EAST TENNESSEE — Several East Tennessee school systems have joined a lawsuit that’s targeting some of the most popular social media giants.
Recently, two law firms announced a total of 33 school systems across Tennessee have signed onto the lawsuit, which is seeking actionable accountability, tools, and resources to address the lack of protections, monitors, controls, and cooperation to protect children amid a growing mental health crisis due to social media.
Meta, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, WhatsApp, and YouTube are all at the forefront of the lawsuit.
“There’s been a conversation happening across the country, across the world about the effects of social media on young people,” said Johnson City Schools Board of Education Chair Kathy Hall. “We’re seeing its effects in our school systems, everything from safety concerns to student mental health, to distractions.”
Greene County Schools, Greeneville City Schools, Johnson City Schools, Johnson County Schools, and Sullivan County Schools are the school systems in our region included in the lawsuit.
“We saw this as an opportunity to join with other school systems in our region, across the state, and across the country, and really to effect a change,” added Hall.
Chuck Carter, director of Sullivan County Schools, said, “With the ever-increasing use of social media among students, we’ve seen negative effects in the classroom, including disruptions, mental health issues, and safety concerns. We’re charged with educating, preparing, and protecting students and consider the requests in the lawsuit to be common sense solutions that could make a positive impact to combat these issues.”
Chris McCarty is a Knoxville attorney who is leading the lawsuits. He said school districts are having to handle more social media-related issues instead of focusing on educational practices.
“We know those effects are coming into schools and schools and parents are left to clean up the mess that these social media companies are knowingly making,” said McCarty. “This situation is not affecting 1,2 or 3 kids at a time, it’s affecting hundreds, thousands, millions of kids across this country.”
“We hear about students being very distracted by social media, and we know that it affects their mental health, I think there are some very tragic stories about students’ mental health on social media,” said Hall. “But on a day-to-day basis, I think every student who looks at pictures and thinks that they don’t have the perfect life like some of the other people they see on social media, that affects them.”
McCarty and Hall both said they’re hopeful the lawsuit will spark change.
“The way the algorithms target students and the way that advertising is done on social media, we’re really trying to make it less of a distraction and more of a positive influence,” said Hall.
“We want them to acknowledge that they helped create this problem, their internal studies show it and what can they do with us to work on solutions so that there is a way for them to be more responsible and accountable for how they market to and service kids,” said McCarty.
Right now there is no set deadline on when the lawsuits will begin.
A Snapchat spokesperson provided this statement to our sister station in Nashville in response to the lawsuit.
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.
The boards of all school systems in the social media litigation voted to join the lawsuit, and include:
- Anderson County Schools
- Bedford County Schools
- Bledsoe County Schools
- Blount County Schools
- Cannon County Schools
- Claiborne County Schools
- Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools
- Collierville Schools
- Cumberland County Schools
- Fentress County Schools
- Grainger County Schools
- Greene County Schools
- Greeneville City Schools
- Hamblen County Schools
- Humphreys County Schools
- Johnson City Schools
- Johnson County Schools
- Knox County Schools
- Lenoir City Schools
- Lincoln County Schools
- Loudon County Schools
- Maryville City Schools
- Metro Nashville Public Schools
- Oak Ridge City Schools
- Oneida Special School District
- Putnam County Schools
- Sevier County Schools
- Shelby County Schools
- Stewart County Schools
- Sullivan County Schools
- Van Buren County Schools
- Warren County Schools
- Wilson County Schools
Other Tennessee school districts interested in joining the lawsuit may contact Chris McCarty at cmccarty@lewisthomason.com or 865-541-5256.
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