Gervais School District sues social media giants over youth mental health crisis
By KPTV Staff
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GERVAIS, Oregon (KPTV) — The Gervais School District is suing social media giants, saying that they have used their platforms to create a youth mental health crisis in America.
In the lawsuit against Facebook, Instagram, (as well as their parent company Meta), Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Google, the district claims that these platforms specifically target young people and take advantage of them to keep them coming back to the platform.
The lawsuit claims that social media companies have designed their platforms to exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of young people to make them spend more time on the platform so they can sell more ads for profit. The lawsuit adds that content often targeted to teens is harmful.
The district told FOX 12 its motivation for the lawsuit is to get social media sites to make changes in how they design their platforms to stop negatively targeting youth. But the district says it is also suing because it claims dealing with mental health issues caused by social media has put a strain on resources and affected their ability to educate students.
The district says these issues were made even worse after students returned to school from the pandemic.
FOX 12 reached out to the social media platforms, but only heard back from Snapchat. The company says that it has worked to expand mental health resources within its app, and also says the app is an important tool for young people to communicate with friends.
In a statement, the company said:
“Nothing is more important to us than the wellbeing of our community. At Snapchat, we curate content from known creators and publishers and use human moderation to review user generated content before it can reach a large audience, which greatly reduces the spread and discovery of harmful content. We also work closely with leading mental health organizations to provide in-app tools for Snapchatters and resources to help support both themselves and their friends. We are constantly evaluating how we continue to make our platform safer, including through new education, features and protections.”
Seattle Public Schools filed a similar lawsuit in January against many of the same tech giants behind these social media platforms. It blamed the companies for worsening mental health and behavioral issues for young people.
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