Reportedly, the complaint filed against the social media companies alleges that the platforms purposefully design their products to “hook” young people, which leads to a mental health crisis.
According to Seattle-based outlet King5, more than 16 million daily TikTok users are under age 14.
Dr. Lucia Magis-Weinberg, a psychology professor at University of Washington, told the outlet that social media “can actually put a number on whether you’re popular or not, how many likes you have versus how many likes I don’t have.”
Felicia Craick, an attorney for Keller Rohrback, the law firm representing the school district, said that “as of last year, almost 50 percent of teenagers in the state spent between one and three hours a day on social media and 30 percent averaged more than three hours a day.”
Reportedly, the lawsuit claims that the school district and its 49,000 students have been “directly impacted.” The impact Craick said is suicides, attempted suicides, and mental-health ER visits.
As alleged in the complaint, this crisis was already growing before the pandemic and research has identified social media as playing a major role in causing mental health problems in youth.
Last year, a study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than 40 percent of teens felt “sad or hopeless” during the pandemic.