Seattle schools are blaming social media for a mental health crisis. Are tech companies responsible?

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The Seattle public school system is unhappy.

The district, tasked with teaching about 50,000 students in 100 schools, is facing what it calls a mental health crisis. And he blamed the crisis on four social media companies: Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok; Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube; and Snap, the company behind Snapchat.

So, the school district filed a lawsuit (pdf) against the four companies that are among the most valuable companies in the world with a combined market capitalization of approximately $2 trillion for wreaking havoc on its student population.

From 2009 to 2019, there was an average 30% increase in the number of students at complainants’ schools who reported feeling so sad or hopeless almost every day for two or more consecutive weeks that [they] stopped doing certain usual activities, attorneys for the school district wrote in a 92-page lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Seattle on January 6.

Seattle Public Schools alleges the defendants violated Washington state’s public nuisance law, a vague law more commonly used for noise-related complaints than corporate malfeasance.

The trial is a puzzle. It is built on a weak victim, legal experts told Quartz, between the actions of social media companies and the deteriorating mental health of its students, and on a claim of harm that would be better borne by students. or concerned parents rather than a school district. . The lawsuit also makes a legal argument regarding Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, an important but controversial law that gives websites some protection from legal liability for user-generated content. But that argument may soon be rendered moot by the US Supreme Court, which is tackling the Section 230 issue in its current term.

The Seattle School Districts Argument

Seattle Public Schools says the design and algorithms powering the named social media companies are responsible for its students’ suffering.

The use of social media has well-established impacts. Last year, a Wall Street Journal investigation spurred by a whistleblower found that Metas’ own internal research, for example, showed Instagram negatively affects the body image of teenage girls. But in a legal context, experts say it’s difficult to isolate the cause of mental health problems in individual children, let alone the collective thousands who attend a large metropolitan school district. And, of course, social media can hurt some students while helping others find community and friends online.

There’s no doubt that teenagers are under extraordinary psychological pressure, perhaps unprecedented pressure, but there are so many reasons why it could be, said Eric Goldman, a professor at the University of Law School. ‘Santa Clara University, which highlighted the drastic effects of the pandemic. It’s hard to isolate what’s causing Gen Z stress…because it’s all intertwined.

Jennifer Granick, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview that she doesn’t know how the school district can prove that it harmed its entire student body, justify that it was from the right complainant and isolate the causes of the mental health crisis to social media.

How are they going to show the causality that this crisis is due to social media and not one of the millions of other causes, like stress, poverty and the pandemic? she asked.

Goldman also took issue with the school district that brought the case. I’m intrigued by the idea that the school district is the right plaintiff, he said. Think about all the things that happen in society and that show up in the school environment. Can school districts sue for all of these other issues?

Social media is the latest in a long line of bugbears that parents and officials have accused over the years of corrupting the nation’s youth. It’s a list that includes things like heavy metal, video games, and marijuana.

Can school districts sue record labels that release heavy metal or game publishers that release video games or pot dealers that sell pot? Goldman asked. Where does it start and does it stop? It does not mean anything.

The lawsuit seeks only one charge: a violation of the state’s public nuisance law. But Goldman said public nuisance laws generally apply to physical spaces, not digital spaces.

It’s an unusual claim, he said. If there’s a drug dealer setting up shop across the street, that would be the kind of thing that could be a public nuisance. Calling software that is in no way connected to school a public nuisance is just plain weird.

A Seattle Public Schools spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The Battle on Section 230

The most salient legal claim in the lawsuit is that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does not shield the four defendants from legal liability for design decisions that control their respective algorithms.

Section 230 has become a lightning rod for social media criticism in recent years. The law, enacted in 1996, essentially protects owners of websites that host users’ third-party content such as web forums, comment sections, and social media from some liability.

Scholars largely credit Section 230 as intrinsic to the growth and maturation of the modern web: it gives website owners the ability to exercise their legal right, protected by the First Amendment, to moderate content as they hear it. And he’s backed Silicon Valley’s biggest companies that depend on user-generated posts, photos, videos, comments, reviews, endorsements and more to grow.

But tech critics have been looking everywhere for a way to rein in social media companies they say have become too powerful and are abusing that power. American politicians as ideologically diverse as Republican Senator Josh Hawley and Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar have introduced bills to change Section 230. This week, President Joe Biden wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Congress must fundamentally reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields tech companies from legal liability for content posted on their sites.

A Supreme Court Date for Section 230

In its lawsuit, Seattle Public Schools claims that Meta, Alphabet, Snap and ByteDance cannot hide behind Section 230 for what their algorithms have chosen to promote, effectively asking a federal court to weigh liability for recommending and promoting content harmful to young people, as the complaint alleges.

This question is worth asking, but there is a caveat that is already being debated in the Supreme Court. (In a troubling sign for the law, Judge Clarence Thomas has previously signaled that he thinks Section 230 needs to be reassessed.) Two cases related to Section 230 Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter c. before the courts of law this mandate.

Both cases largely assess whether Section 230 shields Google-owned YouTube as well as Twitter from legal liability under US anti-terrorism laws, focusing on the role their algorithms play in recommending content. of ISIS recruitment to users.

Granick said that while algorithms can be controversial, they are inseparable from how social media companies exercise their legal right to moderate content. An algorithm is just an automated way to put policies in place, she said. This is how they eliminate hate speech. This is how they eliminate misinformation. That’s how they eliminate harassment.

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