Districts Say Social Media Is Hurting Students' Mental Health. Now They're Suing

学校称社交媒体正在伤害学生的心理健康。现在他们起诉了。

A growing number of school districts are following the lead of the Seattle public schools and suing major social media companies over the deteriorating mental health of their students.

越来越多的学区效仿西雅图公立学校，起诉主要的社交媒体公司，指责他们使得学生心理健康状况恶化。

Their argument: that these companies have designed highly addictive apps and marketed their products to kids who are uniquely susceptible to manipulation. School districts, meanwhile, have been left to deal with the fallout from the harm those apps are doing to students’ mental health, the lawsuits argue.

他们的论点是：这些公司设计了高度上瘾的应用程序，将他们的产品销售给特别容易受到控制的孩子。诉讼称，与此同时学区还需要处理这些应用程序对学生心理健康造成的伤害产生的后果。

While legal experts are skeptical that these lawsuits will succeed in the court of law, in the court of public opinion, they may have more success.

虽然法律专家对这些诉讼能否在法庭上取得成功持怀疑态度，但在舆论的法庭上可能会更为成功。

“Essentially, schools are saying, ‘Look at what’s happening to our youth, and you, the social media companies, are responsible’,” said Robert Hachiya, a Kansas State University education professor and a former school administrator who is an expert in education law. “There’s no question there is a problem. The issue is, how can social media companies be assigned some kind of liability for this problem?”

堪萨斯州立大学（Kansas State University）教育学教授、前学校管理者、教育法专家罗伯特-哈奇亚（Robert Hachiya）表示：“从本质上讲，学校在说‘看看我们的年轻人发生了什么，你们这些社交媒体公司应该负责。’”“毫无疑问，这个问题确实存在，但是社交媒体公司如何为这个问题承担某种责任？”

It’s not really about the money, he said, “It’s about getting them to change their practices.”

他说，这真的不是钱的问题，“而是要让他们改变做法。”

The Seattle district broke new legal ground when it filed a lawsuit in January against the major social media companies: ByteDance (which owns TikTok), Google (which owns YouTube), Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), Snap (which owns Snapchat), and Twitter.

西雅图地区在1月份对主要社交媒体公司提起诉讼时打破了新的法律基础：字节跳动（拥有抖音），谷歌（拥有油管视频），元宇宙（拥有脸书和照片墙），素颜相机（拥有色拉布）和推特。

King County, where the Seattle school district is located, has seen an increase in suicides, attempted suicides, and mental-health-related emergency room visits among school-age kids, according to the complaint. The number of students in the school system saying they feel “so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that they stopped doing some usual activities” went up 30 percent in the decade since 2009, which is about the time the use of smartphones to access social media began to take off for teens and young adults.

根据起诉，西雅图学区所在的金县，学龄儿童的自杀、自杀未遂事件和与心理健康有关的急诊室就诊人数有所增加。自2009年以来的十年中，在学校中表示他们“连续两周或更长时间几乎每天都感到悲伤或绝望，甚至因此停止了一些日常活动”的学生数量增加了30%。这十年中，青少年和年轻人开始使用智能手机访问社交媒体。

Students who are suffering from anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges do worse in school and are more likely to act out in class or skip it altogether, which impacts the ability of schools to fulfill their mission, the Seattle lawsuit argues. Rising mental health problems among students also put more pressure on school resources, forcing districts to divert money away from academics and toward hiring mental health professionals and staff who are trained to identify and work with children in crisis.

西雅图的诉讼称，患有焦虑、抑郁和其他心理健康问题的学生在学校表现更差，更有可能在课堂上闹事或逃课，影响了学校正常履行使命。学生日益严重的心理健康问题也给学校资源带来了更大的压力，迫使各学区将资金从学术上转移出来，去雇用心理健康专业人士和工作人员，他们接受过培训，可以识别和帮助处于危机中的儿童。

The lawsuit asks for financial compensation for the school district and for the courts to declare the practices of social media companies a public nuisance under Washington state law.

该诉讼要求对学区进行经济赔偿，并要求法院根据华盛顿州法律宣布社交媒体公司的做法构成公害。

Education Week reached out to the social media companies named in the complaint, but only heard back from Google by the time this article was published.

《教育周刊》联系了投诉中提到的社交媒体公司，但直到本文发表时才收到谷歌的回复。

“We have invested heavily in creating safe experiences for children across our platforms and have introduced strong protections and dedicated features to prioritize their well being,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to Education Week. “For example, through Family Link, we provide parents with the ability to set reminders, limit screen time and block specific types of content on supervised devices.”

谷歌发言人在一份声明中说：“我们已经投入巨资在平台上为青少年创造安全的体验，引入了强有力的保护和专用功能，优先考虑他们的健康。例如，通过家连家软件，为家长提供了设置提醒、限制屏幕时间和阻止受监督设备上特定类型内容的功能。”

Experts cite weaknesses in the legal arguments by school districts

专家们列举了学区在法律论证中站不住脚的观点

Now, at least nine additional school districts and municipalities in Arizona, California, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state have filed similar suits, according to local media reports. And that number is poised to grow as at least five other school districts are weighing whether to file their own lawsuits or join existing ones.

据当地媒体报道，现在，亚利桑那州、加利福尼亚州、新泽西州、俄勒冈州、宾夕法尼亚州和华盛顿州至少还有9个学区向市政当局提起了类似的诉讼。这一数字还将继续增长，至少有五个其他学区正在考虑，是提起自己的诉讼还是加入现有的诉讼。

But drawing the connection between social media, student mental health, and who is responsible is not necessarily straightforward, experts say.

但专家说，在社交媒体、学生心理健康和谁负责之间，很难建立起直截了当的联系。

“Providing recommendations of videos you might watch, providing social media services where people can communicate with each other, is generally protected by the first amendment,” said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA and a specialist on First Amendment law. “The government generally can’t impose liability on publishers for supposedly publishing material that causes some of the users to be psychologically harmed. You can’t sue a movie studio for putting out a movie that is bad for some small fraction of the audience.”

"提供你可能观看的视频推荐，提供人们可以相互交流的社交媒体服务，一般都受到第一修正案的保护，"加州大学洛杉矶分校的法律教授、第一修正案法律专家尤金-沃洛赫说，"政府一般不能因为所谓的出版材料导致一些用户的心理受到伤害，而对出版商追加责任。不能因为电影公司推出了一部对某些小部分观众不利的电影而起诉它。"

The fact that this case involves minors likely won’t matter, said Volokh, because children have First Amendment rights, too.

沃洛赫说，本案涉及未成年人这一事实可能并不重要，因为儿童也有第一修正案的权利。

He said the Seattle complaint stresses that social media companies design their algorithms and platforms to increase engagement and use. While the complaint argues that doing so manipulates vulnerable young minds, Volokh said there is another way of looking at it: “That’s just saying that they work hard to provide a product that their users really like.”

他说，西雅图的投诉强调，社交媒体公司设计他们的算法和平台，增加参与和使用率。虽然投诉认为这样做会操纵脆弱的年轻人的思想，但沃洛赫说，还可以从另一个方面去看待，“他们只是想要努力提供用户真正喜欢的产品。”

In the case of the Seattle lawsuit, Volokh said getting these practices labeled a public nuisance doesn’t provide social media companies with clear rules of what content or business practices are and are not allowed.

在西雅图的诉讼中，沃洛赫说，给这些做法贴上公害的标签，并没有为社交媒体公司提供明确的规则，说明哪些内容或商业行为是允许的，哪些是不允许的。

“They are saying it’s a nuisance—it’s bad for society. It’s a very vague and potentially a very broad rule that it’s hard for anybody to try to figure out how it will play out,” he said. “If the legislator wanted to pass a law that said, ‘you can’t have under 16-year-olds on your platform except with parental permission, or you have to limit the number of hours people under 15 can spend on the platform,’ [...] those laws would still be challenged under First Amendment grounds, but at least it would give the platforms some indication of what they are allowed to do and what they’re not allowed to do.”

“他们说这是一种滋扰，对社会有害。这是一个非常模糊的规则，可能非常广泛，任何人都很难弄清楚这将如何发挥作用，“他说，“如果立法者想通过一项法律，说‘除非得到父母的许可，否则你不能让16岁以下的人在你的平台上，或者你必须限制15岁以下的人在平台上花费的时间’，”他说，“这些法律仍然会受到第一修正案的限制，但至少它会给平台一些指示，说明他们可以做什么，不允许做什么。

While the lawsuits cite a litany of research showing that social media detrimentally affects children and adolescent mental health, pinning the wholesale decline in youth mental health on social media companies and their practices will likely be a tough sell, said Kansas State’s Hachiya.

堪萨斯州立大学的哈琦亚（Hachiya）说，虽然诉讼引用了一连串的研究，展现出社交媒体对儿童和青少年的心理健康产生了不利影响，但将如此广泛的青少年心理健康伤害归咎于社交媒体公司及其做法，可能会非常艰难。

“There are so many intervening acts,” Hachiya said. “What’s the parental involvement? What’s parental supervision? How about the divisiveness of the country in general? Economic and other stresses? Social media can’t just be the cause of the problem.”

她说：“干扰行为太多了。家长参与呢？家长监督呢？国家分裂情况如何？经济和其他压力？并不只能归咎于社交媒体。”

But the fact remains that school districts are being asked to shoulder a major burden when it comes to students’ worsening mental health.

当涉及到学生日益恶化的心理健康时，学区还是要承担主要负担。

These lawsuits can serve as a wake-up call for their communities, said Jeanne L. Surface, a professor of educational leadership at the University of Nebraska Omaha who specializes in school law.

珍妮-L-斯普尔表示这些诉讼可以为他们的社区敲响警钟。她是是内布拉斯加大学奥马哈分校教育领导学教授，专门研究学校法。

The lawsuits send communities a message of : “‘Wake up, come on, we need [social media companies] to take some responsibility here,’” Surface said.

这些诉讼向社区传达了这样一个信息：“快醒醒吧，社交媒体公司需要承担一些责任，”她说。

State legislatures are also cracking down on social media

州立法机构也在打击社交媒体

For any district that may be considering filing similar complaints, Volokh has a piece of free legal advice: Check your state laws.

对于任何可能提出类似投诉的地区，沃洛赫无偿提供一条法律建议：检查你所在州的法律。

“In some states, there are so-called ‘anti-slap’ statutes that allow defendants to get the case thrown out early, and may require the plaintiffs to pay the defendants’ attorney fees, when the lawsuit is over constitutionally protected speech,” he said. “Now, some of the statutes have exclusions for lawsuits by government entities to vindicate public interests. But I would look hard at the local laws and make sure that when the lawsuit is thrown out, as it’s pretty likely to be thrown out, the school district doesn’t end up on the hook for tech platforms’ legal bills.”

他说：“在一些州，有所谓的‘反掌掴’法规，允许被告提前撤诉，并可能要求原告在诉讼涉及受宪法保护的言论时支付被告的律师费。现在，一些法规排除了政府实体为维护公共利益而提起的诉讼。但我会仔细研究当地的法律，确保当诉讼被驳回时，因为很有可能被驳回，学区最终不会为科技平台的法律账单所困扰。

Lawsuits related to their youngest users aren’t the only legal difficulties social media companies must contend with these days. New laws in Arkansas and Utah require social media companies to verify users’ ages and get parental consent before allowing minors to set up profiles on their platforms.

与年轻用户有关的诉讼并不是社交媒体公司目前必须面对的唯一法律难题。阿肯色州和犹他州的新法律要求社交媒体公司在允许未成年人在其平台上建立个人资料之前，必须核实用户的年龄并获得父母的同意。

The new Utah law establishes a host of additional requirements for accounts used by minors aimed at limiting the addictive qualities of social media and providing parents with more opportunities for oversight. Utah is also creating a social media curfew for users younger than 18, by not allowing them to access their accounts between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m.

犹他州的新法律对未成年人使用的账户提出了一系列额外要求，旨在限制社交媒体的成瘾性，为父母提供更多监督机会。犹他州还为18岁以下的用户制定了社交媒体宵禁，不允许他们在晚上10：30到早上6：30之间访问自己的账户。