Meta’s headquarters are located in Menlo Park, California, about four miles from the county seat of Redwood City.
Meta Platforms Inc. was sued by the local county board of education for making students dependent on social media platforms and contributing to a mental health crisis.
The San Mateo County Board of Education added the parent companies of Facebook and Instagram to a complaint it filed against other social media giants such as Google, TikTok and Snap on March 13. Meta’s headquarters are located in Menlo Park, California, approximately four miles from the county seat of Redwood City.
The complaint is similar to the first-of-its-kind lawsuit filed in January by a Seattle public school district, alleging that the company’s platform was addictive and served content that was harmful to adolescents and teens. claims to be designed to Several other school districts in areas from Florida to Arizona have also filed lawsuits, and scores of young people and their parents have also filed lawsuits.
San Mateo school board to allocate “unprecedented resources” to children hurt by excessive screen time to address psychological problems “without historical analogy” including rising suicide rate, according to complaint It says it is diverting funds from its traditional educational goals to do so.
Meta’s global safety officer, Antigone Davis, said the company wants teens to be safe online, offering more than 30 safety tools for kids and families, including supervision and age verification technology. said it does.
“When a teen joins Instagram, we automatically set their account to private and send them notifications periodically reminding them to take a break,” Davis said in a statement. We don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders, and we identify over 99% of the content we remove or take action on before it’s reported.”
Billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has championed school reform in the past, donating $120 million to San Francisco Bay Area schools nearly a decade ago. But the 116-page complaint calls Facebook and Instagram public nuisance, extorts Meta and other companies, and accuses them of gross negligence, conspiracy and unfair competition.
According to the complaint, “The ultimate goal is to get young people involved with the platform and to stay on it for as long as possible because it means they can sell more ads.” , has learned that is best achieved by responding to the lowest common denominator endless stream of the most provocative and toxic content.”
At Thursday’s congressional hearings, which highlighted issues related to social media addiction, TikTok chief executive Shou Chew said U.S. lawmakers and the Biden administration should invest in the company’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd., as a unit. tried to resist attempts to force it to sell its shares. Block it in the US.
The parents of a 16-year-old boy who committed suicide after using TikTok attended a hearing.The couple are suing ByteDance, claiming TikTok sent their son over 1,000 videos related to suicide, despair and self-harm. are doing.
The case is San Mateo County Board of Education v. YouTube LLC, 23-cv-01108, United States District Court for the Northern District of California (Oakland).
(Except for the headline, this article is unedited by NDTV staff and published from a syndicated feed.)
