Yesterday’s bold Prediction of school board(s) v. social media class action lawsuit has already become a reality

Yesterday’s bold Prediction of school board(s) v. social media class action lawsuit has already become a reality

September 6, 2023 by tomaswell

I’m no Nostradamus, not by a long shot (but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night). Just to give you an idea of my ability to read tea leaves, in 2015, as I watched Donald Trump descend the escalator in Trump Tower as a theatrical prelude to his announcing his candidacy for the Republican president nomination, I smirked at my TV and said aloud to no one in particular, “He’ll crash and burn in six weeks.”

Well, we know how that turned out.

But yesterday, I wrote here that it was a certainty that the federal lawsuit filed by the Livingston Parish School Board against two social media giants would quickly mushroom into a class action case.

Little did I know at the time (honest) that it already had. Today, I learned that nearly 200 school districts (so far; one law firm claims the number is closer to 500 for his firm alone) have enrolled as plaintiffs in what is about to become the next big legal battle that has the potential to rival the lawsuits against big tobacco, the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the opioid litigation.

Yesterday, I WROTE THAT the Livingston Parish School Board was going after Instagram and its parent company, Meta, and TikTok and its parent, ByteDance.

Now we learn that those four defendants have been joined by co-defendants Snapchat, Google, Facebook and YouTube in the class action du jour.

The CLASS-ACTION STORY, posted by Reason, an online news service, quoted The Wall Street Journal as saying the 200 lawsuits have been consolidated in the U.S. District Court in Oakland, California. The Journal said plaintiff attorneys (like Fayard Honeycutt in Denham Springs, which filed the action on behalf of the Livingston board) are soliciting school boards throughout the country to file lawsuits against social-media companies on allegations that their apps cause classroom disciplinary problems and mental health issues which divert resources from education.

It was not immediately clear whether the Livingston Parish action would be part of that consolidation. That lawsuit is 182 pages in length compared to 287 pages for the class-action PETITION.

I wrote yesterday that the local lawsuit appeared to be a “boilerplate” petition that did not originate locally. A so-called boilerplate document is one written for more than one entity and distributed to potential users who simply plug in local data and names to make it appear to be locally generated.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a frequent practitioner of boilerplate legislative bills it generates for state legislatures across the country. There have been instances when legislators, who are members of ALEC, didn’t bother to edit the “model legislation” closely enough have submitted bills without making proper edits, which made the bills inappropriate for a given state until they were amended and re-submitted.

The plaintiff attorneys in the larger class-action suit are claiming that:

• The social media defendants have targeted children as a core market;
• Children are uniquely susceptible to harm from social media apps;
• Defendants designed their apps to attract and addict youth;
• Millions of children use defendants’ products “compulsively”;
• Defendants’ apps have created a youth mental health crisis
• Defendants’ defective products encourage dangerous “challenges”;
• Defendants’ apps contribute to the sexual exploitation and “sextortion” of children;
• Defendants could have taken steps to avoid harming plaintiffs (but did not)
• Algorithms maximize engagement at a harmful level;
• Facebook and Instagram user interfaces are designed to encourage addictive engagement;
• Instagram encourages bullying, body-shaming and other negative social comparisons;
• Meta, YouTube and ByteDance (TikTok) have failed to implement effective age-verification;
• TikTok, Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram have defective parental controls, and have “impediments” to discontinuing use;
• Snapchat’s defective features are designed to promote compulsive and excessive use;

The petition, like the Livingston School Board lawsuit, emphasizes the dangers of sexual exploitation posed by adult predators who surf social media looking for victims in order to produce and distribute child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). The class action suit said social media “can increase risky and uninhibited behavior in children, making them easier targets to adult predators for sexual exploitation, sextortion and CSAM.”

The lawsuit even lays the responsibility for teen deaths, ostensibly from suicide brought on by cyber-bullying.

As a general rule, plaintiff law firms in cases like this are rolling the dice and take most, if not all, of the financial risks, i.e., filing fees, expert fees, deposition costs, discovery, etc. and do not charge a fee up front, choosing instead to hope for a favorable decision or settlement and to take their fee on the back end, usually 25 percent to 30 percent of the award or settlement. And it’s usually then that the fun begins when observers can sit back and watch the lawyers fight it out amongst themselves over who gets what. That’s usually when it really gets nasty – and entertaining.

Now, having seen my prediction of a class-action lawsuit occur so quickly and with such deadly accuracy, I’m now on my way out the door to buy a Powerball ticket and to place my wagers on the Super Bowl champion.