A Bay Area school district is now suing three of the world’s most popular social networks claiming they are hazardous to the health of their young students.
"No one gets off the hook for the health and well-being of our young people,” said Superintendent of Schools Nancy Magee.
She said the lawsuit, filed by Cotchett, Pitre, and McCarthy of Burlingame says the addiction comes from algorithms that can be damaging to students, and has led to suicidal behavior, and depression. "And when we try to work with social media companies to remove content that could be directly harming a child, it's very difficult,” said Magee."You can lower the temperature of the algorithm if you want, but if you do that, if you have less interesting content, you're gonna have less people going to that website, you'll have less advertisements, less money,” said Ahmed Banafa, tech analyst at San Jose State University.
NBC Bay Area reached out to TikTok, Google and Snapchat and all three declined to comment directly on the lawsuit, but say they have built in features to limit screen time, increase parental abilities to better control what their kids see, and are working with mental health officials to try to improve their products.
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