Can parents, school districts suing social media companies make platforms safer?

Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker told a Philadelphia crowd in 2017 the website's design was "exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology." He said he and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's creator, knew this.

Parker gave a warning.

"God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."

Seven years later, experts say America's children are experiencing an unprecedented mental health crisis fueled in part by social media. And although protecting children from the potential harm of social media has wide bipartisan support, no solutions have been put in place to meaningfully counteract the problem.

In recent years, groups have turned to the courts to try to get companies to change their practices. Across the country, dozens of states and hundreds of young people, parents and school districts are involved in a complex and overlapping web of legal actions against social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

It’s still early, and both sides have traded blows. As University of Tennessee College of Law professor Alex Long puts it, it’s been a mixed bag for both parties.

"They're still in the game," Long said of both the plaintiffs and the social media companies. "They've got every incentive to keep going."

Here's what lawyers and legal and medical experts have said about the mental health crisis and legal fight, and what they think it will take to ultimately make children safer online.

Parents, experts weigh in: Can kids safely navigate social media?

‘Their business isn’t more important than kids’

Up to 95% of teens aged 13-17 in the United States report using social media, according to an advisory from the U.S. surgeon general. Most report daily usage and around a third say they use it "almost constantly," with most logging 3.5 hours a day on social media. The risk for mental health problems, including anxiety and depression, skyrockets when children and adolescents use social media more than three hours a day, the advisory stated.

Measures like the Kids Online Safety Act and other bills aimed at protecting kids online are still working their way through the U.S. House and Senate. A Tennessee bill requiring minors to have parental consent to create social media accounts has passed the Tennessee Senate and will go to the House, which already passed an earlier version of the bill. Several states have passed similar, albeit more restrictive, laws, although they have been blocked in court.

Lawsuits argue that social media platforms have specific defects that are harming children — either through addiction and worsening mental health, or by making it easy for predators to find children. Some of those claims are bolstered by internal studies done by the social media companies themselves on how they affect users.

Many lawsuits brought by minors and their families ask for compensation for the harm they say they've experienced, from developing eating disorders to attempting suicide, while also asking the companies change their practices such as implementing more thorough age verification, instituting more parental controls and changing features they say make the platforms addictive.

Tennessee is involved in cases against Meta and TikTok in the Davidson County Chancery Court. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti took TikTok to court in March 2023 over the company’s alleged failure to produce documents his office requested for an investigation.

Skrmetti called the push against social media companies a "50-state effort,” with Tennessee and Colorado chairing a multistate investigation of the platforms.

"The biggest driver for me is getting the companies to change their behavior," he said. "Their business isn’t more important than kids."

On another legal front, more than 650 school districts have sued social media companies recently through two consolidated cases in California. One of the districts is Metro Nashville Public Schools.

MNPS spokesperson Sean Braisted said that teachers see the harm caused by the companies in classrooms everyday and that MNPS "bears the costs of dealing with the bullying and harassment, inattention to academics, behavioral problems, discipline issues, and threats linked to social media."

The lawsuit asks that the companies fund "prevention, education, and treatment for the effects of excessive and problematic use of social media in schools,” Braisted said.

Case draws comparisons to JUUL, opioid litigation, but ‘no perfect analogy’

Joseph VanZandt, an attorney at Montgomery, Alabama, law firm Beasley Allen that is playing a leading role in federal lawsuits over social media, sees similarities to another case he worked on against electronic cigarette maker JUUL.

"We are dealing with a youth addiction epidemic," VanZandt said. "We're dealing with the fallout of what happens when companies target young individuals and cause harm to them."

When accused of addicting children to their sites, the companies typically push back. The way Skrmetti sees it, though, "if it's not addiction, it's something that sure looks an awful lot like addiction."

The JUUL case and some other examples of this type of legal challenge, called mass-tort, like litigation against opioid manufacturers have resulted in millions or billions of dollars in settlements to the plaintiffs. Others, like litigation against firearm manufacturers for their role in American gun violence, have not been as successful. Long said one possible outcome of the case is a settlement into a fund that states can use to address harms like social media addiction.

Despite some similarities, Skrmetti said "there's no perfect analogy."

What the companies have to say

José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, which owns YouTube, denied the allegations against the company and said YouTube has "built services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls."

A TikTok spokesperson said that the video-sharing app has "industry-leading safeguards" for young people, including “an automatic 60-minute time limit” for users under 18 and parental controls for teen accounts.

Meta highlighted some of its practices for age verification, which include monitoring by artificial intelligence to flag users whose age appears inaccurate. Meta added it is advocating for federal legislation to require app stores to get parental approval whenever teens under 16 download apps.

“We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously in these cases and believe the evidence will demonstrate our long-standing commitment to supporting young people," the Meta spokesperson said.

Snap, which owns the picture-messaging app Snapchat, focused on its differences from other social media apps, including how it opens directly to a camera and lacks traditional public likes or comments. The company said it "will always have more work to do" but "feel(s) good about ... helping close friends feel connected."

Where do things stand now?

It's still pretty early on. There are two main cases — one in California state court and another in federal court, where hundreds of lawsuits from minors, parents, attorneys general and a handful of local governments have been combined for pretrial proceedings. Some other cases, like the Tennessee attorney general's, are in other state courts.

In the federal case, Long, the law professor, said it will likely take years before a resolution is reached either through trial, settlement or a judge dismissing the case. Exactly how long depends partly on how far up the ladder the case makes it — and it's possible the issue may eventually end up in the Supreme Court.

The biggest development so far in both of the two main cases is that the plaintiffs survived an early attempt from the social media companies to throw the cases out. The companies rested the bulk of their arguments on the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives providers general immunity from liability for content made by users of their site.

In both cases, the plaintiffs made it through, but not without taking a few hits.

"The plaintiffs won a little bit, and they lost a little bit," Long said of U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ October ruling on the companies’ motion to dismiss. "That first ruling gave both sides something to be unhappy about and something to be happy about."

A unique challenge

One question for lawyers is whether the social media platforms are "products" for the purposes of product liability law. It's a term courts have typically been hesitant to apply to intangible goods.

"Product liability was conceived with the idea that the product in question was going to be something like a Coke bottle that explodes or a (Ford) Pinto that explodes," Long said. "It wasn't initially designed with technology like this in mind."

One of the most frequently cited cases on the issue was over a book that identified edible and poisonous mushrooms. After one reader almost died because a poisonous mushroom was listed as safe, he sued. In the end, the publisher got off the hook, since the judge ruled that the information in the book was not legally a "product" — the physical book, its pages and cover, was.

"That decision is a very 20th century conception of what a product is,” Long said. “That's the precedent that somebody is … going to have to overcome."

So far, things have gone well for the plaintiffs in federal court on this front. Gonzalez Rogers, the federal judge, ruled at a preliminary stage that many aspects of the platforms are products for which the companies could be held liable. But the issue will likely still come up later in the case.

Rachel Wegner contributed to this story.

Reach justice reporter Evan Mealins at emealins@gannett.com or follow him on Twitter @EvanMealins.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Snapchat, Facebook face hundreds of lawsuits. What may happen next