Your local school district is suing the internet.
It's a phrase that sounds kind of insane. But it's also increasingly true. Over the past few months, numerous school boards including those in Seattle, San Mateo County, Portland, Scottsdale, San Diego, and many, many others are suing social media companies such as Meta, Alphabet, TikTok, Snap, and others. They allege that social media platforms are knowingly serving up harmful content to students and causing an increase in instances of depression, eating disorders, self-harm, and even suicide. The lawsuits variously demand changes to the platforms including changes to safety features, a prohibition on collecting data from minors, and large fines to pay for school mental health programs.
These lawsuits seem to be motivated by an admirable purpose. After all, what kind of monster would want more teen depression and suicide? However, multiple factors stand in the way of the success of these lawsuits.
Legs to Stand on
Starting with the issue of standing. It's unclear whether school districts should be able to file these suits at all.
For those unfamiliar with legal terminology, standing refers to the concept that you need to be directly harmed by the party you're suing in order to be able to take them to court. You can't sue someone for hurting someone else. It's up to the injured party to decide whether they want to make that undertaking. There are exceptions to this, of course. Most notably, parents can file suits on behalf of their children. We've seen this employed in cases like West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, where parents sue for some sort of relief against violations of their children's rights. It's not at all clear whether schools have the sort of legal relationship with the children under their care to permit them to sue social media companies on the children's behalf. This is something that may vary on a state-by-state or even district-by-district basis, and will undoubtedly be raised by the defendants during the trials. Since most of the social media activity that schools are suing over is occurring outside of regular school hours, it is going to be much more of an uphill climb for schools to claim that they have the correct sort of legal relationship with their off-campus students to permit them to sue on their behalf. Prior case law does not seem likely to be helpful to the schools in this regard. The 2021 Supreme Court case Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. established that the court has a fairly limited and constrained view of what sort of relationship a school has with its students when they are not on campus or interacting directly with the school in some way.
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But it does raise the question, why are schools suing instead of the parents? If one could convincingly prove that social media companies should be liable for depression, self-harm, and bullying suffered by their under-aged users, it's unclear why schools should be the ones receiving a payout from said companies instead of the parents and the children themselves. Amusingly, the Seattle-based gaming webcomic, Penny Arcade, pointed out this apparent contradiction.
Some of the school districts filing suit are instead claiming standing by asserting that they themselves have been injured by the social media companies and their impact on teen mental health. The justifications vary from lawsuit to lawsuit, but they tend to assert something similar to what the Seattle schools are claiming:
"Our students - and young people everywhere - face unprecedented learning and life struggles that are amplified by the negative impacts of increased screen time, unfiltered content, and potentially addictive properties of social media counseling." ...
"Our obligation is to create the conditions for students to thrive and have high quality learning experiences" ... "The harm caused by these companies runs counter to that."
In short, the schools' argument can be boiled down to this.
Social media causes teen depression. This forces us to spend money on mental health programs. This loss of money is a direct harm to us that gives us standing to sue.
This argument seems sensible on its face but falls apart in the face of prior case history. Clapper v. Amnesty International USA states that Party A diverting resources to cure the injuries of Party B caused by Party C is not sufficient harm to give Party A standing to sue Party C. In an ironic twist of fate, this same line of reasoning employed by the schools was recently used by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryck and a group of Texas plaintiffs in a lawsuit to try to get Mifepristone outlawed in the US, which seems likely to be shot down on appeal. Beyond the dubious associations of this line of argument, it also fails to pass muster when applied to other similar situations. Hospitals, for example, have a stronger duty of care for their charges' physical health than any school does for students' mental health. Yet hospitals aren't considered to have standing to sue drunk drivers, drive-by shooters, or drug dealers, even though they have to expend resources treating people who are harmed by these groups.
230 Blaze It
These standing arguments probably make these school lawsuits against social media dead on arrival. But what if one put those issues aside and just had the courts adjudicate the question "Can social networks be held liable for mental health issues caused by usage of their platforms?"
In short, no.
In medium, no, because of section 230.
In long, it may be useful to look at the specifics of Section 230, the claims of mental health damage, and how their interaction means that the social media companies probably aren't liable for mental health problems caused by the use of their platforms.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, commonly referred to on the right as "The Woke Censorship Enabling Act" and on the left as the "Corporate Malfeasance Enabling Act" (if their hyperbolic posting about it is to be believed) is fairly short and easily digestible even to a layperson, so it may be beneficial to quote it in full:
(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph.
In this case, this means that social media companies are not liable for damages caused by material posted by their users, but they are still allowed to remove content from their platforms as they see fit. That first part is essential when considering what exactly the platforms are being sued over. The schools are suing social media companies over damages caused by the consumption of content posted by the platforms' users. "Users" is the operative term here. No one is claiming that anything created by the networks themselves is causing teen mental health problems. It's not the font on their pages or the color of their UI that's allegedly causing harm here. It's the posts from other users that are causing mental health damage. Section 230 is unwaveringly clear that providers have absolutely no liability for the actions of their users. If the platforms were interspersing insults and harassment that they themselves wrote with user-posted content, then the plaintiffs might have ground to stand on. But as long as the content causing harm is not created by the companies in question, they have zero liability for it.
The schools counter by claiming that the issue is not with the content, but the algorithms that decide what pieces of content to serve users. The claims by the schools basically say that the recommendation algorithms employed by networks to decide what pieces of user-submitted content are harming teens. They assert that the recommendation algorithms prioritize content that worsens depression and anxiety, and since the companies control those algorithms, that makes them liable.
This line of argument unfortunately still can't breach the barrier posed by Section 230. Any sort of content-serving algorithm is effectively a technical means to promote some material while restricting others, which is clearly protected by subsection 2B of section 230. It's impossible to run a social network that doesn't have some restriction on what content a user sees. A chronological feed restricts a user's ability to see old posts. An alphabetical listing of text posts based on the subject of those posts will restrict a user's ability to see posts about Zucchinis and Xylophones. Even randomly serving user posts from a network's entire catalog of posts is a form of Section 230-protected content restriction.
While there are efforts on both sides of the aisle to change and weaken Section 230 protections, the law as it currently stands means social media companies are in no way liable for the harms that the schools are suing them over. The Supreme Court even weighed in on questions of whether to weaken Section 230's provisions in the context of displaying videos produced by ISIS. And unfortunately for the schools' lawsuits, they unanimously upheld Section 230's liability shield, which is likely to spell doom for any lawsuit over teen mental health.
What to do?
While the lawsuits are unlikely to succeed, they are not without merit in the non-legal sense. The schools are responding to a real issue that social media companies are facilitating. Plenty of research has shown that social media use is causing an uptick in depression, eating disorders, and self-harm in teens, which is having an impact on school operations. Beyond issues impacting students, social media is just really annoying if you're a school administrator. Be it getting kids to steal toilets, assault each other, or cheat on tests, social media makes it hard to run a school and, understandably, educators would want to use the courts to rein in the companies that they feel are making their jobs harder, even if the law is not behind them.
So what can be done? The first option would be to appeal to parental responsibility. Kids access social media from devices that their parents control. The manufacturers install mechanisms that allow parents to control what kinds of content a device can access. Schools concerned with harmful social media use could mount campaigns to educate parents about how to better use the existing mechanisms to control their kids' social media usage.
But of course, relying on parents to control their children's consumption habits has been a losing battle since the beginning of time. Another refreshingly honest solution would be to just ban social media for children. With all the comparisons made between social media and drugs, gambling, or alcohol, it seems like an obvious solution to apply the same legal treatment to it. As a society, we consider all those things to be harmful generally, but not so harmful that we can justify banning them wholesale. So we settle on restricting access for those we deem to be least capable of consuming them responsibly and hope to mitigate their damage overall. Utah Republican Chris Stewart has proposed this basic solution in Congress. Unfortunately, age gating is a notoriously leaky mechanism, and attempts to make them more robust would likely just result in the shutdown of whole services if Utah's attempt to ban underage porn access is any indication. But it may be the best option available and would at least have some impact in reducing teen exposure to harmful content, even if it doesn't impact teens with the tech-savvy to circumvent age gates (i.e. most of them).
Ultimately, there may not be a single silver bullet solution to the problems of social media. A lot of problems facing us today are like that. Perhaps the best course of action is just to make incremental fixes and mitigate harms where they arise. Certainly, that would be better than wasting time and money on publicity stunt lawsuits with no hope of succeeding.