Holding Big Tech accountable for youth social harms
Seattle’s public schools district has filed a lawsuit against multiple major social media companies, accusing them of harming young people’s mental health.
The lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in US district court, accused the social media companies behind TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube of creating a “mental health crisis among America’s youth”.
“Defendants’ growth is a product of choices they made to design and operate their platforms in ways that exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of their users into spending more and more time on their platforms. These techniques are particularly effective and harmful to the youth audience,” the 91-page suit said.
“Defendants have successfully 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,” it added, citing harmful content including extreme diet plans and encouragements of self-harm.
The lawsuit went on to attribute the companies’ alleged misconduct to the rising rates of anxiety, depression, thoughts of self-harm and suicide ideation experienced among young people.
According to the lawsuit, from 2009 to 2019, there was on average a 30% increase in the number of students at Seattle public schools who reported feeling “so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that [they] stopped doing some usual activities”.
As students experience various mental health issues including anxiety and depression, their performance in schools drop, the lawsuit said, making them less likely to attend school and more likely to engage in substance use and to “act out”, in turn hindering “Seattle public schools’ ability to fulfill its educational mission”.
I joined the team Breakfast Television to dig into this breaking story.
Should social media companies be held accountable for social harms like loneliness, decreased cognitive function, and depression?
Watch for my take.
