The Seattle public school district has filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court against the tech companies behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat, seeking to hold them responsible for the mental health damage they have inflicted on young people.
The 91-page lawsuit claims that social media companies have created a public hazard by targeting children with their products and contributing to the worsening of mental health and behavioral disorders, including anxiety, depression, disordered eating, and cyberbullying.
The suit also alleges that said companies have made it more difficult to educate students and have forced schools to hire additional mental health professionals, create lesson plans about the effects of social media, and provide additional training to teachers.
The complaint asserts that the companies have “exploited the vulnerable brains of youth, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse of Defendants’ social media platforms,” and that the content directed toward young people is often “harmful and exploitative.”
“Plaintiff is not alleging Defendants are liable for what third-parties have said on Defendants’ platforms but, rather, for Defendants’ own conduct,” the lawsuit reads. “Defendants affirmatively recommend and promote harmful content to youth, such as pro-anorexia and eating disorder content.”
In emailed statements to the Associated Press on Sunday, Google and Snap maintained they were working hard to protect young people from harm. “We will continue working to make sure our platform is safe and to give Snapchatters dealing with mental health issues resources to help them deal with the challenges facing young people today,” Snap said in a written statement.
Meanwhile, José Castañeda, a spokesperson for YouTube’s parent company Google, insisted the company had “invested heavily in creating safe experiences for children across our platforms and have introduced strong protections and dedicated features to prioritize their well-being.”
According to the lawsuit, from 2009 to 2019, there was an average increase of 30% in the number of Seattle Public Schools students who reported feeling “so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row” that they stopped participating in some of their usual activities.
Although thousands of plaintiffs have filed lawsuits against social media companies for the harm they inflict on children, this is believed to be the first filed directly by a public school district. As such, the school district has requested that the court order the companies to stop causing the alleged public nuisance, award damages, and provide funding for prevention education and treatment for excessive and problematic use of social media.
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“The Seattle public school district has filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court against the tech companies behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat,,,,for the mental health damage they have inflicted on young people.”,,,,totally ignoring the snapper headed mental derangements inflicted on young socially mis-developed brains via their woke indoctrinated ideology of gender bending brain cells to the point they no longer recognize their God designed humanity.
God forbid there be a valid competing free thinking educating institution that could deprive the liberal educational indoctrinators of the power to totally and socially control the development of innocent minds with the ability to pick and choose what works and what does not work in their lives. Apparently, the Skedaddle school system that is designed to create fearful easy to control social snowflakes, is afraid they will lose their monopoly in the use of youth educational snow jobs. It is either THEIR love that becomes the drug or none other. First clean and organize your own house and brains Seattle. Big Gov schools just another face of big tech problems.
How’s about sue the dunces of parents, who are the ones who keep BUYING ALL these bloody cell phones, laptops and tablets, THAT GET their kids hooked on Anti-social media!!!
are you going to sue rappers for their language and violence??? what about tv shows with white people in them?? you know nice people who work and obey the law. you know that hurts their woke feelings