Federal Judge Allows Public Nuisance Claims Against Social Media Sites to Go Forward

Social media took another hit Nov. 15 after a federal judge allowed most of the public nuisance claims brought by school districts in the addiction cases to move forward.
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California found on Nov. 15 that school districts in 15 of the 19 states at issue could pursue public nuisance claims that social media sites, such as Instagram and TikTok, created a mental health crisis among the nation’s youth. The ruling is the fourth dismissal order from Gonzalez Rogers in the social media addiction multidistrict litigation and is contrary to a June 7 public nuisance decision by a Los Angeles judge in parallel litigation in California state courts.
“Here, defendants make their platforms available to the entire public,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote, concluding that the social media platforms failed to argue that their conduct doesn’t interfere with the public’s health. “While the students’ injuries are individualized byproducts of that interference, and while the school districts’ resource diversion and expenditure are individualized corollary impacts of those individual students’ harms,” she continued, “those harms and costs all flow from defendants’ alleged interference with the public health.”
However, she granted dismissal of public nuisance claims as to four states: Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island and South Carolina.
“Addictive social media platforms have significantly disrupted the learning environment for our children, forcing schools, teachers, and administrators to address the fallout on youth mental health,” Lexi Hazam of San Francisco’s Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein and Previn Warren of Motley Rice in Washington, D.C., who are co-lead plaintiffs’ counsel in the litigation, said in a statement. “We will press ahead with our claims on behalf of school districts across the country and will not relent until Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google are held accountable for knowingly designing their platforms to exploit young users for profit.”