Hills school board, said last month "there has to be a reckoning" of the factors, including social media, that are contributing to a mental health crisis among American adolescents.
"We have a student mental health crisis the likes of which we have not seen before," Morrison said.
"I cannot overemphasize the increasing level of student anxiety," he said, that existed before the pandemic and only worsened the situation.
"We're going to have to figure out the role we play," Morrison said.
The more than 60-page lawsuits brought by Watchung Hills – which includes high school students from Warren, Watchung, Green Brook and Long Hill – and Chatham are essentially identical and filed by the law firms of Carella, Byrne, Cecchi, Olstein, Brody & Agnello in Roseland and Seeger Weiss in Ridgefield Park.
They have taken the case on a contingency basis and will only be paid in the event of a monetary award. Both firms have worked multidistrict mass torts and class actions in state and federal court.
On its website, Seeger Weiss said it represents hundreds of families who have filed product liability lawsuits alleging social media companies failed to provide protections to minors and designed their platforms to promote harmful behavior.
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Like the other lawsuits, Watchung Hills says it requires funds to develop a long-range plan to deal with the mental health crisis caused by social media.
Watchung Hills needs the companies "to take accountability for their bad acts" and "to stop targeting youths for profit and it needs them to stop using algorithms, social media features, and policies that they know are a driving force behind the current mental health crisis."
School districts throughout the country have filed suit against the social media providers, including Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
The lawsuits blame the companies for worsening mental health and behavioral disorders including anxiety, depression, disordered eating and cyberbullying; making it more difficult to educate students; and forcing schools to take steps such as hiring additional mental health professionals, developing lesson plans about the effects of social media and providing additional training to teachers.
But the legal fight may not be easy.
“The complaint focuses on only how social media harms kids, and there might be evidence of that,” Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law in Silicon Valley, told the Associated Press earlier this year. “But there’s also a lot of evidence that social media benefits teenagers and other kids. What we don’t know is what the distress rate would look like without social media. It’s possible the distress rate would be higher, not lower.”
But the companies have maintained they have taken the safety of their users, especially kids, seriously, and they have introduced tools to make it easier for parents to know whom their children are contacting; made mental health resources, including the new 988 crisis hotline, more prominent; and improved age verification and screen time limits.
Even if social media benefits some students, that doesn’t erase the serious harm to many others, Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit working to insulate children from commercialization and marketing, told the Associated Press
“The mental health costs to students, the amount of time schools have to spend monitoring and responding to social media drama, is exorbitant,” Golin said. “It is ridiculous that schools are responsible for the damages caused by these social media platforms to young people. Nobody is seeing the kinds of cumulative effects that social media is causing to the extent school districts are.”
Contributing: Associated Press
Email: mdeak@mycentraljersey.com
Mike Deak is a reporter for mycentraljersey.com. To get unlimited access to his articles on Somerset and Hunterdon counties, please subscribe or activate your digital account.
This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: Facebook, TikTok, YouTube sued by Watchung Hills NJ school district
