PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla — Pinellas County school board members voted to join a multi-district lawsuit suing social media companies for not protecting kids.
School officials said the lawsuit’s goal is to make social media safer. It's a nationwide litigation that has already been started by other schools.
One Dunedin High School teacher, Brandt Robinson, explained, he sees the negative impacts social media has on students.
"People will find out, for example, someone’s been talking about them and then a class period later it’s gone viral and then there’s other comments and bullying that takes place," Robinson explained.
Bullying is something that was brought up by school board members during their meeting Tuesday night.
"We see that in our schools, we see reduced attention span, reduced cognitive development, or delayed cognitive development, learning impacts, behavior, discipline, physical health, mental health, depression and certainly the worst that can happen, that can happen to any family or school family, which is the loss of life," Vice Chairperson for the Pinellas County School Board Laura Hine said.
Board members unanimously approved joining a multi-district lawsuit against Meta, which owns Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube.
"The claims in this case would relate to the damages that the school board has incurred in expending time and money in dealing with cyberbullying and other youth mental health issues that have come about by the actions of those companies," a school official said during the meeting.
10 Tampa Bay reached out to all social media companies involved in the lawsuit.
A spokesperson for Google, the company that owns YouTube said, “Protecting kids across our platforms has always been core to our work. In collaboration with child development specialists, we have built age-appropriate experiences for kids and families on YouTube, and provide parents with robust controls. The allegations in these complaints are simply not true.”
A Snapchat spokesman said, "Snapchat was designed differently from other social media platforms because nothing is more important to us than the well-being of our community. Our app opens directly to a camera rather than a feed of content that encourages passive scrolling and is primarily used to help real friends communicate. We aren't an app that encourages perfection or popularity, and we vet all content before it can reach a large audience, which helps protect against the promotion and discovery of potentially harmful material. While we will always have more work to do, we feel good about the role Snapchat plays in helping friends feel connected, informed, happy, and prepared as they face the many challenges of adolescence.”
With that, Pinellas County and at least 20 other Florida schools are joining this nationwide lawsuit.
The district estimates the lawsuit will take about three to four years. Representing them is the Maher Law Firm out of Orlando and Wagstaff & Cartmell out of Kansas City. These are the same attorneys who have previously represented the district in another lawsuit related to vaping.
No public funds will be spent and district officials said recovery for attorneys would come out of the settlement or judgment. A district official emphasized that this is not a class action lawsuit, rather every school will file their own lawsuit and it will all go to the same judge in federal court to review each one.