Another N.J. School District Case Poised to Join Social Media MDL in Calif.

A public nuisance and negligence class action (docket 3:23-cv-01643) against social media companies by the Watchung Hills Regional High School District in New Jersey is the latest case poised for transfer, with the recent wave of like-minded cases, to the U.S. Court for the Northern District of California for consolidation with the existing personal injury social media cases, James Cecchi, director of Carella Byrne's class-action practice in Roseland, New Jersey, emailed Communications Litigation Today Tuesday.

Cecchi is lead attorney in the Watchung Hills case and also is interim lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the 16 Samsung data breach class actions transferred for pretrial consolidation to U.S. District Judge Christine O'Hearn for New Jersey in Camden. More than 130 cases now comprise -- or are about to comprise -- the personal injury social media multidistrict litigation before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers for Northern California in Oakland (docket 4:22-md-3047). Covington & Burling attorneys for Meta filed notice Monday with the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation identifying Cecchi's Watchung Hills case as a potential tag-along action for the MDL in Oakland.

The Watchung Hills case was filed March 22 in U.S. District Court for New Jersey in Trenton. It alleges students are being “victimized and exploited” by Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok. The social media companies are “ruthlessly extracting every dollar possible with callous disregard for the harm to mental health,” alleged the complaint. The school district serves students in New Jersey's Somerset and Warren counties.

The world has become more interconnected over the past decade, bringing defendants “hundreds of billions of dollars of profits” while there’s been a “steady rise in the mental health struggles of our children,” said the complaint. The platforms “exploit minor users’ undeveloped decision-making capacity, impulse control, emotional maturity and poor psychological resiliency,” it said.

The complaint cited accounts of Meta employees reporting to management in 2017 that Facebook was causing “harmful dependencies” and marketing to children under 13 despite “clear legal mandates” against allowing that age group on its platform. CEO Mark Zuckerberg “actively rejected proposed redesigns intended to minimize the harms to child and teen users,” the complaint said.

Meta’s Instagram platform is also structured to induce addiction, compulsive use, and over-engagement” in ways that “lead to predictable and foreseeable” harms, the complaint said. It cited survey results in a September 2021 Wall Street Journal article showing high percentages of teens’ feelings of depression, suicidal ideation or violence to others in the previous month were “directly attributable to Instagram."

At Google, a company initiative to reach 1 billion hours of user viewing a day resulted in the formula “outrage equals attention,” said the complaint. YouTube redesigned itself to “maximize addiction,” and its algorithm prioritized engagement over user safety, despite the knowledge that such programming was harmful to youth, the complaint said.

A Snapchat “secret formula” for friending someone, called “Quick Add,” is designed to reinforce addiction and boost the odds of maintaining “more users for longer,” the complaint said. Its Explore feed, designed to keep users’ attention for as long as possible, has been described by psychologists and government officials as “dangerously addictive,” it said.

One of TikTok’s popular features is “challenges,” where users film themselves in an activity that encourages them to mimic and “one up” other users engaging in the same type of activity. The challenges are widely promoted, resulting in high user engagement that benefits parent company ByteDance, alleged the complaint. Often, the challenges promote dangerous or risky conduct, the complaint said.

One in six teens has experienced abusive behavior online, including name-calling, spreading false rumors, receiving unsolicited explicit images and physical threats, said the complaint, citing a 2018 Pew Research Center study that found 90% of teens believe online harassment is a problem for them, 63% a “major problem.” Schools have an increase in students seeking mental health services, said the Watchung district. Two-thirds of school districts in an April 2022 U.S. Department of Education report cited an increase in the need for mental health services since the start of the pandemic. School districts have had to hire additional mental health personnel and develop additional mental health resources as a result of students' online activity, the complaint said.

The plaintiff seeks a judgment that defendants have created, or were a “substantial factor” in creating, a public nuisance; damages, penalties, monetary relief and legal costs; and injunctive relief.