School district sues Meta, Google, and TikTok over ‘mental health crisis’
theverge.com
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The special damage they claim to have suffered seems to primarily relate to expanding and diverting resources to deal with mental health issues of students.
The table of contents of the complaint is a good summary of their assertions, including:
Defendants’ apps have created a youth mental health crisis.
Defendants target children as a core market, hooking kids on their addictive social media platforms.
Children are uniquely susceptible to Defendants’ addictive apps.
Defendants design their apps to attract and addict youth.
Millions of kids use Defendants’ products compulsively.
Defendants' defective products encourage dangerous "challenges."
Defendants' defective social media apps facilitate and contribute to the sexual exploitation and sextortion of children, and the ongoing production and spread of child sex abuse material online.
Causality is really hard to establish, possibly impossible in this case. Nonetheless, there does appear to be a youth mental health crisis, and it arose around the time of the smart phone. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/honestly-its-probably-the-phon...
- Defendants target children as a core market, hooking kids on their addictive social media platforms.
It certainly appears that way to me; but it would help to get actual documentation of intent.
- Children are uniquely susceptible to Defendants’ addictive apps.
There is a lot of science that says that teens are vulnerable to addiction; the dual systems view, a pretty influential perspective, is that sensitivity to reward (particularly social rewards) increases dramatically in adolescence, but cognitive control lags; this leads to an increase in exploration vs exploitation, which is adaptive, but risky. I think they are on strong ground here.
- Defendants design their apps to attract and addict youth.
Like the last, documentation of intent would be the best thing for the case.
- Millions of kids use Defendants’ products compulsively.
This is probably true. Adults too. Defense is going to say that its up to parents and guardians to police the use of these apps. That argument didn't work with cigarettes and alcohol, so I'm guessing won't work here eitehr.
- Defendants' defective products encourage dangerous "challenges."
This is true
- Defendants' defective social media apps (a) facilitate and contribute to the sexual exploitation and sextortion of children, (b) and the ongoing production and spread of child sex abuse material online.
I've denoted one as (a) and one as (b). (b) is undoubtedly the case. (a) is more culture-war-y, but its hard to argue that a lot of the viral video content is not sexxed up*
* I'm no prude, but find it annoying that 90% of the reels that Facebook suggest to me are sexual in nature, and that the sexually arousing nature of the suggested videos grabs my eyeballs. I mean, it works. But, I don't want those kind of distractions when I'm scrolling to see what friends and family are up to. Oh look, my sister took her kids to the beach. Oh look, that couple is simulating sex on a picnic table! Oh look, Mom got her first ripe tomatoes!
They don’t stand a chance.
Part of the human experiment I guess. We’ll see where we end up. I suspect authoritarianism, rampant viruses, and a toxic environment while we entertain ourselves to death.
But cigarettes and alcohol is legally age restricted. Or did that happen later?
https://mayor.baltimorecity.gov/news/press-releases/2023-05-...
now they are blaming their horrible school results on social media. Hopefully the courts throw it out
When I was raising my daughters the smart phones didn't come until their peers hit middle school (their teens). They did the odd web-surfing (desktop) thing while in elementary school though.
Are smart phones really in the elementary schools now?
What's more, most of them will have TikTok and/or SnapChat installed.
The biggest example from my own childhood was WWE (WWF at the time). The simplicity of the scripts etc seemed to be explicitly targeted towards kids who would then, predictably, try to copy the wrestling moves on their friends.
It's a million times more harmful than seeing the human body sans garments.
Obviously there are specific types of porn that I'd be mildly concerned by my child being exposed to, but generally speaking it's the violence and inherently problematic power structures within that are the fundamental issue, not the nudity.
But there isn't really just 'mainstream' anymore. Weird face-slapping or gagging or bukkake stuff is a click away from the front page, frequently in 'suggested videos'.
It's a different animal for sure now. It had a subtle but very negative effect on my ability to start intimate relationships. I can't imagine what it would've been like if I was in highschool seeing OF girls on reddit. In the 2000s, there was a distance between the girls I knew and women I saw in professional porn. But now I know college-age women who have given OF a try. Definitely would have further warped my perceptions.
From what I can see, todays porn is no longer an ideal but more reflective of reality, to the point where people that one interacts with in daily life could have produced it (e.g. OnlyFans).
For example, for me when I was in high school/college Playboy ran a series called Girls of the ACC where they recruited contestants from our local state school. This was over 20 years ago, and to me isn’t so different from the effect of OnlyFans, letting “normal” people participate in pornography.
When it quickly became clear that the girls I wanted didn't feel that same way about me, it did not change the way I felt about them. Combined with the experiences I had of the 'control men with sex' ethos, my powerful emotions for women seemed like a huge liability. There were a few very painful experiences where a couple of my middle-school crushes toyed with me. Flirting with me then turning around and laughing with their friends about what a virgin I was. Looking back, there were girls who were interested in me, but I failed to recognize it[0],[1].
I sort of developed this idea that in my relationships, sex must be established at the beginning as something that won't be 'used against me', and I sought out relationships with sex at the forefront of my mind. If intercourse wasn't going to be established as freely engaged in more-or-less right away, I took that as my sign it was a no-go.
Meanwhile, I found early on that porn was quite enjoyable. Between that, my painful emotional experiences, and popular media almost always culminating relationships in sex, I got the message that sex was 'the good part' of a relationship.
I started evaluating women mostly in terms of how much I would enjoy the sex, not the overall time spent together. It seemed like the only logical defensive position to take. This is where I think OF would be mind-breaking. I'll come back to this shortly.
I largely sought out non-committal-style FWB type relationships. This turned out to be very impractical and I did not find many women who wanted to start a relationship based on sex. In particular, most of the women I was attracted to were turned off by that approach to a relationship. However, I did find a couple, and those relationships really revolved around their sexual aspects. The nuclear core was how much sexual pleasure we were capable of achieving (they were also porn consumers). I'm fortunate that we weren't really drug users, but the sex was kind of like a drug. Chasing higher highs. They were excellent at first, just what I wanted. But the focus on pleasure became unsustainable: I felt my penis wasn't big enough for her taste, she felt like she wasn't petite enough for my taste, etc.
At some point, if you're chasing "the most pleasure" moving into BDSM and/or involving other people (threesomes, DP, orgies, etc.) start to seem like logical next-moves. We got about ankle-deep in this before things got incredibly emotionally messy. But I did recognize that this stuff was kind-of distant from the normal experience. This wasn't "what everyone is doing", it's just what they wish they were doing. Pornstars and rockstars and pro athletes were the only people that get to enjoy these zeniths of sexual pleasure.
I have been fortunate enough to realize that a holistic view of sex is more like "You can make someone feel really good. Find someone who you like to do everyday things with, share hobbies with. Believe it or not, there are women that like the things you like, and long-term, it's more fun and rewarding to share a hobby[2] than see how hard you can make each other cum."
But if OF had been available, and I was 17-23 seeing 18-25 year old girls doing anal and FFM, MMF, gapes, etc. as it is possible to now without paying a cent, I think the effect on me would have been about the same, but multiplied exponentially. Instead of that kind of thing being the purview of rockstars and pornstars, knowing it would be a challenge to find a woman who wanted that kind of lifestyle, I'd be wondering why it's so hard to find one. I'd think that they look so normal, so like the girls that are my peers.
Or, god forbid, younger me falls for a girl he meets somewhere, then she rejects him, and then he finds out she has an OF. That's an absolute black hole of self-loathing.
[0] e.g. A girl from a class asked me if I liked The Mars Volta. In hindsight it was an obvious attempt at flirting. But I was cool. "What? No they're whiny posers. I only like serious punk like Anti-Flag and Rise Against and AFI". Someone please invent a time machine so I can give myself a black eye then explain it doesn't matter what I like THE CUTE GIRL IS INTERESTED IN YOU.
[1] I think the fact that I was watching porn warped how I thought women would express interest. Sex is something that happens after you figure out you get along. But, given that I was watching fairly hardcore porn, I think I figured a girl who might want sex would signal it in a clearly sexual way. 'Intimacy' is probably a better term than 'sex', but I've already written a small essay so I won't get into that.
[2] Or even build a life together, but again, outside of scope.
Unrestricted phones too it seems
> Smartphone ownership shifts markedly in [the children aged 8-11] group, which correlates with the children’s transition to secondary school … As reported by parents, more than half of 8-11-year-olds (55%) owned a mobile phone, a significant increase on children aged 3-4 and 5-7 (both at 20%).
[1]: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/media-literacy-re...
[2]: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/255852/...
Second, it can be expensive and therefore not an option for everyone but there are schools with solid phone/media policies. My kids go to a school where phones are forbidden until 9th grade.
They also lean less on the parents when other kids are around because playing with other kids is what they really want.
When you look at the stupid videos, a good chunk of them give a sense of social presence. That's what the kids are craving. Pseudo-social media is a fake substitute, like artificial fruit flavoring.
I wouldn't trust the general web to be age-appropriate for under-12s these days, including all advertising in any apps, but that doesn't mean I can't sympathise with parents desperate for some distraction.
My parents had it relatively easy with me: when I was five, I was using a Commodore 64, learning to read from its user manual and just starting to notice that the loading screens for some games counted oddly, going "…, 8, 9, A, B, …"
The worst that any of that meant for my parents was the incredibly minor point that that I was aware enough to notice the dual meaning of "Jet Set Willy".
With the right apps and restrictions, a smartphone is basically just a handheld console no different from a gameboy in functionality.
Unfortunately there is also too much pressure for constant analytics for me to feel at ease with the modern world, even in cases where I know from the inside that GDPR is being taken 100% seriously.
I'd be in favour of a change in the law such that analytics was banned, and/or software was required to function offline…
My 8 year old has never used a tablet. He thinks phones are just to call people. He just knows that people use them for dumb things just because they can't bare to be alone with their thoughts for 2min.
Yes it is a "battle" and it requires time and effort. It's not impossible. Uphill battle for sure, one that I will probably lose, but still worth fighting.
Because it's not like there is no history of government policy / decision makers managing to create or exacerbate social problems.
e.g.
Never thought I'd have so many friends and acquaintances who doubt the world is ball shaped, the moon landing, or suspected 9/11 was an inside job. Yet I do and some of them actually came to these beliefs because of school research papers and debate classes.
The entire value proposition of modern computation is about scale and cost. It's the same things, but with much higher quantity and intensity. Something that can be tolerably safe at 1 unit/day may be very dangerous at 1000 units/day. I would be surprised if pre-teen porn consumption has only risen by 1000x in the past 30 years.
Yet humans are the same biological systems.
At what point does it go from entertainment to obsession to something like heroin? There's a point where it does, and we could probably figure out a metric.
It's disingenuous to pretend 'oh there's nothing new here'
Video games had not arrived — when they did they cost a quarter to play. That kind of limited the time spent there, ha ha. Personal computers were expensive so even when they arrived, we of course did not have one.
Porn was finding a magazine in the trash can behind an office building.
The thing that saddens me the most about all of this stuff (the internet especially, perhaps) is that kids aren't out trying to fly a kite any more.
But since we are filing ridiculous suits they should sue fast food companies and junk food ones as well. It’s already well established that poor nutrition affects student outcomes significantly.
They should also sue state governments for blocking housing too since student homeless is a problem.
Do you mean legally? Because ethically, I think they make perfect sense. And I would think similar about going after fast food companies and possibly other industries.
If they care about this they can simply ban phones in their school districts.
This suit is analogous to banning fedex and ups because kids are addicted to mailing each other scandalous notes. Clearly will fail.
If there’s specific content posted by specific groups that are a concern the school should go after them.
If that is the reason though, I'd doubt that speech that deliberately attempts to subvert rational thought and manipulate the audience would fall under that protection.
I don’t think the courts have ever broadly recognized schools’ standing with respect to things that can harm students outside of the school’s walls. I would think that the appropriate regulatory tool here is having each school (or district) institute bans on device use during school hours, not suing random companies.
I don't think this is wrong per se, but it's hard to see a court accepting that broad environmental concerns of this sort fall under schools' purviews.
Put another way: if schools can sue social media companies for disrupting the educational environment, what stops them from suing oil companies for making the world uninhabitable for their students? The problem isn't factuality (the school is arguably correct in both cases!), but scope.
I’ll tell you that for the schools that my kids go to, parents would most likely throw a massive tantrum if they banned phones.
Beyond that…it wouldn’t work and would either be ignored and just another mis-applied or selectively punished thing or further turn every school into prison-lite.
In reality the entire school system is a sham intended to be public day care so that parents don’t have any reason they can’t go to work. So anything that would functionally work to improve education is orthogonal at best.
Banning phones in schools isn’t popular with students (and is unenforceable on the long tail), but it’s the only actual tool that schools have here. Filing lawsuits with social media companies makes for fun headlines, but it doesn’t grant them standing.
There’s literally no way to physically ban phones with any efficacy EVEN IF they had prison level of monitoring and standardization
Its not enough to sue them. They need to be drastically rearchitected.
Thanks but no thanks.
There ought to be better solutions.
My view is that it's a question of culture. In particular, the eradication of any sort of authority (parents, teachers) and the worshipping of "I want, therefore it's good and my right" are among the root causes for this epidemic.
Just something on top of my head, I'm sure that there are solutions to this. It's the political will and balls that are nowhere to be found...
Denmark have MitID, which is a sort of government OIDC/OAuth2 thing. There's no issue in having it expose only a single claim, such as age, or adult=true/false in age verification scope. You don't have to open the floodgates to government data, in fact Denmark has navigated that pretty well through the last three iterations of our government issues online ID scheme. There's even laws preventing cross referencing data from different database, in the case that you for some reason have access to it.
What about having IRL stores sell one-time use age verification tokens after showing ID? Just like tobacco or alcohol they can make it illegal to provide them to a minor. Whereas if you're worried about privacy you can still buy with cash.
The store sells a scratch card containing a single-use code, after you show them ID. When you sign up with whatever social network, you enter the code and the social network validates it with the code provider service. That's it.
At best the code provider can tell the social network which store the code was purchased in. Drive over to the next state to purchase codes if you're paranoid. Mandate by law that no records of code purchases or copies of ID are kept. We don't require it for alcohol or tobacco purchases so there's no justification here.
Sure, it adds more steps than just "click this checkbox if you're an adult" but kids/teens are a crafty bunch and, unlike drugs and sex, a) the penalty for violation of the rules is not immediately obvious (to the youth, OR even to society) and b) the act of violating the rules is not obvious in itself to people who aren't on that person's phone: there's no physical items left behind for parents to notice.
Effectively what we're talking about here is trying to solve the Sybil Problem, which has no widely-accepted solution.
There's no database of alcohol or tobacco buyers. The sales clerk just checks your id and forgets about it. It's a code good for use on exactly one account on one service, and expires in maybe a year. If you have multiple accounts on multiple services, buy separate codes for each one. They should be reasonably priced - no more than $5 each.
You don't need a perfect solution. Despite laws against underage drinking, smoking, and drug use it still happens.
They do[1]. Most social media sites in the US don't allow children under 13 to use their sites, as a matter of policy. There have been proposals to expand COPPA to other forms of tracking and to children under 16.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Prot...
Problem for TikTok is the very nature of it is whats bad for kids. Shortens attention span.
I agree with you on parenting, but I won't, for a second, let these companies off the hook for the damage they cause.
Give them an inch, they'll take your entire soul if they can and it will help their quarterly P&L. Don't forget it.
It's illegal. Tiktok, Facebook, ... nonsense on the other hand isn't, because these platforms aren't responsible for the content they broadcast, by regulation. So should these regulations change?
It's as if we're allowing cigarette companies to be all pervasive through general access and direct advertising to our kids, and then saying: "but the parents shouldn't let them smoke, man, they're not responsible parents".
I think that's unfair at this stage.
Yes, perhaps regulation needs to change.
I feel the comparison to cigarettes is apt: I know of children who had an "official" Facebook account for their parents and a "real" one for their school friends. And while I'm not sure I 100% agree with the lawsuit, I think it's worth asking: given how much money these companies invested in hooking teens up and how much they profited from it, should they also be held accountable for the negative effects of said hooking up?
Well, then people should show some ID before using the internet or something to prove they are adults? How do you enforce that? at the ISP level? at the device level? At the website level? Genuine question. Who's responsibility is that? In a society where nobody wants to be responsible for anything?
So there are regulated industries where age restriction is already being handled.
It seems silly to blame the parents when the world has shifted around them, outside of their control.
That said, encouraging your kids to interact in person seems reasonable to me.
I'm not saying it's a good or healthy space for teens to socialize, but I do contend it's an important one.
Hypothesis/opinion: a large portion of the world has no access to the internet or social media and those people are doing better in terms of mental health than those with access.
Also there's a significant amount of kids without access (because their parents don't let them) even in the Western world and they seem to be doing fine (if not better) as well.
I'm sure plenty of teens would do fine without social media, some would probably prefer it because some people prefer limited social contact, but we can't make a blanket statement that we can yank kids offline and it'll all be fine.
The criticism I'm hearing in this thread seems to be, "parents are doing something uncomplicatedly irresponsible, it's obvious kids should be off social media," but frankly the analysis I'm seeing behind that is pretty thin (I'm gathering this is more a gut feeling for people than a reasoned position? Which is valid and all, it just doesn't make for good discussion since it can't be transmitted to or evaluated by another person), and this is a complex issue without such simple solutions.
Facebook of your youth is a social network. TikTok is also a social network. Maybe try launching TikTok for once and let me know whether you’d want to grow up like that.
Help me understand the difference between this conversation and the general phenomenon of looking at what the kids are doing and finding it weird and scary. Because everything I did as a teen was supposed to destroy my generation, too.
That’s anti-socializing. That is nothing but huge skinner boxes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
Almost all of their friends have no restrictions at all on phone use, electronics, video streaming, etc. A few have been on TikTok and Instagram since they were in 5th grade. The amount of pressure I hear to let them have Snapchat is constant.
Regardless, we maintained the restrictions. Apple Family makes it fairly easy to manage. Xbox controls are a little more of a pain but they work too to moderate.
I’ve talked to my kids about the addictive and psychological elements of how certain games work or videos. They listened but didn’t understand.
Last week, they started talking to me about how a lot of their friends have a phone in front of their face all the time and they see what we’ve been trying to warn them about. It was a struggle to get there but seeing that they finally really understood was big.
The flip side though, the reason they understand is because they see people who have fallen victim to it. It’s like understanding why your parents warned you about drugs because you see what happened to your friend who fell into it.
We know the consequences. At this point, parents shouldn’t have to spend so much time worrying about this. It’s not easy but it should be.
Social media is toxic: it’s not real, it’s a waste of life when there’s tons of other awesome things you can do. And the legitimization of chasing Internet Points is truly sad.
They might also not know how to interact properly in the real world.
Very similar to child labor laws where there were lots of firms refusing to use it, but were getting put out of business by those who did. Solution: use the law to force everyone onto equal ground.
Otherwise many many avenues of improvement for our society are impossible to take for the two reasons you and GP mention.
I’m adult. I’m still unable to deal if I don’t implement heavy restrictions on every screen I use. I don’t even have Tiktok, FB, IG or Twitter, just HN and reddit. I know how addiction feels, and this feels like it. Social media is poison.
I do talk to them about things at different levels as they get older. They will have to manage it all themselves one day, but I’m going to keep them away from it as long as I can.
It’s like how cigarettes weren’t allowed to be advertised to children. Sure, parents were responsible for teaching kids not to smoke but companies need to also be held accountable for the well-being of their product and it’s users too. It’s not an either / or. There is enough responsibility for all parties to be accountable.
If 10% of your users are using your product wrong, the users are at fault. If 90% are using it wrong, it's your fault.
I mean, for fucks sake, attending schools themselves has been directly linked to increased suicides (https://fee.org/articles/new-study-shows-the-striking-correl... and https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/childrens-risk-of..., for example).
IIRC, the outcry was because Facebook was performing a psychological experiment without subjects' consent. That's considered unethical.
Also an unrelated note, do NOT browse this site without an ad-blocker. Just realized that The Verge has regressed in quality and is riddled with ads just like the Daily Mail.
Section 230. These lawsuits have zero merit until regulations change.
(And yet again, if people are contemplating this direction of authoritarian control, it's simply because they perceive a small crisis, and don't know how else to answer it besides brute force. (But all of civilization is a series of little emergencies; if you start thinking in policy in terms of emergency measures, you'll never have normality again)).
What if social media design is malicious intentionaly and kids are so messed up that x school can't function anymore (hypothetically).
If, for example, 100% of people under the age of 18 commit suicide within one month of being on Instagram, these arguments correctly would not prevent action against Instagram. We’d simply find a way to prevent kids from going on IG while weakening as little as possible the First Amendment’s protections of things that are good for our society.
The only point of debate here is where each individual draws the line.
From my observation, it seems people who are close to children a lot (parents, teachers, medical professionals) have been screaming their fucking brains out about this problem in ever-increasing intensity for years and years. People who are not close to children (20-something year old tech workers and HN browsers) think it’s all made up.
Human rights (i.e. freedom of speech) aren't utilitarian concepts for achieving some secondary end-goal, like a desired social outcome. They're an end-goal in themselves. That's the core value judgement of free societies: the recognition of human dignity, human autonomy, as an *intrinsic* moral good to be protected at great cost.