School District Notches a Win in Tech Addiction Case Against Top Platforms
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School District Notches a Win in Tech Addiction Case Against Top Platforms

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Top tech companies are poised to spend a lot of time in court in the coming months.

Like Bloomberg reportsUS District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled this week that Meta, Google, TikTok and Snap must face lawsuits filed by school districts accusing them of creating apps that encourage excessive use, leading to mental health problems.

School districts in 19 states claim that the companies do not implement features such as age verification, parental controls and session time limits. Design choices that allow for infinite scrolling, along with targeted algorithms, mean that kids have trouble putting their phones down, creating a doom loop that can disrupt sleep at best and create serious mental health issues at worst. Schools say they have had to dedicate resources to dealing with this, from confiscating phones to dealing with online behavior spilling into classrooms, including dangerous social media “challenges”.

The tech companies wanted the case thrown out, but Judge Rogers will let it continue. However, she found that some claims are protected by a law which states that technology companies are not responsible for offensive or offensive content on their platforms, provided they make a good faith effort to remove or address it.

Altogether, the companies are facing hundreds of lawsuits in this matter, notes Bloomberg.

Last week, Rogers issued a similar sentence for two lawsuits against teenagers against Meta.

Under pressure from lawsuits and lawmakers, social media companies have moved to implement controls for younger users. Last month, for example, Instagram introduced Teen Accountswhich limits access to younger users’ accounts and gives parents more control over their children’s app settings.