LI school districts sue social-media companies for ‘harm’ to adolescents: ‘Record levels’ of mental issues
Nearly a dozen Long Island school districts are suing social-media giants such as Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat, claiming the “addictive and dangerous” platforms cause mental-health woes in kids.
The schools — which say social media has led to “serious financial and resource disruptions” in their respective districts — want money to compensate for the cost of hiring mental-health professionals, changing lesson plans to teach kids about the dangers of social media and investigating online threats, according to Newsday.
“They’re well aware of the harm they’re doing,” said William Shinoff, a California lawyer who represents about 1,000 districts nationwide and 37 on Long Island, to the outlet. “They’re doing nothing to stop it.”
The lawsuits are the newest in a wave of complaints that threaten to inundate the embattled companies, which have long been accused of not doing enough to protect kids from social media’s nefarious effects.
In October, New York Attorney General Letitia James and 32 other state attorneys general filed suits that claimed Meta, Facebook’s parent company, purposely installed addictive features on Facebook and Instagram to hook young kids on their products.
“Kids and teenagers are suffering from record levels of poor mental health, and social-media companies like Meta are to blame,” James said at the time, adding that Meta has “profited from children’s pain” and contributed to the youth mental-health crisis.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ administration filed a similar lawsuit in February that accused Meta, Google and other companies of designing platforms that “purposefully manipulate and addict children and teens to social media applications.”
On Long Island, more than two dozen other districts plan to file lawsuits similar to those already lodged in California federal court, according to Shinoff.
The districts’ nearly-identical five-page complaints — which accuse the companies of being both negligent and a public nuisance — are part of a multidistrict federal lawsuit brought by parents, schools and state governments, Newsday said.
School officials claim they’re on the “front lines of redressing the damage” the companies’ algorithms cause when they target kids who are “uniquely susceptible to addictive features in digital products and highly vulnerable to the resulting harm,” according to the outlet.
The Long Island plaintiffs are school districts in Brentwood, Bellmore-Merrick, East Islip, Great Neck, Islip, Jericho, Kings Park, North Merrick, Port Jefferson, South Huntington and Westbury.
“We have seen things posted and how disruptive they are to the school environment,” Nicholas Ciappetta, president of the South Huntington Board of Education, told Newsday.
“We want social-media companies to take responsibility and to implement appropriate safeguards to ensure that they’re monitoring these types of things.”
Shinoff said schools also want social-media companies to beef up their age-verification processes and make it easier for parents and school officials to keep an eye on kids’ access.
“The amount of time that our kids spend on social media is of concern, and the information that’s available — some of the misinformation that’s available on social media — that concerns me,” Jericho Superintendent Hank Grishman said.
He added that he also wants to ban the companies from getting kids’ personal information or tracking their Internet activity.
On Sunday, a Google rep said in a statement that the allegations were “simply not true.
“Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” the representative said. “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.”
Representatives for the other companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.
But a Snapchat rep told Newsday that while the company 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.”
