Seattle Public Schools' lawsuits over social media harm face tough legal road FOX13
behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, alleging they have created a public nuisance by targeting their products to children. The Kent School District south of Seattle followed suit on Monday.
Federal law — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 — helps protect online companies from liability arising from what third-party users post on their platforms. But the lawsuits argue the provision, which predates all the social media platforms, does not protect the tech giants’ behavior in this case, where their own algorithms promote harmful content.
But Szabo pointed out that Seattle's graduation rates have been on the rise since 2019, during a time when many kids relied on social media to keep in touch with their friends throughout the pandemic. If social media were truly so harmful to the district's educational efforts, the graduation rate wouldn't be rising, he suggested.
"We automatically set teens’ accounts to private when they join Instagram, and we send notifications encouraging them to take regular breaks," Anitigone Davis, Meta's global head of safety, said in an emailed statement. "We don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, and of the content we remove or take action on, we identify over 99% of it before it’s reported to us.
Both cases were filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle, but they are based on state public nuisance law — a broad, vaguely defined legal concept whose origins date back at least to 13th century England. In Washington, public nuisance is defined, in part, as "every act unlawfully done and every omission to perform a duty" which "shall annoy, injure or endanger the safety, health, comfort, or repose of any considerable number of persons.
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