Google and Meta denied the accusations, stating that their company has taken precautions to protect the youth.
Meta Platforms Inc., Google, TikTok, and Snap will have to face the federal court as the school districts have filed lawsuits against them, alleging to be ‘addictive,’ which causes mental health crises among school kids.
The Oakland, California, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is ruling after a Los Angeles Superior Court judge gave a favorable decision to the firm on June 7. The conflict makes them potentially liable for damages in 150 cases before Roger, even as they avoid liability for claims for over 600 Los Angeles cases.
Rogers generally rejected the requests to dismiss some negligence claims but narrowed the range of allegations that would proceed. She concluded that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that protects internet companies from lawsuits, prohibits some claims.
Google and Meta denied the accusations, stating that their company has taken precautions to protect the youth. Snap has also mentioned its safety initiatives and shown research that supports Snapchat has a positive impact on users. TikTok didn’t respond immediately comment.
This decision was just a week after Rogers decided that Meta must face the lawsuits claiming that the company intentionally made the kids addicted to Facebook and Instagram. A group of states has made similar allegations against TikTok, but both businesses denied the claims.
Companies also face hundreds of personal injury cases accusing them of designing the platform in a way that children spend excessive time in front of screens. However, the school cases may have significant monetary damage since each district aims to recover institutional costs for the adverse effects caused by hundreds of students addicted to social media.
The school districts accused the social media apps of constructing their platforms to make kids addicted by using algorithms and features like the ‘like’ button, which hurts society, similar to the cigarette companies making their products addictive.
Google representative Jose Castaneda stated that the claims were not correct. He said that Google has built services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate content, and parents get control over the content. It is to support youth, mental health, and parenting.
A Meta representative said in the statement that they disagreed with the court.
He supported his statement by displaying numerous resources developed to help parents and teens, like the recently developed Teen account, which will change the content that millions of teens view in their accounts by automatically protecting and restricting the content teens can view.
The leading attorneys, Lexi Hazam and Previn Warren celebrated the decision as a win for teachers, administrators, and schools who were at the forefront of the child mental health problem in the country.
In the statement, they said that kids are having difficulty because of their addiction to YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. So, the schools would have extra difficulty helping the teens in crisis, which strains their budget and diverts them from their educational goals.
The judge said that claims by the school districts for the legal theory of public nuisance against nicotine vape pen sellers would be separate.
University of Florida law professor Clay Calvert suggested that the large payouts in the Juul case might have made the defense attorneys adopt the same strategy in the social media cases.
The professor also pointed out a fundamental difference between vape pens and social media. For example, the First Amendment protects the content posted on social media apps.
Judges in Oakland and Los Angeles are separately handling the cases filed by youths and families accusing social media companies of making their platforms addictive, which causes psychological distress and even suicides among students.
According to the US District Court, Northern District of California (Oakland), the federal lawsuit is in Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation.