Chatham Schools Sue Tech Companies Over Social Media Harm

CHATHAM, NJ — The School District of the Chathams filed a lawsuit against big tech companies, claiming that they were responsible for a worsening mental health crisis among students and had a direct impact on the schools' ability to carry out their educational mission.

The lawsuit, filed last week in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, names some of the world's social media conglomerates, alleging that they are victimizing its students by "ruthlessly extracting every dollar possible with callous regard for the harm to mental health."

The complaint was filed against the parent companies of Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Google and YouTube as plaintiffs claimed that the companies purposefully designed their products to entice young people to use their platforms, resulting in a mental health crisis.

The school district wants a jury trial and a judgment that includes unspecified monetary damages and penalties.

According to the lawsuit, the companies' actions prey on their most vulnerable users and place schools on the front lines of this "unfair fight."

The lawsuit states that the school district has incurred and will continue to incur additional costs to treat the children entrusted to them, including the hiring of mental health professionals and developing additional mental health resources.

According to Board of Education President Jill Weber, the district is set to lose the state Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds (ESSER) next year, which Chatham has been using for increasingly valuable school mental health programs.

Students with mental health issues perform worse, prompting schools to take steps such as training teachers to identify and address such symptoms and developing additional resources to warn students about the dangers of social media, according to the complaint.

"The last decade has seen a steady rise in the mental health struggles of our children. As the world has grown interconnected over the same period, the channels through which children connect have solidified into massive data pipelines, from which hundreds of billions of dollars of profits have been wrung by the defendants," the lawsuit states.

Patch has reached out to Michael LaSusa, Superintendent of Schools in Chatham, for comment on the complaint.

Although federal law, specifically Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, could help shield tech companies from liability resulting from third-party content posted on their platforms, that provision might not protect the actions in this case, according to the complaint.

According to the lawsuit, the companies are acting as co-publishers of some content because they all create images and GIFs for users to post on their videos and pictures.

"In many cases, the only content in a user’s Facebook post is the image, GIF or music supplied by Meta. When users incorporate images, GIFs, and music supplied by Meta into their postings, Meta functions as a co-publisher of such content," the lawsuit states. "A Facebook user who incorporates images, GIFs or music supplied by Meta into their post is functionally equivalent to a novelist who incorporates illustrations into their story. Meta can no longer characterize the images, GIFs, and music it supplies to its users as third-party content, just as the novelist cannot disclaim responsibility for illustrations contained in their book."

In his testimony before Congress in September 2020, Tim Kendall, the first director of monetization at Facebook, reiterated Meta's decision to design its platforms in ways it knew to be risky in order to increase engagement.

This testimony was one of the other pieces of evidence included in the 66-page court document supporting Chatham's case.

"At Facebook, I believe we sought to mine as much human attention as possible and turn it into historically unprecedented profits. To do this, we didn’t simply create something useful and fun; we took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset," Kendall said. "Social media preys on the most primal parts of your brain, it provokes, it shocks, and it enrages."

The lawsuit continues by alleging that the promotion of harmful content has become so essential to the defendants' business models that it is generating profits that are growing exponentially, allowing them to choose to withhold the truth and continue to harm users instead of making their platforms safer and less dangerous.

"In fiscal years 2021 and 2022, YouTube generated total advertising revenues of $28.8 billion and $29.2 billion respectively. In stark contrast, the advertising revenues for fiscal year 2017 was $8.1 billion," the suit states.

The lawsuit claims that as schoolchildren spent more and more time online and were exposed to more "manipulations," the crisis grew worse and worse during the pandemic.

Following the pandemic, American adolescent media consumption skyrocketed at an astonishing 17 percent per year, reaching an average of 8 hours and 39 minutes per day in 2021.

The School District of the Chathams is a regional public school district that serves students from Chatham Borough and Chatham Township in grades pre-kindergarten through twelfth.