[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We're now going to talk about something that a lot of your parents might wish would happen all over the country. One school district is suing a number of social media companies for their effects on children's mental health. Why are they doing this? Well, for example, and last year's State of the Union Address, President Biden took some time to discuss the state of children's mental health and while he mentioned a few culprits, the pandemic, obviously, bullying violence, he also pointed to social media. Listen.

President Biden: Let's take on mental health, especially among our children whose lives and education have been turned upside down. Children were also struggling before the pandemic bullying, violence, trauma, and the harms of social media. We must hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they're conducting on our children for profit.

[applause]

It's time to strengthen privacy protections, ban targeted advertising to children, demand tech companies stop collecting personal data on our children.

Brian Lehrer: All right, so there's the President in the State of the Union Address saying we must hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment he called it that they're conducting on our children for profit. Well, now one school district, Seattle public schools, is taking on the President's quest to hold them accountable for the mental health crisis among America's youth, and take it very seriously to court.

The district cited a part of that clip we played in their lawsuit against the major companies behind our most popular social media platforms. With us now to discuss Seattle public schools' case against social media is business and tech journalist and co-founder of GeekWire, Todd Bishop. Todd, thanks for doing this with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Todd Bishop: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: You want to just list the companies first that are being sued by Seattle public schools?

Todd Bishop: Yes, it's a who's who social media Titans, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, and Instagram, and Meta and all of their parent companies. This is really a smorgasbord of big tech companies that are targeted by the suit.

Brian Lehrer: What is the lawsuit claim and what does the lawsuit seek?

Todd Bishop: The lawsuit claims that these companies are a public nuisance under Washington State Law. That's interesting, in part, because it has parallels to the legal strategy that was used by Seattle public schools and other public institutions against JUUL, the e-cigarette maker in a successful litigation. It seeks to compensate Seattle public schools for the resources that it's diverted and devoted to this entire quest to improve and address mental health issues as the suit calls it the youth mental health crisis, but more than that, it's not just retroactive, it's looking forward and saying that Seattle public schools to truly address this would need considerably more money, the maximum penalties under law as the suit puts it, to institute new programs to further address the mental health crisis that the district claims these companies have created.

Brian Lehrer: It's you TikTok, you Snapchat, you Instagram are causing us to have to spend more money on mental health counselors in our public school district and we're going to prove your contribution to that in court.

Todd Bishop: That's right. Much of this 92 Page lawsuit is focused on proving the harms and uses, for example, the whistleblower testimony by Francis Haugen, that illustrated that Instagram and Facebook were aware of the harmful effects and press the head anyway because it was in their business interests. That really is the main focus of the initial complaint is laying the factual groundwork. It's pretty rigorous in its citations, and its research, to prove or to show, attempt to prove that these companies have had that causal impact on mental health.

Brian Lehrer: Well, let's get a little anecdotal evidence on the table here. Listeners, young people, yourselves, check your screen time and tell us how much time you spend on different platforms. What do you typically do online and do you actually enjoy using social media? Are there other things you wish you were doing instead? That would be an indication of addiction if there are other things you wish you were doing instead, but you keep going back and back and back.

Parents as well, parents, teachers, mental health counselors, and public school districts yourselves, maybe you're listening on a prep period or something right now. Do you think what evidence would you cite that social media companies are contributing to the need for mental health services for children and teens today? 212-433WNYC, 212-433-9692. Mark Zuckerberg you want to call in and push back or anyone else at that level? 212-433-9692. Xi Jinping, you want to call in and support TikTok 212-433-9692.

Seriously, let's get some anecdotal evidence on the table. I'm sure there are heads nodding out there, right now saying, "Yes, these platforms are contributing to a mental health crisis and they should at least be held financially liable for the extra services that school districts have to pay for, and maybe there should be other limitations too." 212-433WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Can you go a little bit into some of the evidence?

You said they try to very, to go into a lot of detail laying out these connections. It's one thing to say something out there exists that's potentially harmful to somebody's mental health, it's another thing to prove in court, that it caused it. Give us an example, if you can.

Todd Bishop: One example that the lawsuits cited was the use of bots by The Wall Street Journal and others who were able to go in and create phantom accounts or bot accounts that signed up as 13-year-olds, or in some cases, other older teenagers, and immediately saw based on their preferences, these sites, and apps pushing content that took these young users or these ostensibly young users who were actually bots, into places that were dangerous and showed them things like extreme dieting, just based on one or two seconds that they would linger on a video and show that there is real motivation on the part of these sites to show content that's harmful, as a way of increasing engagement.

Just like right up to that line of it being inappropriate and you can see in the research that really boosts the level of engagement that a lot of the teens would have with this type of content.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a sense yet of the defense that any of the social media companies will use?

Todd Bishop: Yes. I've heard from a few a couple back, Snap and also Google, and of course, Alphabet, the Google parent company is the parent of YouTube. The defense that they seem to be giving so far is they're doing their best. They're attempting to institute programs and put in safeguards that would prevent youth from being harmed by social media. The real crux of the issue and one of the places where the rubber meets the road is the fact that the ability for 13-year-olds and actually kids that are younger than 13 to sign up is essentially a pledge.

They don't have to verify their identity or have their parents verify their age, they're able to go in and just say, "Oh, yes" Like a 10-year-old could go and say, "Oh, yes, I'm actually 15." There's no real verification of that. That is one of the issues that the school district lawsuit really dives into and points out where the site in their view, the school districts view are not doing enough to prevent, especially young kids from getting onto these platforms and being harmed.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Here's Jessica in Brooklyn, who says she's a therapist. Jessica, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in today.

Jessica: Hi, thank you. Yes, I'm a therapist, and I see a lot of kids and their parents coming in talking about, I saw on TikTok, there's mental health TikTok and everything. I see these behaviors in my child. There's something wrong with them or a kid really feeling like there's something terribly wrong with them and coming up with self-diagnoses, and just wanting to talk people down from the ledge, from time to time that some of these things are normal and TikTok providing this platform for therapists, for mental health professionals and non-professionals to just say like, "Yes, whatever it is that you're experiencing is a huge problem and you need to get it fixed right away."

Brian Lehrer: Am I understanding you correctly that you're saying that we're defining mental illness these days or mental health issues too broadly in teenagers and some feelings that they're coming with to therapy should just be seen as normal rather than indications of mental health problems?

Jessica: Yes. Not just teenagers, but also young kids. I see a lot of parents coming in saying, "My six-year-old is having a temper tantrum," and that is totally normal. That's not an indication that they have let's say autism or something.

Brian Lehrer: Right or oppositional disorder, which I think is a thing but where does social media come in for you, if at all?

Jessica: In that there's that whole subsection of mental health TikTok, of users talking about their own realization that they are autistic, getting diagnosed later in life, and then spreading that idea around to other people. If you like to organize things by color, you are probably autistic, and that is not accurate, that's not sufficient.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. TikTok is reinforcing this idea that people may have mental health issues that they don't actually have or that aren't actually serious.

Jessica: The main issue being that people then come in looking for medication for these diagnoses. When it isn't provided to them or it is provided, it creates this sense of like, "I'm not able to handle this on my own. I don't know how to figure things out and there's something terribly wrong with me," especially for the kids.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think from your experience in your practice that this is different today because TikTok or maybe also other platforms exist than in the past? Because kids would always talk among themselves, rumors would get started, they'd judge each other. Sometimes they're really mean, "Oh, you sort by colors. You must be autistic," to use your example, whatever it is. Has it changed the playing field fundamentally?

Jessica: I think it has, in that, I hear kids diagnosing each other, asking each other like, "Have you been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder yet?" Looking at each other and being like, "Well, obviously you have autism," or "Obviously you have ADHD because you can't sit still for more than 20 minutes." I do think that the internet has reinforced that and all the social media stuff has definitely reinforced it as being like, "Oh, I saw this thing and I think you might have it as well," or "I was diagnosed with it, so clearly you have it too," but the point you just made, I think is absolutely true.

Brian Lehrer: Jessica, thank you so much.

Jessica: Kids definitely talk amongst themselves.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. [crosstalk] Thank you for your call. Sorry. Did you want to finish your thought there? Go ahead.

Jessica: No, I just said thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, thank you. Let's go next to Jason in Nassau County. Jason, you're on WNYC, a school teacher I see. Hi, Jason.

Jason: Hi. Good to meet you and appreciate you having me on. I just wanted to point to Jonathan Haidt's research and his book, The Coddling of the American Mind. What he suggests is detrimental to teenagers with the use of the phone and social media, but then also to anecdotal evidence that I see around the schools specifically during lunch periods where students will be at a table of eight or nine students and they'll all have their cell phones out, with one hand watching what's going on on the cell phone, and then the other hand, using a fork or whatever and eating at the same time.

I would make a comparison to much like the cigarettes that teenagers used to smoke or adults used to smoke after a meal. That same type of comparison or that same chemical release in the brain that the cell phone or social media releases while you're using the phone and eating.

Brian Lehrer: You're a teacher, not a lawyer, but how much do you think this should legally be on the social media companies as the Seattle public schools lawsuit that we're talking about would put it? Some schools don't allow kids to bring cell phones in the building or check them at the door and get them on your way out at three o'clock. Some would say parents have to monitor this, don't let your kids get addicted to their phones or to particular social media sites. What would you say as a teacher to that argument?

Jason: I would say that the one thing that strikes me as maybe a legal responsibility on behalf of the social media companies is the idea that like you said, any student can create a profile for themselves or any minor can create a profile themselves without the parent's consent or without even scanning a driver's license or some form of ID that proves their age. I think that opens the door for anybody to use the platform.

Brian Lehrer: Jason, thank you for your call. I appreciate it. As we have a few more minutes with Todd Bishop, co-founder of GeekWire talking about the Seattle Public School's lawsuit against major social media platforms for their role in contributing to the childhood and teen mental health crisis that we have in this country, and literally asking for damages so they can hire more counselors and things like that. Todd, any reaction? Anything you were thinking to those first couple of callers?

Todd Bishop: Absolutely. I think the last point on the comparison to cigarettes is very apt not only from a societal perspective but also from a legal perspective as you alluded to Brian. I am also not a lawyer but in looking at this lawsuit, it's interesting to compare it to the litigation against JUUL, the e-cigarette company. This was clearly a result of the law firm for Seattle public schools being emboldened by the success of that JUUL litigation. They took part in it, although they have not yet decided Seattle public schools whether they will take part in the settlement but there are still some major differences.

If you look at e-cigarette advertising, it's advertising, it's there, you can see it, and you're talking about complex algorithms behind the scenes with these social media companies. I think that's going to be a more difficult case for the Seattle public schools to make. Also as, your callers and you were alluding to, you got some complex inputs here. It's not just a simple matter of, kid, smoking an e-cigarette or vaping, there's parental responsibility, there's societal issues, there's a lot going into this complex stew, and it's not going to be as easy to prove the impact of these social media sites as it might have been with JUUL.

Brian Lehrer: Andrew in Morris County. You're on WNYC. Hi Andrew.

Andrew: Hi Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Hey there. You're on the air. We got you.

Andrew: Hi. I just wanted to call in from the perspective of someone slightly younger than some of the people who've called in before. I'm 24, I'm not a teenager. I grew up on social media, and I have learned a lot about myself from being on social media that I wasn't learning in real life. I grew up my entire life thinking there's something seriously wrong with me and not knowing what was going on, not being able to relate to my peers, not being a very functional human being because I didn't know what was going on with my mental health.

When I was in college, when I started finding people talking about mental health on social media, things started clicking into place. I started understanding, "Oh, wait a minute. I've experienced that." I just wanted to call in and say I personally don't like TikTok at all. I've deleted it from my phone. I don't use it anymore because it really stresses me out. That being said, there is some benefit to people talking about their experiences on social media because while there is a lot of very toxic pushing of, oh, mental health issues are a "cool thing to have" that people think on social media, which isn't true, being mentally ill isn't fun.

It is important that people hear about more diverse experiences than they do in real life because there is such a stigma of mental illness and mental health issues.

Brian Lehrer: It's such an important point, and it's one of the upsides of social media in general and it's allowed a lot of isolated people in many places. Maybe you're a LGBTQ in a small town somewhere nobody's supporting your identity, but then you find there's a world out there you can connect to online all kinds of things like that go in the other direction. Do you think based on your experience on TikTok or any platform that this lawsuit is misguided and it tells a false story of what young Americans' experiences are on social media or requests a remedy that would be as harmful as it is helpful to the next generation?

Andrew: Honestly, no. I think this lawsuit is a good idea. I'm not a lawyer I don't know anything about legal issues when suing major social media companies it seems like and not something that we can just take lightly. I do think that these companies need to be held accountable. For every good post that there is talking about, "Hey, if you're genuinely experiencing distress by symptoms like this, or if you're genuinely experiencing like actual real mental health problems that people are encouraging them to speak out and to do their own research before just diving in and saying, 'Oh, I have a personality disorder. Oh, I have autism. Oh, I have dissociative disorder.' Do your own research I think that's important."

I do think we do need to hold these social media companies accountable because for every good post that's out there's 10, 50, 100 that are harmful and not just about mental health everything about body image, about politics, about identity. There's a moral gray area because for every good thing that's out there, there's bad stuff that's out there too and it's hard to navigate what's good and what's bad.

With the way that these companies are run with the way that they run their algorithms to push people to view more content, that's where it gets harmful because as someone was saying earlier if you scroll past the diet ad and you sneeze and you have it on your phone screen for too long, all of a sudden every day you're going to be bombarded with--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that's right and its--

Andrew: Here's how to lean 20 pounds here, get the perfect body.

Brian Lehrer: Exactly. It's that commercial imperative that I think is at the heart of the accusations in the suit. They're doing this for profit in ways that will result in harm to kids, mental health harm to kids, and they don't care. Andrew, thank you for such a thoughtful call. We really appreciate it. Todd, as we run out of time, if you want to react to that at all. Then just tell us what the timeline seems to be for this lawsuit. I'm surprised that it's just Seattle that a thousand other school districts haven't piled on and made this a class-action suit.

Todd Bishop: I think that's still a possibility. We did see overnight, another local school district here in the Seattle region, Kent, Washington filed essentially a cookie-cutter suit. I think it is possible that other school districts in the future will join, but those legal hurdles will likely make it less of a groundswell than the e-cigarette litigation was. To me, the most interesting line in the lawsuit is toward the bottom, where they not only ask for damages, but they ask for the court to enjoin the defendants from engaging in these actions.

There is the potential here, not just for remediation and remuneration, but also for some reform of what these companies are doing and in terms of the psychological tools that they use to increase engagement and allegedly to the detriment of these students' mental health. I think there's a lot at stake here, and at the very least, it's bringing these issues even more into the national conversation.

Brian Lehrer: Todd Bishop, co-founder of GeekWire, thanks so much for joining us today. This was great. I really appreciate it.

Todd Bishop: Thank you, Brian.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.