The Franklin Area School District will be joining a multidistrict litigation suit filed in the federal court of the Northern District of California against a number of social media companies, alleging the companies have created mental health issues in youth populations through deliberately exploitative practices.
The school board, during its meeting on Monday night, voted to engage legal counsel to pursue a claim in the litigation, and authorized Superintendent Eugene Thomas to execute documents necessary to pursue the claim on behalf of the district.
“The underlying theories are that social media platforms, through harmful and exploitative marketing and operational practices, violated public nuisance laws by creating mental health issues in the adolescent populations,” Thomas said in an email to the newspaper on Tuesday.
Thomas said the suit, titled “In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation,” has two classes of plaintiffs — personal injury plaintiffs and school district plaintiffs — and that the school districts are impacted by having “to divert their limited resources to address these issues in the classrooms.”
This includes forcing schools to hire additional mental health professionals, develop lesson materials, provide additional training to teachers and take additional steps to deal with “worsening mental health and behavioral disorders including anxiety, depression, disordered eating and cyberbullying,” he said.
Social media addiction also has made it more difficult for schools to educate students, Thomas’ email said.
At the meeting, Thomas noted “Many times, our school district had to engage and work with students whenever social media was at the forefront, either through bullying or inappropriate sites or distractions from their academics … or conflicts,” adding this had cost the district money and “human capital” in the form of time spent addressing these issues.
Thomas told the newspaper that the district had been invited to participate in the suit by its solicitor’s law firm, Knox McLaughlin Gornall & Sennett in Erie, “because every district is affected by it,” and that thousands of districts across the country are expected to take part.
In this case, “We really don’t know what the districts would get, but there’s a very real potential of a significant monetary settlement,” he said.
Board President Sabrina Backer cast the lone “no” vote against joining the litigation.
Backer told the newspaper on Tuesday that she couldn’t be in favor of joining the suit “when we can’t say definitively we had any harm.”
She also said there had been “lengthy discussion” of the issue at a previous board meeting, and at that discussion “a few of us” disagreed with the suit.
The multidistrict litigation consolidates several claims against social media companies that have been filed across the nation, consolidating them into one court with one judge.
In addition, Pennsylvania is among 33 states that have joined the lawsuit, according to a news release from Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry’s office.
Defendants in the case include Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram; Snap, parent company of Snapchat; Bytedance, parent company of TikTok; and Google, which now owns YouTube.
In addition to school districts, the master complaint in the case, which was filed March 10, includes as plaintiffs children who suffered personal injuries through the use of social media, as well as the personal representatives of their estates in cases of death, and their family members and guardians where applicable, according to the complaint.
