• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, October 25, 2024

Siding against social media platforms, a federal judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit by school districts and local governments across the country that claim Meta, Google, Snapchat and TikTok harmed students and disrupted schools.

The suit, like others brought by attorneys general and teens themselves, claims that the social platforms design their services to be addictive, and then serve minors with potentially harmful material -- such as “challenges” that allegedly encourage people to attempt dangerous activity, or filters that allegedly promoted unrealistic beauty standards.

The social platforms urged U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Rogers Gonzalez in the Northern District of California to dismiss the school districts' suit for several reasons, including that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and the First Amendment protect web services from suits over content.

Section 230 specifically protects web services from liability over users' posts, and the First Amendment separately protects interactive services' decisions about how to organize and display content.

U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding over the litigation, said some of the claims were foreclosed by Section 230, but others could move forward.

For instance, Rogers said Section 230 protected the platforms from allegations that algorithmic recommendations of third-party content promoted addiction, but said that law didn't preclude claims that the platforms failed to label appearance-altering filters. (She previously issued similar rulings in lawsuits brought by attorneys general and teens.)

The platforms also argued that the claims should be dismissed on the grounds that the allegations, even if they were proven true, wouldn't show how the companies caused any injury to the schools or local entities that sued.

Rogers said the allegations in the complaint, if true, could show that the platforms caused schools or local governments to expend resources to deal with minors' “compulsive use” of social media.