The world’s biggest social media platforms agreed to pay about $27 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a rural Kentucky school district that alleged their products are addictive and helped create a teen mental health crisis that drained school resources.
Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Instagram and Facebook, is paying the school district $9 million, more than any of the other companies, according to documents released under the state’s open records laws. Snap Inc. and TikTok each agreed to pay $8 million, the records show. Google’s YouTube negotiated a payout of slightly more than $2 million, and was the only company that also agreed to provide the district with training programs to help teachers better use its video product in classrooms.
The one-time payments add up to 8% more than Breathitt County School District’s $25 million annual budget.
The settlements, which were announced earlier this month but without financial details, allowed the companies to avert the first trial in the nation over a school district’s complaint, which was scheduled for June 12 in federal court in Oakland, California. Their reprieve, however, will be short-lived: more than 1,300 other school districts have filed similar lawsuits and are awaiting trial. The next is scheduled for February 2027.
The agreements with Breathitt County schools could indicate the companies are open to a mass settlement with the remaining school districts. The collection of lawsuits could ultimately cost the companies as much as $400 billion in liability, according to an estimate from Bloomberg Intelligence.
In written statements, the companies said they had resolved the case amicably and would continue to invest in stronger safeguards for their users.
The companies’ settlement terms, disclosed for the first time under Kentucky’s open records laws, elucidate the potential cost of sprawling, multi-jurisdiction litigation that’s been years in the making. More than 6,000 lawsuits have been filed against the social media giants over the past four years by individuals, school districts and state attorneys general, accusing them of creating products as addictive as cigarettes and targeting them to minors, just like Big Tobacco.
Social media platforms’ features, including limitless scrolling and autoplay video, have warped a generation of children, causing addiction, depression, anxiety, eating disorders and suicide, the lawsuits claim.
In the first personal-injury case to go to trial, a jury in Los Angeles state court in March found Meta and YouTube liable for harming a 20-year-old woman who claimed her addiction caused severe emotional distress. Jurors awarded her $6 million in damages — a minor sum for two trillion-dollar businesses — but a symbolic victory for thousands of other young people who are waiting for their day in court against the companies. (Snap and TikTok, which were also named in that case, settled confidentially ahead of trial.)
In a separate trial that same month, a jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages for failing to protect children from online harms.
The Breathitt County case was billed as a bellwether trial, or test case, for social media addiction claims by school districts. It came as a surprise to many plaintiffs attorneys involved in the litigation that all the companies agreed to settle the case ahead of trial, in part because Breathitt County was selected to go first by the defendants.
The companies argued that Breathitt County — a tiny district nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains — is representative of other districts in rural areas with less than 2,000 students, which make up nearly half of the school suits filed nationwide.
While personal injury suits brought by individual users or their parents seek compensation for personal losses, the school districts want reimbursement for institutional costs – including burgeoning mental health and counseling services for students. The districts argue the companies knew about the mental health risks for youths, but failed to design features to reduce the addictive nature of their products.
Breathitt County School District had asked for more than $60 million to finance mental health programs tied to excessive student social media use, and to develop lesson plans around the dangers of the digital world. In a deposition, the district’s superintendent, Phillip Watts, estimated that he spent about 20% of his working time handling social media-related concerns.
Carolyn McDaniel, the principal of Breathitt County High School from 2016 to 2019, estimated that social media swallowed even more of her time. “It was a huge waste of resources,” she said in an interview. “I had two assistant principals and they spent at least 50% of their time on social media stuff.”
“The kids would sneak their phones into class, video fights during the school day, vandalize property and bully one another online,” McDaniel added. “I remember our counselors were really struggling, even back then.” McDaniel now works at a high school in Tennessee and said the social media problems have only intensified.
The next federal bellwether trial – this one selected by the plaintiffs – centers on a school district in Tucson, Arizona.
Meanwhile, Kentucky is in a group of about three dozen states that are suing Meta over social media harms, with a trial set for August in Oakland. Kentucky’s attorney general told the judge overseeing the case that the state is seeking $40 billion in civil penalties.
This report is auto-generated from Bloomberg news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.