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Meta, Google, TikTok and other social media companies could soon be compelled to fund student mental health services and redesign features alleged to encourage compulsive use if school districts prevail in a growing wave of lawsuits.
More than 1,000 school districts nationwide — including at least a dozen in California, including Los Angeles Unified School District — argue that social media companies knowingly designed products that harm children’s mental health, and that the cost of addressing the harm has shifted to schools, which have had to expand counseling, crisis intervention and campus safety efforts.
“Excessive social media use has fueled a youth mental health crisis which essentially forces schools to pivot from education to crisis intervention on a daily basis,” said Aelish Baig, a lead attorney representing LAUSD in the federal multidistrict lawsuit. “The costs with these harms include enormous diversion of staff time, and significant cost associated with the increased anxiety and depression, self-harm and suicidality affecting the students.”
The federal lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California, represents several school districts in Southern California, including Burbank Unified, Oceanside Unified, Coronado Unified, Temecula Unified, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified, ABC Unified and Ramona Unified, along with other districts from around the country. The districts are seeking both financial compensation and injunctive relief to help address increased demand for mental health support.
According to their complaints, districts have had to hire more counselors and therapists, ramp up training for teachers and staff and educate students on online safety and cyberbullying with a reported rise in depression, anxiety and other mental health issues.
A recent landmark jury trial and a bellwether school district’s case in Kentucky have also emboldened the school districts currently in litigation against social media companies.
In March, Kaley Glenn-Mills of Chico was awarded $6 million in a landmark jury trial in Los Angeles. Glenn-Mills, at age 17, sued Meta, the parent company for Facebook and Instagram, and Google, successfully arguing before a jury that the companies engineered their platforms to addict children.
In May, Breathitt County School District in Kentucky became the first district to settle with social media companies for $27 million for contributing to rising costs of school mental health services. The first part of the multidistrict case, brought by state attorneys general on behalf of their states, is scheduled for August, with the second part of the case, brought by school districts, following in February 2027.
Meta appealed the verdict in the social media addiction lawsuit last week and Google plans to appeal as well, the Associated Press reported. “We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to the Associated Press.
Baig said the standing lawsuit, which now represents LA Unified, makes the strongest case yet to force social media companies to pay more than a lump sum.
Through injunctive relief, school districts are asking the court to compel social media companies to overhaul design “defects” that encourage compulsive use, as well as implement new safeguards to protect student mental health. Overhauls could include drastic changes to commonplace engagement features such as infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations and autoplay.
“It’s not until you have a strong coalition that you can actually effectuate change when you’re going against corporations of this size,” Baig said. “It would never have been enough to just have a few small school districts.”
LAUSD board member Nick Melvoin said the litigation follows a strategy similar to the district’s fight against vaping and nicotine companies. In 2019, LA Unified joined a national class action lawsuit against e-cigarette company Juul, which ultimately paid school districts $1.2 billion in 2023 for targeting teenagers and draining school resources.
“As we did with the vaping settlements, we will present as part of these cases evidence of the amount of money that we’re spending on social workers and counselors, and it would be to reimburse the district for those services that are already being deployed,” Melvoin said. He said LAUSD will likely seek “tens of millions” in monetary relief along with “injunctive relief, and hopefully, policy change.”
Google rejected the allegations. José Castañeda, a company spokesperson, told EdSource that YouTube has “built services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences” and that the “allegations in these complaints are simply not true.”
In the Kentucky case, social media companies argued that the district failed to prove that the students’ mental health problems were directly linked to social media use. While the district referred more students for counseling, lawyers for the companies noted that “none of those referrals ever identified ‘social media addiction’ as the cause.”
That’s likely because researchers have not found clear markers of clinical addiction, such as measurable withdrawal, tolerance and real-world impairment, in social media use, to qualify an addiction diagnosis. Rather, studies point to evidence that young people can form harmful and compulsive habits from social media use. That distinction has been at the core of social media companies’ defense, which have boosted billions in revenue with algorithmic features engineered after slot machines.
Vihaan Bhardwaj, a rising senior at Mt. Everest Academy in San Diego and the K-12 co-chief of policy at the GenerationUp youth advocacy nonprofit, said the defense makes “invisible” students’ lived experiences. Beginning at age 12, he said Instagram repeatedly fed him “fear-mongering” content about his acne that led him to lose his self-confidence.
“Maybe one hour of just straight drinking alcohol will be so much worse sooner than one hour of scrolling, but you can’t just say it’s not harmful because the potency is less,” Vihaan said.
Social media companies also argued that school districts cannot measure which resources directly addressed student mental health issues tied to social media use. Baig, the attorney representing LAUSD, said school districts will tally an estimate based on years of counseling referrals, expenses, disciplinary incidents and costs, as well as documented cybercrimes and threats to children.
“They’re experiencing thousands of annual incidents of suicidal behavior, of sick and depraved cyber crimes, of shooting and bombing threats coming in on social media, of extortion and student sex trafficking, all of which are diverting enormous resources from the district’s core mission — which is to educate a student,” Baig said. “They take up staff time, from teachers to mental health counselors to administrators to even the maintenance crew.”
Baig also expects discovery to uncover internal company documents linking youth mental health issues to social media use. Platforms have long studied compulsive use, growth strategies and engagement metrics for young users, and in 2021, leaked documents to the Wall Street Journal revealed that Meta knew that 1 in 3 teen girls had worse body image issues after using Instagram.
Even if social media companies are not forced by the court to make drastic design changes, Melvoin said schools will still save on mental health costs with state efforts to raise the age for a social media account to 16, implement age verification and expand digital wellness education in schools.
And if school districts receive a big payout from social media companies, Vihaan said he hopes districts ensure “counselors are not just being added, but also trained” to help kids with social media use.
“You have to understand the in-person social disconnection that pushes us towards these platforms,” Vihaan said. “That nuance is often misunderstood by these adult resources.”
