The school board in Meta Platforms Inc.’s home county filed a lawsuit against the business for allegedly encouraging student addiction to its social media networks and causing a crisis of mental health.
Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook has been named in a lawsuit by the San Mateo County Board of Education filed against Google, TikTok, and Snap-on March 13. The distance between Redwood City, the county seat, and Meta’s offices in Menlo Park, California, is roughly four miles.
The complaint is comparable to a first-of-its-kind lawsuit brought by the Seattle school district in January, which claims that the companies deliberately created their social media platforms to be alluring and to send harmful content to children and teenagers.
Also Read: What’s behind bitcoin’s latest surge?
Numerous other school systems, as well as numerous children and their parents, have filed lawsuits in places like Florida and Arizona. According to the complaint, San Mateo’s board of education claims it is allocating “unprecedented resources” to help children harmed by excessive time spent on screens and diverting funds from traditional educational objectives to deal with psychological issues that “have no historic analog,” such as increased suicide rates.
According to Antigone Davis, the global head of safety at Meta, the company wants teenagers to stay secure online and provides over 30 safety tools for children and families, including age verification technology and parental control.
In a statement, Davis said, “We automatically set teens’ accounts to private when they join Instagram, and we send notifications encouraging them to take regular breaks.
We don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders, and of the content we remove or take action on, we identify over 99% of it before it’s reported to us.”
The billionaire CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has previously supported the educational change, contributing $120 million to San Francisco Bay Area schools almost ten years ago.
Also Read: Why Google suspended China’s Pinduoduo app?
But in the 116-page lawsuit, Facebook and Instagram are referred to as a public nuisance, and Meta and the other businesses are charged with racketeering, gross negligence, conspiracy, and unfair competition.
At a Congressional hearing on Thursday, issues related to social media addiction were brought up as TikTok CEO Shou Chew fought back against efforts by US legislators and the Biden administration to compel the business’s Chinese parent firm, ByteDance, to forfeit its shares of the unit or shut it in the US.
The meeting was attended by the parents of a 16-year-old boy who committed suicide after using TikTok. The pair filed a lawsuit against ByteDance, claiming that TikTok sent their son over 1,000 videos about self-harm, suicide, and hopelessness.
I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.