Educating Schools on Social Media Use, Cyberbullying and Mental Health Disorders: Seattle Public Schools vs. Other School Districts
There are hundreds of lawsuits being filed and it is not clear if any other school districts have filed a complaint like Seattle’s.
It blames them 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.
“There will be the issues of showing that the social media content was the cause of the harm that befell the children,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t file these lawsuits.”
While federal law — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — helps protect online companies from liability arising from what third-party users post on their platforms, the lawsuit argues that provision does not protect the tech giants’ behavior in this case.
Seattle Public Schools students who felt sad or depressed almost every day for two or more weeks in a row, and who stopped doing typical activities, have increased by 30% since 2009, according to the lawsuit.
According to internal studies revealed byFacebook’s whistle blowers, the company knew about the negative effects of the photo sharing app on teenagers and their thoughts of suicide. She alleged that the platform prioritized profits over safety and hid its own research from investors and the public.
One mother in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, said her 18-year-old daughter is so obsessed with TikTok, she’ll spend hours making elaborate videos for the Likes, and will post retouched photos of herself online to look skinnier.
CNN reported that another mother in the same county said that her 16-year-old daughter’s ex-boyfriend shared partially nude pictures of her with another person abroad via direct messages. After a failed attempt at blackmailing the family, the user posted the pictures on Instagram, according to the mother, with some partial blurring of her daughter’s body to bypass Instagram’s algorithms that ban nudity.
The lawsuit against Instagram and Facebook in Bucks County, California, filed in the Circuit Court of California (C.C. 1823)
The lawsuit was filed in California federal court, which stated that there was a need to continue to fund mental health programs. Bucks County is seeking unspecified monetary damages to help fund these initiatives.
The district attorney wants to hold the companies accountable. “It is no different than opioid manufacturers and distributors causing havoc among young people in our communities.”
“They said their platforms are not addictive, and they are; they said they are helpful and not harmful, but they are harmful,” he said. “My hope is that there will be strength in numbers and other people from around the country will join me so there will be a tipping point. I just can’t sit around and let it happen.”
In response to the lawsuit, Antigone Davis, the global head of safety for Instagram and Facebook-parent Meta, said the company continues to pour resources into ensuring its young users are safe online. She added that the platforms have 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.
In order to create a safe environment for children across their platforms, the company has invested heavily in creating safe experiences and has introduced strong protections and dedicated features. He pointed to products such as Family Link, which provides parents with the ability to set reminders, limit screen time and block specific types of content on supervised devices.
ASnap is constantly evaluating how it continues to make its platform safer, including through new education features and protections.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/22/tech/bucks-county-social-media-lawsuit/index.html
On the Case of the Instagram Static Event involving a 17-year-old Migdal-Teitelbaum State Victim
Tobias added that increased support for government regulation that would impose more restrictions on companies could impact the outcome of these lawsuits in their favor.
“For now, there will be different judges or juries with diverse views of this around the country,” he said. “They aren’t going to win all of the cases but they might win some of them, and that might help.”
Whatever the outcome, the mother of the 16-year-old whose intimate photos were shared on Instagram is applauding the district attorney’s office for sending a strong message to social media companies.
“Before the incident with my daughter, I would not have given a lawsuit filed by the county much thought,” she said. “But now that I know how hard it was to take content down and there’s only so much people can do; corporations need to do so much more to protect its users.”