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How would you feel if the school district educating your children sued the local newspaper, radio station, bookstore or library because the district claimed that they could no longer properly educate your children, as those kids were distracted and spending too much time on any of those things? Or how about if they sued the makers of chess sets for dulling your children’s minds?
You might raise serious questions about the education your kids were receiving. You might wonder how prepared those districts were to educate your children on how to live in the modern world. You might wonder about the quality of schools overseen by administrators prone to falling for moral panics and mass hysteria without evidence (phenomena you might hope the schools would actually be educating your own children to recognize and avoid).
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Unfortunately, it seems as though we’re experiencing the modern version of just such a scenario. Yes, while it seems laughable today, schools once bemoaned the impact of newspapers, radio, novels, libraries and even chess on school children. And, in retrospect, those panics not only look silly, but most modern schools now actively encourage reading news and books, visiting libraries, and playing chess as ways to better educate and stimulate the mind.
Today a similar fear is overtaking school administrators across the country. But this time, it’s about social media. And, rather than just complain about it, school districts are suing.
Various school districts across the country are suing (in different combinations) Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat. They’re claiming that these social media apps are a public nuisance, because kids are “addicted” to social media and feeling depressed in school, and sometimes committing acts of vandalism. The fact that kids have been depressed in schools and committed acts of vandalism in the past, or that there were similar claims about everything mentioned above, somehow does not make it into these lawsuits.
It started with Seattle’s public school district admitting that it was ill-prepared to teach children in the age of social media. This lawsuit became something of a punchline, as people wondered why schools should be paid by social media for not being able to properly educate kids. But, in quick succession many other districts followed suit, including Mesa Public Schools in Arizona, Bucks County in Pennsylvania, Gervais School District in Oregon, and 11 different counties in Kentucky who all authorized lawsuits against social media. Oh, and also San Mateo County, right in the heart of Silicon Valley where many of these companies are based.
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The lawsuits are almost all based on “public nuisance” claims, which in recent years have become a sort of catch-all used by many class action lawyers seeking to hold companies responsible for large scale harms around climate, pollution, tobacco, lead paint, opioids and more. No matter what you think about the use of public nuisance claims in those cases, they involve situations in which there is real physical harm. With social media, we’re talking about speech. You don’t ingest speech. Speech doesn’t poison your lungs.
Had these types of lawsuits been common back in the 19th century, you could have seen school districts suing libraries and book sellers for being public nuisances to children.
As for the evidence of harm, it remains almost entirely lacking. While many point to increases in depression and suicide, the rates of each still remain significantly below where they were in the 1980s and early 1990s (when there was no social media, and the biggest scourge in schools was… walkmen?). To date, while studies have shown correlation, none have really proved a causal link. Indeed, alternative evidence is compelling, including a general increase in better mental health awareness, which likely leads to more recognition of—and reporting of—depression.
Meanwhile, repeated studies have shown equal, if not even greater, results that a larger percentage of students find social media is beneficial in helping them build social connections, find their own communities, and improve general well being. A recent Pew Research Center study (which, bizarrely, was selectively quoted to hide this fact in some of the lawsuits) found that a much greater percentage of teenagers claim that social media has benefited their lives, and only a tiny percentage say it has made their lives worse.
Indeed, many of the studies have shown the same thing that we learned with all the other moral panics about children and access to information: the kids are alright. They can figure this stuff out, with some guidance—the kind of guidance one might hope would come from the schools where they were sent to prepare for adulthood.
The lawsuit by San Mateo County’s Board of Education, which oversees the schools my own kids attend, deserves special mention. While it, like the others, includes the public nuisance argument, it goes much further, making a RICO claim, arguing that the defendant social media companies are engaged in racketeering, as if they were organized crime families.
Even more bizarre: while the lawsuit spends many pages (misleadingly) citing research about teens’ usage of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, for unexplained reasons (I asked, and they refused to answer), the lawsuit does not include either Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) or Twitter as defendants. Instead, it targets YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat, and seems to want to hold them liable as mobsters for the (misstated) sins of Facebook and Instagram.
The end result of this is a flood of lawsuits by school districts against social media companies, effectively admitting that these districts not only refuse to prepare our children for how to deal with modern communications technology, but they wish to be paid for their own failures. And much of this seems to be driven by a failure to understand what the evidence actually says, or how kids actually make use of the technology today.
It makes about as much sense as suing the makers of chess sets.
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