(CN) — Meta must face at least some of the claims by school districts that the company is liable for children’s purported addiction to its Facebook and Instagram social media platforms, a federal judge said Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, following her previous rulings in the consolidated lawsuits accusing social media companies of deliberately making their platforms addictive to minors, denied Meta’s bid to throw out the negligence claims by school districts but said Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act limits the extent to which the company can be held liable.
“Defendants principally contend the school district and local government entities’ alleged injuries are too remote or attenuated for the law to redress,” she wrote. “In most ways, the court disagrees. Negligence, as a common-law cause of action, provides a flexible mechanism to redress evolving means for causing harm. School district plaintiffs’ allegations sufficiently fall within the ambit — by and large — of the relevant states’ negligence laws.”
However, Gonzalez Rogers added, as often is the case with claims against social media companies, Section 230 and the First Amendment impose a significant limitation on plaintiffs’ theories of recovery. In addition, some of the claims involve the “non-foreseeable intervening conduct of third parties” that breaks the chain of legally attributable causation between the plaintiffs and Meta.
The schools accuse Meta of deliberately designing its Facebook and Instagram platforms to foster compulsive use and addiction in minors, whose mental and physical health deteriorates as a result. They claim that, since they are on the “front lines” of redressing the damage caused by Meta’s design choices, they expend substantial financial resources to mitigate the mental health and behavioral issues students suffer as a result of social media addiction.
“This core theory of injury focuses on the impact of compulsive use itself, irrespective of third-party content, defendants’ protected publishing activity and defendants’ protected first-party speech,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote in allowing the school districts to proceed on this theory.
On the other hand, the schools can’t seek damages from Meta for content users post on Facebook and Instagram.
“As to any alleged injuries to the school districts stemming from dangerous challenges, threats, and crimes disseminated or perpetrated on defendants’ platforms caused by deteriorated youth mental health, those allegations fail proximate causation for a lack of particularized allegations,” she wrote.
The judge said she will address Meta’s motion to dismiss the school districts’ public nuisance claims in a forthcoming decision.
Representatives of Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The ruling is part of the multidistrict litigation that consolidates hundreds of personal injury lawsuits on behalf of children and adolescents, by school districts and local governments, and by state attorneys general before the judge in Oakland. The plaintiffs claim that Facebook and Instagram, as well as Google’s YouTube, ByteDance’s TikTok, and Snapchat are designed to foster compulsive use by minors.
Gonzalez Rogers last week mostly denied Meta’s request to dismiss the claims by 34 states that it designed social media apps like Facebook and Instagram to make them addictive for minors, finding that many of consumer protection claims brought by the state attorney generals are “cognizable.”
The judge allowed the states to proceed on their claims under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which prohibits collecting data from social media users younger than 13 without notifying and obtaining permission from their parents. The company sought to have these claims thrown out insofar as, it argued, neither Facebook or Instagram is directed at children.
But whereas Meta maintained that the content directed at children that third parties post on these platforms shouldn’t make the platforms themselves directed at children, Gonzalez Rogers disagreed and said this third-party content a platform hosts can be considered in determining whether the platform, or a portion thereof, is directed to children under the act.
“Meta’s design, development and deployment of certain product features plausibly constitutes unfair or unconscionable practices under all at-issue federal and state standards,” Gonzalez Rogers said last week, but added that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — which shields online businesses, including social media platforms, from liability for content posted by users — limits some elements of the social media giant’s claims.
As far as the states’ consumer protection claims were concerned, some Facebook and Instagram features that the states claim get children hooked are protected under Section 230 from liability for content posted by users, Gonzalez Rogers wrote.
In their joint lawsuit filed last year, 33 states including California claim that Meta built a business model focused on maximizing young users’ time on its platforms and employed psychologically manipulative platform features. They accused the social media giant of publishing reports purporting to show misleadingly low rates of user harms and said it refused to address existing harms to users to conceal and downplay its platforms’ adverse effects.
The social media giants are also fighting a similar consolidated case in Los Angeles County Superior Court, where last week they asked to trim more than a thousand lawsuits claiming the apps have fomented an epidemic of teen addiction and depression.