Meta is just being sued for causing a "mental health crisis" in the US.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram was included in a complaint the San Mateo County Board of Education filed against Google, TikTok, and Snap on March 13.

Meta is just being sued for causing a 'mental health crisis' in the US.

 Meta is just being sued for causing a 'mental health crisis' in the US.

The school board in the county where Meta Platforms Inc. is based sued the corporation for allegedly encouraging student addiction to its social media platforms and causing a mental health crisis.

The parent firm of Facebook and Instagram was included in a complaint the San Mateo County Board of Education filed against Google, TikTok, and Snap on March 13. Four miles separate the county seat in Redwood City, California, from the Menlo Park, California, headquarters of Meta.

The case is comparable to a first-of-its-kind lawsuit brought by the Seattle public school district in January, which claims that the corporations intentionally structured their platforms to be addictive and to send hazardous content to children and teenagers. Numerous other school districts, as well as multiple kids and their parents, have taken legal action in places like Florida and Arizona.

According to the complaint, San Mateo's board of education claims it is allocating "unprecedented resources" to help children harmed by excessive screen time, diverting funds from traditional educational objectives to deal with psychological issues that "have no historic analogue," such as rising suicide rates.

According to Antigone Davis, the global head of safety at Meta, the firm wants teenagers to stay secure online and provides more than 30 safety solutions for children and families, including age verification technology and parental control.

In a response, Davis said, "We immediately set kids' Instagram profiles to private when they join, and we send reminders encouraging them to take regular breaks." "We don't allow content that encourages self-harm, eating disorders, or suicide, and of the stuff we remove or act upon, we identify over 99% of it before it's reported to us," the statement reads.

The billionaire CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has already supported educational reform, contributing $120 million to San Francisco Bay Area schools over ten years ago. But in the 116-page case, Facebook and Instagram are referred to as a public nuisance, and Meta and the other businesses are charged with racketeering, gross negligence, conspiracy, and unfair competition.

According to the lawsuit, "the ultimate purpose is to get young people to interact with and stay on the platforms for as long as possible, because that means they can sell more advertising." The businesses "have recognised that this is best accomplished by delivering an unending flow of the most controversial and damaging content they can get away with," according to the article.

At a Congressional hearing on Thursday, issues related to social media addiction were brought up as TikTok CEO Shou Chew fought back against efforts by US lawmakers and the Biden administration to compel the company's Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd., to sell its shares of the unit or block it in the US.

The hearing was attended by the parents of a 16-year-old boy who committed suicide after using TikTok. The parents filed a lawsuit against ByteDance, claiming that TikTok delivered their kid more than 1,000 videos on self-harm, death, and hopelessness.

YouTube LLC v. San Mateo County Board of Education, 23-cv-01108, US District Court for the Northern District of California, is the case at hand (Oakland).

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