By Diana Novak Jones
May 29 (Reuters) – A Kentucky school district secured approximately $27 million in settlements from social media companies over claims they fueled a student mental‑health crisis, with Meta Platforms paying the largest amount at $9 million, according to records seen by Reuters on Friday that reveal the settlement’s financial terms for the first time.
Meta settled the case brought by Breathitt County School District on May 21, a few weeks before a planned June trial, following earlier settlements by co-defendants Snap Inc, YouTube parent Alphabet and TikTok parent ByteDance. Terms of the deals had not been disclosed in court.
Alphabet paid $2.01 million to settle the case; Snap paid $8 million and ByteDance paid $8 million, according to copies of the settlement agreements that Reuters obtained from the school district via a public records request.
The companies have denied the allegations and say they take extensive steps to keep teens and young users safe on their platforms.
When the settlements were announced, Meta, Snap and YouTube said they had resolved the claims amicably. Attorneys for the plaintiffs said after the announcement that their focus is now on pursuing similar claims brought by 1,200 other school districts.
BELLWETHER CASE FOR SCHOOL DISTRICTS
The Breathitt school district, which is in a rural county in Appalachia, accused the companies of designing their platforms to keep young users hooked, driving anxiety, depression and self-harm among students and leaving schools to deal with the consequences.
The school district was seeking over $60 million to cover the costs of counteracting social media’s impact on students’ mental health and to fund a 15-year mental health program to abate the problem. It had also asked for a court order requiring the companies to modify their platforms to reduce addictive features.
Breathitt’s case was slated to be the first among the school districts’ cases, which have been consolidated in federal court in California, to go to trial. It had been closely watched as a bellwether or test case of the school districts’ claims in the sprawling litigation. Judges and attorneys often use bellwether verdicts to assess the potential value of remaining claims and guide settlement talks.
Breathitt is a small district that serves about 1,600 students across six schools, according to federal data, but the litigation also includes far larger districts. Tucson Unified School District in Arizona, a district of about 40,000 students whose case is scheduled to go to trial in February, is seeking more than $1.1 billion to fund a 15-year mental health program, plus over $100 million in compensation for the time teachers and staff have spent managing social media’s impact. The Los Angeles Unified School District and the New York City public school system — together serving more than 1.2 million students — have also sued.
Meta has warned investors that legal and regulatory blowback in the European Union and the U.S. over youth social media issues “could significantly impact our business and financial results.”
More than 3,300 lawsuits involving addiction claims are pending in California state court against the social media companies. Another 2,400 cases brought by individuals, municipalities and states, as well as the school districts, are pending in California federal court.
In a landmark trial, a Los Angeles jury on March 25 found Meta and Alphabet’s Google negligent for designing social media platforms that are harmful to young people. It awarded a combined $6 million to a 20-year-old woman who said she became addicted to social media as a child. Snap and TikTok were also named in that lawsuit but settled before trial.
(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones in Chicago; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis)
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