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Meta, Google, TikTok and other social media companies may soon be forced to fund student mental health services and redesign features they say promote compulsive use if school districts prevail in a growing wave of lawsuits.
More than 1,000 school districts across the country — including at least a dozen in California, including the Los Angeles Unified School District — argue that social media companies have knowingly created products that harm children’s mental health and that the costs of dealing with the harm have been shifted to schools, which have had to expand their counseling, crisis intervention and campus safety efforts.
“Overuse of social media has fueled a youth mental health crisis that is essentially forcing schools to shift from education to crisis intervention on a daily basis,” said Aelish Baig, a senior attorney representing LAUSD in the federal multiple district lawsuit. “The costs of these harms include enormous waste of staff time and significant costs associated with the increased anxiety and depression, self-harm and suicidality affecting students.”
The federal lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California, represents several school districts in Southern California, including Burbank Unified, Oceanside Unified, Coronado Unified, Temecula Unified, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified, ABC Unified and Ramona Unified, as well as other districts across the country. Districts are seeking both financial compensation and injunctive relief to meet the increased demand for mental health support.
According to their complaints, districts have had to hire more counselors and therapists, increase teacher and staff training and educate students about online safety and cyberbullying, amid reports of a rise in depression, anxiety and other mental health issues.
A recent landmark jury trial and the case of a key school district in Kentucky have also emboldened school districts currently engaged in litigation against social media companies.
In March, Kaley Glenn-Mills of Chico was awarded $6 million in a landmark jury trial in Los Angeles. Glenn-Mills, aged 17, sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Google, successfully arguing before a jury that the companies had designed their platforms to addict children.
In May, Kentucky’s Breathitt County School District became the first district to settle with social media companies for $27 million to help address rising costs of mental health services in schools. The first part of the multi-district lawsuit, filed by state attorneys general on behalf of their states, is scheduled for August, with the second part of the lawsuit, filed by school districts, following in February 2027.
Meta appealed the ruling in the social media addiction lawsuit last week and Google plans to also appeal, the Associated Press reported. “We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously and remain confident in our ability to protect youth online,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to the Associated Press.
Baig said the ongoing lawsuit, now representing LA Unified, is the strongest argument yet for forcing social media companies to pay more than a lump sum.
Through an injunction, school districts are asking the court to force social media companies to revise design “flaws” that encourage compulsive use and implement new protections to protect students’ mental health. Revisions could include drastic changes to everyday interaction features like infinite scrolling, algorithmic recommendations, and autoplay.
“It’s only when you have a strong coalition that you can actually create change when you stand up to companies of this size,” Baig said. “It would never have been enough to have just a few small school districts.”
LAUSD board member Nick Melvoin said the litigation follows a similar strategy to the district’s fight against e-cigarette and nicotine companies. In 2019, LA Unified joined a nationwide class action lawsuit against e-cigarette maker Juul, which ultimately paid school districts $1.2 billion in 2023 for targeting teenagers and depleting school resources.
“As with the vaping settlements, in these cases we will present evidence of how much money we spend on social workers and counselors as compensation for the services the county already uses,” Melvoin said. He said LAUSD will likely seek “tens of millions” in financial relief along with “injunctive relief and hopefully a change in policy.”
Google rejected the allegations. José Castañeda, a company spokesperson, told EdSource that YouTube has “developed services and policies to provide age-appropriate experiences to young people” and that the “allegations in these complaints are simply not true.”
In the Kentucky case, social media companies argued that the district failed to prove that students’ mental health problems were directly related to social media use. While the district referred more students for counseling, the companies’ attorneys noted that “none of these referrals ever identified ‘social media addiction’ as the cause.”
That’s likely because researchers haven’t found clear signs of clinical addiction in social media use, such as: B. measurable withdrawal, tolerance, and real-world impairment to qualify an addiction diagnosis. Rather, studies suggest that young people can develop harmful and compulsive habits through social media use. That distinction has been at the heart of the defense of social media companies that have increased billions of dollars in revenue using algorithmic features modeled after slot machines.
Vihaan Bhardwaj, a rising graduate of Mt. Everest Academy in San Diego and co-director of K-12 policy at the nonprofit youth advocacy group GenerationUp, said the defense makes students’ lived experiences “invisible.” He said that since he was 12, Instagram had repeatedly fed him “scare-mongering” content about his acne, which had caused him to lose his confidence.
“Maybe an hour of pure drinking is much worse than an hour of scrolling, but you can’t just say it’s not harmful because the potency is lower,” Vihaan said.
Social media companies also argued that school districts cannot measure which resources directly address students’ mental health issues related to social media use. Baig, the attorney representing LAUSD, said school districts would create an estimate based on years of counseling referrals, expenses, disciplinary incidents and costs, as well as documented cybercrimes and threats to children.
“Every year they experience thousands of incidents of suicidal behavior, of sick and depraved cybercrime, of shooting and bomb threats on social media, of extortion and sex trafficking of students, all of which divert enormous resources from the district’s core mission – educating a student,” Baig said. “They take up staff time, from teachers to mental health counselors to administration to maintenance staff.”
Baig also expects the discovery to uncover internal company documents linking youth mental health issues to social media use. Platforms have long examined compulsive usage, growth strategies and engagement metrics for young users, and in 2021, leaked documents to the Wall Street Journal revealed that Meta knew that one in three teenage girls had worse body image issues after using Instagram.
Even if social media companies are not forced by the court to make drastic design changes, Melvoin said schools will still save on mental health costs with government efforts to raise the age for a social media account to 16, implement age verification and expand digital wellness education in schools.
And if school districts receive a big payout from social media companies, Vihaan hopes districts will ensure that “counselors are not only hired but also trained” to help children use social media.
“You have to understand the personal social disconnect that pushes us to these platforms,” Vihaan said. “This nuance is often misunderstood by these adult sources.”
https://lbpost.com/news/education/california-school-districts-seek-money-changes-to-social-media-apps-in-lawsuits
