Meta settles school district lawsuit claiming addictive design harmed students' mental health

Meta on Thursday agreed to settle with a Kentucky school district that sued it over alleged addictive design practices that harmed students’ mental health.

The bellwether lawsuit was the first of at least 1,200 to be brought by a school district against Meta, Snap, YouTube and TikTok for similar alleged harms. The other cases have not yet been tried. 

The Breathitt County School District had asked for more than $60 million to help it establish a long-term program to combat mental health and academic problems posed by students’ excessive social media usage.

The amount that Meta will pay under the terms of the settlement is not public. 

Snap, TikTok and YouTube settled with the school district late last week. A jury trial had been expected to launch in June. 

Platforms have recently lost in court when facing similar lawsuits. In March, Meta and YouTube were found liable by a jury for a young California girl’s social media addiction, which allegedly caused her mental health problems. The jury ordered Meta to pay the girl $6 million.

A New Mexico jury also sided against Meta in March, awarding the state $375 million after the attorney general sued, claiming the tech giant threatens children’s safety and mental health.

A Meta spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The plaintiffs have said that Meta intentionally designs its platforms to be addictive by using harmful algorithms, sending push notifications and encouraging infinite scrolling. Those design decisions and the ensuing addiction have cost schools significant money to combat, plaintiffs have said.

The settlement agreement is an about face for Meta, which took the New Mexico and California cases to trial and asserted the lawsuits were frivolous.

In its complaint, the Breathitt County School District condemned Meta and the other platforms for operating their business to “exploit the neurophysiology of the brain’s reward systems.” 

It alleged that the platforms prey on young people because their profits increase as time spent on platforms spikes.

“America’s youth lack the emotional maturity, impulse control, and psychological resiliency to perceive, understand and combat the manipulation and harm that is occurring through the social media platforms.”

The school district said it has had to spend significant sums tracking and treating the results of social media addiction, which it said has manifested in suicides, cyber bullying and other cyber abuses.

“Despite plaintiff’s best efforts, the mental health crisis persists, and the budget is not adequate to take the steps needed to fully address this crisis,” the complaint said. “Plaintiff needs significantly more funding than it has to implement potentially lifesaving programs in the face of this ever-increasing mental health crisis that the defendants helped create.”