ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY, Md. — The Anne Arundel County Public School System joins several other Maryland school districts in suing social media companies Meta, Google, ByteDance and Snap Inc.
The lawsuit alleges these products are harming students, damaging mental health and increasing burdens for school districts.
School districts say these social media companies have known about these negative impacts but have continued to prioritize profit over the well-being of children.
As a result, schools are unable to keep up with the mental health service demand. Through this lawsuit, the Board is seeking to change the way "the platforms exploit teens and obtain funds to address this crisis from those responsible, rather than continuing to place that burden on taxpayers."
We reached out to the social media companies, so far there's been no response.
Here's what they said a few months ago:
We want to reassure every parent that we have their interests at heart in the work we’re doing to provide teens with safe, supportive experiences online. We’ve developed more than 30 tools to support teens and their families, including tools that allow parents to decide when, and for how long, their teens use Instagram, age verification technology, automatically setting accounts belonging to those under 16 to private when they join Instagram, and sending notifications encouraging teens to take regular breaks. We’ve invested in technology that finds and removes content related to suicide, self-injury or eating disorders before anyone reports it to us. These are complex issues, but we will continue working with parents, experts and regulators such as the state attorneys general to develop new tools, features and policies that meet the needs of teens and their families.
Protecting kids across our platforms has always been core to our work. In collaboration with child development specialists, we have built age-appropriate experiences for kids and families on YouTube, and provide parents with robust controls. The allegations in these complaints are simply not true.
