Social Media Firms Pay $27 Million to KY School District for Harming Children

A school district in Kentucky has received about $27 million in settlements from social media companies after claiming these platforms contributed to a student mental health crisis. Meta Platforms paid the most, at $9 million, according to records reviewed by Reuters. This is the first time the financial details have been made public.

Meta settled with the Breathitt County School District on May 21, just weeks before a trial was set for June. Snap Inc, YouTube’s parent company Alphabet, and TikTok’s parent ByteDance had already reached settlements earlier. The terms of these agreements had not been shared in court before.

Alphabet paid $2.01 million to settle, while Snap and ByteDance each paid $8 million. These amounts come from settlement agreements Reuters got from the school district through a public records request.
After the settlements were announced, Meta, Snap, and YouTube said they had settled the claims in a friendly way. The plaintiffs’ lawyers said they will now focus on similar claims from 1,200 other school districts.

The Breathitt school district, located in a rural part of Appalachia, said the companies made their platforms addictive for young users. They claim this led to anxiety, depression, and self-harm among students, leaving schools to handle the results.

The school district wanted more than $60 million to help cover the costs of dealing with social media’s effects on students’ mental health and to pay for a 15-year mental health program. They also asked the court to order the companies to change their platforms to make them less addictive.

Breathitt’s case was set to be the first of the school districts’ cases, which are all combined in federal court in California, to go to trial. Many watched it closely as a test case for the other school districts’ claims. Judges and lawyers often use these early verdicts to estimate the value of other claims and help with settlement talks.

Breathitt is a small district with about 1,600 students in six schools, according to federal data. However, the lawsuit also involves much larger districts. Tucson Unified School District in Arizona, which has about 40,000 students, is set for trial in February and is seeking over $1.1 billion for a 15-year mental health program, plus more than $100 million for the time teachers and staff have spent dealing with social media’s effects. Los Angeles Unified School District and the New York City public school system, which together serve over 1.2 million students, have also filed lawsuits.

Meta has told investors that legal and regulatory actions in the European Union and the U.S. about youth social media issues "could significantly impact our business and financial results."

There are more than 3,300 lawsuits about addiction claims against social media companies waiting in California state court. Another 2,400 cases from individuals, cities, states, and school districts are also pending in California federal court.

In a landmark trial, a Los Angeles jury decided on March 25 that Meta and Alphabet’s Google were negligent for creating social media platforms that harm young people. The jury awarded $6 million to a 20-year-old woman who said she became addicted to social media as a child. Snap and TikTok were also part of the lawsuit but settled before the trial.