N.J. School District Sues Social Media for Spike in Kids' Mental Illness

Social media companies are “ruthlessly extracting every dollar possible with callous disregard for the harm to mental health,” said a Friday class action (docket 2:23-cv-1233) filed by Irvington Public Schools in U.S. District Court for New Jersey in Newark. It’s one of several similar cases linking social media platforms from Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, Snap, TikTok and Google with rising rates of mental health issues among kids (see 2302170051).

Public schools are “on the frontlines of this unfair fight,” said the complaint, saying schools are forced to spend more resources as first responders, trying to “stave off the rising rates of suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety” and other mental health issues among students.

Social media platforms “exploit minor users’ undeveloped decision-making capacity, impulse control, emotional maturity, and poor psychological resiliency,” despite knowing minors are much more likely to sustain serious psychological harm through social media use than adults, the complaint said. Platforms seek to grow their platforms by minors through designs and algorithms that “promote addiction, compulsive use and other severe mental harm,” while thwarting parents’ ability to keep children safe by supervising and limiting social media use, it said.

The plaintiff provides mental health services to its students and trains teachers and staff to screen them for mental health services that school-based health clinics operate in partnership with local behavioral health agencies, the complaint said. The Irvington School District continues to hire mental health professionals to keep up with students’ rising needs, “but there is no end in sight,” the complaint said. The school district needs funding to develop a long-term plan to deal with the mental health crisis, it said.

Defendants need to take accountability and to stop targeting youths for profit, said the complaint. It said social media companies must stop using algorithms, social media features and policies “that they know are a driving force behind the current mental health crisis” for the over 8,000 students in the Essex County, New Jersey, school system.

The companies’ algorithms are promoting and amplifying harmful content to children and teens and operating with a “degree of algorithmic discrimination” that’s particularly harmful to vulnerable user groups, the complaint said. It cited a Pew Research Center study saying 45% of teens in 2018 said they were online “almost constantly” and 44% several times a day, with a “significant portion on social platforms, it said.

The school district asserts claims of public nuisance and negligence. It seeks damages, penalties and other monetary relief as provided by law, plus attorneys’ fees and injunctive relief.