Fort Worth ISD could join hundreds of districts suing 4 social media giants. Here’s why.
The Fort Worth Independent School District is taking steps to join hundreds of other school districts nationwide in suing the four big social media companies, alleging the platforms they run contributed to a mental health crisis among students.
After a closed-door discussion, the district’s school board voted Tuesday, Feb. 18, to approve contracts with two Texas-based law firms to represent the district in the case. In the complaint, school districts allege the social media platforms “have rewired how adolescents think, learn, feel, and behave,” leaving school leaders to deal with the mental health ramifications.
The lawsuit, which was filed last year in San Francisco federal court, targets four big social media companies: Google, which owns YouTube; Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram; ByteDance, owner of TikTok; and Snap, owner of Snapchat. More than 200 school districts nationwide have joined the suit.
Social media is designed to be addictive, schools claim
Among other issues, the school districts claim the social media platforms owned by those companies are designed to addict children and adolescents. They point out that children are particularly susceptible to addictive behavior because the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that’s most responsible for planning, controlling impulsive decisions and evaluating risk vs. reward, isn’t fully developed until about age 25.
The school districts allege the companies designed their products in a way that encourages compulsive use, instills anxiety when users aren’t on the platform often enough and provides inadequate parental controls. In the case of Snapchat, the plaintiffs argue the “disappearing” nature of messages reduces teenagers’ apprehensions about sending sexually explicit pictures of themselves or their friends — without understanding that recipients could take a recording or screenshot of the message.
If Fort Worth ISD officially joins the lawsuit, it won’t be the first Texas district to do so. School boards in Houston ISD and San Antonio’s Northside ISD voted earlier this month to join. The two firms representing Fort Worth ISD, O’Hanlon, Demerath & Castillo and Eiland & Bonnin, are also representing the other two Texas districts. All three agreements are contingency fee contracts, meaning the districts will pay the firms out of any monetary damages they’re awarded.
School districts across the country have reported an uptick in student mental health issues since the pandemic. In 2023, the most recent year for which figures are available, 40% of U.S. high school students reported experiencing persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. More than half of all female students and nearly two-thirds of those who identified as LGBTQ+ reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, according to the survey.
In the same survey, more than three-quarters of high school students reported using social media “several times a day.” Research suggests there’s a link between increased social media use and declines in mental health. In a 2022 study, researchers at universities in Italy and Israel found that the rollout of Facebook on U.S. college campuses in the early 2000s led to an uptick in visits to student mental health clinics and an increase in the number of students who said poor mental health was inhibiting their academic performance.
