Meta Sued by Its Home County Over Social Media Addiction
Meta Platforms Inc. was sued by the school board in the company's home county for allegedly addicting students to its social media platforms and contributing to a mental health crisis.
The San Mateo County Board of Education added the parent company of Facebook and Instagram to a complaint it filed March 13 against other social media giants, including Google, TikTok and Snap. Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, is about four miles from the county seat in Redwood City.
The complaint is similar to a first-of-its-kind suit filed in January by the Seattle public school district which alleges the companies designed their platforms to be addictive and to deliver harmful content to adolescents and teens. A handful of other school districts in locales from Florida to Arizona have also lodged suits, as have scores of individual youths and their parents.
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San Mateo's board of education says it's directing “unprecedented resources” to children damaged by excessive screen time, diverting money from traditional teaching goals to address psychological problems that have “no historic analog,” including rising suicide rates, according to the complaint.
Antigone Davis, Meta's Global Head of Safety, said the company wants teens to be safe online and offers more than 30 safety tools for kids and families, including supervision and age verification technology.
“We automatically set teens' accounts to private when they join Instagram, and we send notifications encouraging them to take regular breaks,” Davis said in a statement. “We don't allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, and of the content we remove or take action on, we identify over 99% of
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