Federal Judge Allows Public Nuisance Claims Against Social Media Sites to Go Forward

By Amanda Bronstad

Social media took another hit Nov. 15 after a federal judge allowed most of the public nuisance claims brought by school districts in the addiction cases to move forward.
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California found on Nov. 15 that school districts in 15 of the 19 states at issue could pursue public nuisance claims that social media sites, such as Instagram and TikTok, created a mental health crisis among the nation’s youth. The ruling is the fourth dismissal order from Gonzalez Rogers in the social media addiction multidistrict litigation and is contrary to a June 7 public nuisance decision by a Los Angeles judge in parallel litigation in California state courts.
“Here, defendants make their platforms available to the entire public,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote, concluding that the social media platforms failed to argue that their conduct doesn’t interfere with the public’s health. “While the students’ injuries are individualized byproducts of that interference, and while the school districts’ resource diversion and expenditure are individualized corollary impacts of those individual students’ harms,” she continued, “those harms and costs all flow from defendants’ alleged interference with the public health.”
However, she granted dismissal of public nuisance claims as to four states: Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island and South Carolina.
“Addictive social media platforms have significantly disrupted the learning environment for our children, forcing schools, teachers, and administrators to address the fallout on youth mental health,” Lexi Hazam of San Francisco’s Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein and Previn Warren of Motley Rice in Washington, D.C., who are co-lead plaintiffs’ counsel in the litigation, said in a statement. “We will press ahead with our claims on behalf of school districts across the country and will not relent until Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google are held accountable for knowingly designing their platforms to exploit young users for profit.”
|

‘A Flexible Mechanism’

The social media companies argued that the claims overstepped the bounds of public nuisance laws in all 19 states.
But Gonzalez Rogers disagreed.
“Public nuisance, like negligence, provides a flexible mechanism to redress evolving means for causing harm,” she wrote. “While public nuisance law remains in flux, the court declines to import these limitations and hold that the supreme courts of the at-issue states would per se prohibit the kind of action brought by the school districts under the alleged facts of this case. However, because a handful of at-issue state supreme courts have expressed reluctance to expand public nuisance, the court declines to permit the public nuisance actions to proceed with respect to those at-issue states.”
She allowed the public nuisance claims to go forward in 15 states, including California, Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
“We respectfully disagree with the court’s decision, which runs contrary to the ruling in the California state proceedings (JCCP) that the school districts cannot expand the law to create legal claims where none exist,” a spokesperson for Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Facebook and Instagram, said. “We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously against these claims and believe the evidence will demonstrate our commitment to supporting young people.”
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who is overseeing the California Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding (JCCP) involving social media addiction cases, had dismissed four complaints brought by school districts in California, Florida, Rhode Island and Washington, concluding, “It is hard to imagine how any business or institution could function — or reasonably insure itself against potential losses — if its liability extends to all those who could reasonably be expected to interact with the individuals that are caused emotional harm by that business or institution.”
A spokesperson for Google, which owns YouTube, said, “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work. In collaboration with youth, mental health and parenting experts, we built services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls. The allegations in these complaints are simply not true.”
Representatives of TikTok, owned by Byte Dance, and Snap Inc., parent of Snapchat, did not respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuits, brought by individuals, school districts, local governments and state attorneys general, allege novel claims that social media usage caused adolescents to become addicted, leading to mental health disorders and, for some, suicide.
Gonzalez Rogers, in her first dismissal order about a year ago, found that the social media platforms could not wipe out all the products liability-related claims based on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which grants immunity to tech companies from the actions of third companies, or the First Amendment.
Last month, Gonzalez Rogers upheld consumer claims brought by more than 30 state attorneys general over alleged misrepresentations made by social media companies, and, in a separate order, refused to dismiss negligence claims brought by school districts and local governments.
This month’s order relied on previous court decisions allowing public nuisance claims in cases involving opioids and electronic cigarettes made by Juul Labs.
In a footnote, Gonzalez Rogers also acknowledged an Oct. 17 decision against Meta in a similar case brought by the state of Massachusetts. Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Peter Krupp sided against Meta, concluding that the “mental and physical harms suffered by Massachusetts youth and the associated burdens to the Massachusetts school and health care systems was foreseeable.”
Gonzalez Rogers wrote, “That court rejected the same argument before this court on substantially similar allegations.”