Harford County Public Schools Files Lawsuit Against Social Media Companies

HARFORD COUNTY, MD — Harford County Public Schools has become the next in line to file a lawsuit against social media companies, claiming their products are detrimental to students' mental health.

The school district joins the Howard County Public School System, Prince George's County Public Schools and others who have filed suit. The defendants in the lawsuit are Meta, Google, ByteDance and Snap Inc. - the parent companies behind Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat.

The lawsuit claims that the platforms are both addictive and exploitative in nature, and make it difficult for the school system to provide adequate mental health resources to its body of nearly 40,000 students, reports WJZ.

The district said it's seeing increased rates of anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation among students. Harford County Public Schools also said that they've had to reallocate funds for educational needs in order to combat the harms from social media, and that the lawsuit is at no cost to taxpayers.

"This lawsuit seeks two things: force social media companies to make changes to their platforms for the well-being of our kids and hold these mega-social media companies accountable for the high costs associated with addressing the mental health problems impacting our students," Carol Mueller, president of the board of education of Harford County, said.