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The top tech companies are poised to spend a lot of time in court in the coming months.
As Bloomberg reports, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers this week ruled that Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snap must face lawsuits filed by school districts that accuse them of creating apps that encourage excessive use, leading to mental health problems.
School districts across 19 states claim that the companies do not adequately implement features like age verification, parental controls, and session timeouts. Design choices that allow for endless scrolling, coupled with targeted algorithms, mean kids have trouble putting down their phones, creating a doom loop that can interrupt sleep at best and create serious mental health issues at worst. The schools say they've had to dedicate resources to handle this, from confiscating phones to dealing with online behavior that spills into classrooms, including dangerous social media "challenges."
The tech companies wanted the case to be thrown out, but Judge Rogers will allow it to proceed. She did, however, find that some claims are protected by a law that says tech companies are not liable for objectionable or infringing content on their platforms, provided they make a good faith effort to remove or address it.
Overall, the companies are facing hundreds of lawsuits on this issue, Bloomberg notes.
Last week, Rogers issued a similar ruling for two teen addiction lawsuits against Meta.
Facing pressure from lawsuits and lawmakers, social media companies have moved to implement controls for younger users. Last month, for example, Instagram introduced Teen Accounts, which restrict access to the accounts of younger users and give parents more control over their kids’ app settings.