Seattle school district sues TikTok, Meta over youth mental health crisis
USA TodayNov 25, 2022
Seattle Schools Suing Tech Giants Over Students' Mental Health
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Image copyright: CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images [via Fox News]
The Facts
The Seattle city school district has filed a lawsuit against Alphabet Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc., and ByteDance Ltd., the owner of TikTok, over claims that schools can't fulfill their educational requirements due to students' anxiety, depression and other related mental health difficulties allegedly resulting from social media usage.
The 91-page suit was filed on Friday with the US District Court and claims that Big Tech's contribution towards worsening mental health and behavioral disorders has forced schools to take additional measures, such as hiring additional mental health professionals, preparing lesson plans to educate students on the impact of social media, and providing additional training to teachers.
The Spin
Establishment-critical narrative
Vulnerable young people are facing mounting mental health pressures and, while some factors provoking this decline — such as issues within the education system and the fallout from the COVID pandemic — are difficult to change, others are very easy to, like algorithms or social media codes. By making the relevant companies more accountable, settings, content filters, and revised guidance could help young people have healthier relationships with social media platforms.
Pro-establishment narrative
Third-party users are largely responsible for their content and conduct online, and numerous regulatory processes are carried out to ensure content is not harmful. According to Meta's global head of safety, Antigone Davis, over 30 tools have been developed to support teens and families, encourage time limits, and identify more than 99% of harmful content even before it's reported by users. Evidently, social media platforms are always evolving to keep young people safe.
Cynical narrative
A crisis affecting mental health isn't the same as a crisis of mental health, and the "reification" of society — where the effects of political arrangements of power and resource start appearing like objective facts about the world — have had the consequence of swapping out political problems for scientific or technical ones. Characterizing issues such as the youth mental health crisis as a problem of "social media addiction" rather than focusing on going after unregulated tech oligopolies skips over the core fact — societal problems like these are inherently political.
