BOONE CO., Ky. — Boone County Schools passed a resolution to join multiple other Kentucky school districts that are filing federal lawsuits against multiple social media platforms.
The Boone County Board of Education passed a resolution Friday that authorized the litigation, which claims social media has negatively affected children. In the resolution, the board of education said "social media is harmful to the mental, behavioral and emotional health of youth and is associated with increased rates of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, eating disorders and suicide."
The resolution also claims that public schools have been impacted by overexposure to social media.
Attorney Ronald Johnson with Hendy, Johnson, Vaughn, Emory law firm was authorized to file lawsuits under the resolution, and said it would be a complex process given first amendment considerations and a notorious section of federal law, often referred to as Section 230, that gives social media platforms wide immunity from lawsuits.
Still, he was confident litigation could prevail.
"The allegation is not that they merely provided an open forum, which is protected by Section 230, and that kids went to that forum and were somehow, by chance, exposed to these things," he said. "What we're alleging is that they actually created the algorithms that determine what these kids see, when they see it, and how much of it they see. That is not protected by Section 230."
The lawsuit also claims that social media companies have been intentionally designing their algorithms to "feed children harmful content, like videos promoting eating disorders, violence, self-harm and suicide."
Johnson added that school districts across Kentucky were bearing the brunt of the cost of addressing these mental health issues.
"The question really is, do we want that to be paid for by the taxpayers, or do we want it to be paid for by the companies that caused the problem?" Johnson said.
Boone County is just one of the many school districts and Kentucky counties to join the lawsuit. WLEX in Lexington previously reported that the Fayette County and Clark County boards of education filed lawsuits as well.
Multiple social media entities were named as defendants in the lawsuits, including:
- Meta Platforms Inc.
- Facebook Holdings, LLC.
- Facebook Operations, LLC.
- Meta Payments Inc.
- Facebook Technologies, LLC.
- Instagram, LLC.
- Siculus, Inc.
- Snap Inc.
- TikTok Inc.
- ByteDance, Inc.
- Alphabet, Inc.
- Google, LLC.
- XXVI Holdings, Inc.
- YouTube, LLC.
WCPO reached out to several social media companies and received this response from Snap Inc, the parent company of Snapchat:
"Nothing is more important to us than the wellbeing of our community. At Snapchat, we curate content from known creators and publishers and use human moderation to review user generated content before it can reach a large audience, which greatly reduces the spread and discovery of harmful content. We also work closely with leading mental health organizations to provide in-app tools for Snapchatters and resources to help support both themselves and their friends. We are constantly evaluating how we continue to make our platform safer, including through new education, features and protections."
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