Social Media a ‘Double-Edged Sword’ for Students, Judge Says

A California federal judge overseeing hundreds of lawsuits from public school districts against popular social media companies on Friday said the platforms are a “double-edged sword” that might be valuable for some students but cause real harm to others.

“I don’t know if they have a claim,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said of the school districts’ novel “public nuisance” lawsuits at an Oakland, Calif., court hearing. “But I do know that the challenges they’re facing are real, they are significant, and they’re all tied back to these platforms.”

Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc., TikTok Inc., and Google are seeking dismissal of the school district lawsuits, which along with hundreds more individual addiction suits from young people, are consolidated in a multidistrict case before Rogers in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The school districts assert that the social media companies are contributing to a youth mental health and addiction crisis that has interfered with schools’ ability to fulfill their educational mission. Their public nuisance legal theory is similar to the approach taken by school districts suing e-cigarette maker Juul, which resulted hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements.

“The entire public school system is impacted,” the school district’s attorney Michael Weinkowitz of Levin Sedran & Berman LLP said at the hearing. “It has affected how schools operate, how teachers teach, how coaches coach, how parents deal with their children.”

But Google’s attorney Ashley Hardin of Williams & Connolly LLP argued that public nuisance laws were never intended to be so broad as to encompass “any manner of social problems,” and that schools can’t sue over injuries that occurred to students.

‘Living in the Metaverse’

Rogers acknowledged that some courts have supported the platforms’ argument that public nuisance claims must have a direct tie to physical land where the nuisance occurred, so disruption from social media wouldn’t be sufficient to sue.

But the judge also pushed back on that argument: “We’re living in the metaverse, that is the next place where people engage in conduct,” she said. “You can go to concerts, you can do all sorts of things on platforms that were never envisioned.”

The platforms also argued in their motion to dismiss that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a broad liability shield for internet companies, blocked the schools’ lawsuits. But Rogers said she didn’t need to hear arguments on that question at the hearing.

The Friday hearing comes days after a judge in Los Angeles heard arguments over the platforms’ motion to dismiss a nearly identical consolidated social media harm case playing out in California state court. During that hearing, Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl grappled with whether social media algorithms were actually pushing students to engage in disruptive “challenges” in school or if they were just pressured by their peers.

The judges in both the state and federal cases have already allow hundreds of individual youth addiction lawsuits to partially proceed against the tech companies.

The case is In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Pers. Inj. Products Liab. Litigation, N.D. Cal., No. 4:22-md-03047, 5/17/24.