The Hamilton County school board voted to join a coalition of school districts nationwide in suing social media companies over their role in the student mental health crisis.
The theory behind the lawsuit is that social media giants — including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok — are deliberately targeting young people for commercial gain, said Scott Bennett, the board's lawyer.
"They're doing so in a way that is, at a minimum, taking advantage of antisocial behaviors and is, in fact, actually fostering some of those behaviors," he said. "Districts around the country are watching a tremendous increase in the number of disciplinary issues that administrators have to address, cyberbullying instances that occur during school hours and after school hours, and untold other problems that are affecting the school climate over which school administrators have no control."
The board's vote came Thursday.
In Tennessee, at least 34 districts, including nearby Bledsoe County Schools, have joined the lawsuit. Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools was the first Tennessee district to join the suit, having filed in May.
While there is a chance the school board could recover some funds from the lawsuit, Bennett said, that isn't the primary reason to do it.
"This lawsuit was initially brought with a primary eye toward setting guardrails in place to make it less commercially tempting for these entities to target our kids," he said.
The board voted 9-0 to join. School board members Tiffanie Robinson, independent of Chattanooga, and Joe Wingate, R-Chattanooga, were absent.
The growing number of school districts across the country joining the lawsuit is one of several efforts in the past year tackling the impact of social media on young people's mental health. A majority of teens ages 13 to 17 in the U.S. report using a social media platform, and nearly half said they use the internet "almost constantly," according to the Pew Research Center.
Last spring, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released an advisory, noting that while social media provides benefits to some youth, "There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents."
In October, Tennessee and more than three dozen other states sued Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, alleging the company has harmed children's mental health.
In his complaint, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said the company's deceptive and unfair business practices are fostering a mental health crisis in the state and alleged the social media platforms did not become addictive by accident.
"Meta dedicated vast resources to understand young users' psychology and behavior so it could better exploit young users' developmental vulnerabilities through irresistible design features," the complaint said.
"Unlike other consumer products that have appealed to children for generations — like candy or soda — with Instagram, there is no natural break point where the consumer has finished the unit of consumption," the complaint continues. "Instead, Instagram is a bottomless pit where users can spend an infinite amount of their time. And Meta profits from each additional second a user spends on the platform."
Contact Shannon Coan at scoan@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6396.