Social Media Drama Just Got a Price Tag

The Lawsuits Put A Price Tag

$60 million. That's what a school district in Breathett County, Kentucky asked for in court. Not because their building burned down because of faulty construction or for a terrible bus accident, but for what social media had done to their students and for the staff who had to clean up after all of that. Then $1.1 billion with a B, that's what Tucson Unified is asking for. Plus another hundred million on top of that. And the most interesting part to me is it ties directly to the school counseling office. Hey, school counselor, welcome back. Today we're talking about something that's been building for years and finally has a price tag on it. Because more than a thousand school districts are suing the social media companies. We're gonna talk about what that means for the work you're doing every single day that nobody ever budgeted for or staffed for. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity on your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you are in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. Here's what this looks like before it's a lawsuit or before it becomes a number. This

What Social Media Looks Like At School

is what it looks like in a school. Peer groups don't always fight in the hallway anymore. They fight in a group chat at 11 at night, and by the time it lands on your desk Monday morning, three other kids have screenshotted it. Two parents are emailing the principal, and you're the one trying to reconstruct this social explosion that happened in a place that you couldn't even see. Or a kid hasn't slept well in months. And when you finally get them to tell you why, it's not even anything that's happening to them. It's the algorithm, feeding them video after video about how the world's ending, or they're not good enough, or how everybody else has got it figured out except for them. Or a parent hands you a phone. Look at what they sent to her. You scroll through messages that turn your stomach, and somehow you're the person who has to figure out what happens next. And though you may not be the only one intervening in these situations, they often land on your desk the hardest. Think about the mental gymnastics that this actually requires. The incident happened at 11 p.m. off campus on a personal device. So now you're trying to figure out if you even have the ability to do anything about it. You're translating between four different apps that all work differently. You're weighing student privacy against a parent's right to know, and against what your district's code of conduct covers, which in this case is usually little to nothing. And you're doing all of this in real time with a kid sitting across from you who is probably in some sort of a meltdown, and you've got 11 other things on your calendar today that are not going to move. The teacher who confiscates the phone three times and gets called the bad guy for it. The administrator fielding the parent phone call, demanding to know why nobody's doing anything. When the truth is everybody's doing something all day, right? With no training in this and no extra time carved out for it. And the front office staff is trying to figure out if a screenshot constitutes evidence of anything. Nobody in your building signed up for this kind of work. Everybody's doing these mental gymnastics around a problem that didn't exist on the scale 10 years ago. And there's no manual, there's no extra planning period or no line in anybody's contract that says, and also social media. The fallout just gets absorbed into your caseload, into your week, and into the parts of your job that aren't official. You know, I tell you, if I had a dollar for every parent who's shown up to tell me about ugly text messages, sometimes that they've composed themselves, or drama that started in a gaming chat. I'd be a rich woman. And y'all, I work at an elementary school. At this point, I feel like I am running the FBI's fourth grade Discord division. So let's talk about what's actually happening in these lawsuits because the scale of it is actually a lot bigger

Why Districts Are Suing Platforms

than you might think. More than a thousand school districts and local governments have filed suit against Meta, Google, Snap, and ByteDance. The claim just isn't a generic social media, is bad for kids. It's very specific. It's about design. It's about the infinite scroll, notification timing built to pull you back into the app, reward systems engineered the same way a slot machine is. The argument is that the addiction itself, the thing that these platforms were built to create, is what's driving the social and emotional fallout landing in schools. Now, quick definition because this word matters: a bellwether case is the test case. When you've got around 1,200 lawsuits all making roughly the same argument, the court doesn't run 1,200 trials. It picks one, and it's usually the one with a clean representative set of facts, and it lets that one go first. And however that turns out tells the rest of these districts and the companies defending against them roughly what to expect. Settle or fight. That's what a bellwether is. It's a preview, but it has stakes attached. Brevitt County, Kentucky was picked as that bellwether. There's been chatter about holding these companies accountable for years, but this isn't theoretical anymore. In March, a California jury found Meta and YouTube liable for negligence in an individual case and awarded $6 million. Then in May, right as the Breathett County trial was about to start, it settled before it ever reached a jury. Roughly $27 million combined from all four companies went to that school district. And Meta alone paid $9 million of that. More than 1,200 other school district claims are still sitting out there watching what's just happened. Now, I'm misspeaking if I make this sound like it's going to be open and shut. It's not. The company's defense rests on section 230. It's a federal law that shields platforms from liability

Section 230 And The Design Argument

for content that other people post. Their argument is a kid bullying a classmate in a group chat or a dangerous challenge that spreads from kid to kid is third-party content, not something that the platform built. A Google spokesman said it like this: the lawsuits fundamentally misunderstand how YouTube and all these other platforms work. And the companies have rolled out some safety features. They have teen accounts, take a break reminders, and default privacy settings for minors. Whether that's enough is a fair question, but at least it's not nothing. But here's why the cases are going through anyway. The plaintiffs stopped arguing about content and started arguing about design. So they're not talking about a bad post got through. They're talking about how the scroll never ends because it was engineered that way. The notification that's designed to pull you back in on purpose because that's what keeps you on the app. It's not a claim about posts anymore. It's a claim about a product built on an intention to produce a behavior. And the courts have started treating that as a different legal question than just hosting what a user posted. All that said though, it is contested. One judge dismissed the school district claims outright. Another let them proceed. Same underlying question, different answers, which is fascinating legally. But on your campus, it still looks like this: a kid in a chair, a parent in your inbox, and a principal asking, What are we gonna do about it? But there's a second fight going on here too, and that's the science. Now,

What The Research Fight Really Says

I'm gonna try to make this sound simple, but you know, just like a teenage romance, the truth is hot and cold, it's messy, and it's very confusing, right? Flowers one minute, and why won't you text me back the next minute? Here's the core disagreement. If you read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Hayde, you know he argues that the evidence has moved well past correlation and into causation. His claim in his words is that there's tons and tons of evidence that social media isn't just sitting next to the rise in teen anxiety and depression, it's producing it. And he's got some real studies to point to. This is not just a hunch. A 2022 paper in the American Economic Review used the staggered rollout of Facebook across U.S. colleges in the mid-2000s as a natural experiment. And it compared colleges to themselves before and after Facebook showed up. Once it arrived on a campus, severe depression rose by about 7%, and anxiety disorder rose about 20%, hitting hardest among students who were already most vulnerable. The mechanism wasn't doom scrolling or lost sleep. It was determined to be social comparison. Kids measuring their own lives against everyone else's highlight reel. A separate randomized trial paid people to deactivate Facebook for four weeks and found the same direction of effect on well-being. Now, let's acknowledge the differences between that research and what we're talking about as school counselors. Both of these studies were done on college students and adults, not the students sitting in your office. Some of the mechanisms may transfer, but the actual numbers might not. They might be more severe, or they might not. That gap between what's been studied and what you're actually working with at your school, that's a real problem. And it's exactly the kind of gap that critics of the anxious generation like to point at. There are others pushing back too. Candace Ogers, a psychologist who spent her career studying exactly this question, wrote a very pointed critique in the journal Nature. Her argument was there's no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children's brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness. She thinks the actual drivers are something else entirely: economic hardship and family instability resulting from the 2008 financial crisis, which hit lower income kids the hardest. Her worry is that focusing on phones and social media lets us avoid looking at harder, less tech-oriented problems. And then there's kind of the more cautious middle. A National Academies of Sciences review of the research landed somewhere between hate and ogres, concluding that the data shows small effects and weak associations, and that the real picture is more complicated than either side really wants to admit. So here's where that actually leaves us as people trained to read research and not just headlines. The legal case and the scientific case are two separate things running on two separate tracks, and they don't have to agree with each other for the litigation to keep moving forward. A jury doesn't need a settled scientific consensus to decide if a company designed something negligently. That's the part of what makes this moment so strange to watch as a clinician. The courtroom is moving faster than the research base underneath it. I don't want to try to tell you which side I think is right. I don't think the evidence lets anybody say that with full confidence yet, no matter how confident either side sounds in their own writing. So yeah, it's complicated and it's awkward, just like we said. But here's what's true no matter how that fight eventually resolves. And this is the part that I actually want you taking with you out of this episode. For years, you've absorbed the cost of this, right? You haven't had any lawsuits, but you've absorbed

You’ve Been Absorbing The Cost

it in your caseload and your workload. Like the endless mediations you try to facilitate, but kids can't talk things through because they can't handle disagreement face to face. The cyberbullying investigation that took up your entire day while you were playing detective across four different apps because somebody had to do it and you were the one that got tagged. The body image conversations you've had to start having with 11-year-olds comparing themselves to filtered, edited versions of people who don't really exist. Sextortion cases, Enoff said, horrible and also heartbreaking. Or the parent conferences where you've ended up having to explain algorithms and recommendation systems because no one quite has the language for it yet. Nobody set you down and said, hey, here's 12 new categories of work, but I'll tell you what, we'll fund it, we'll add some school counselors, we'll train for it, and we'll make sure things are taken care of. No, it just showed up, right? One kid, one crisis at a time, stacked over and over and over again onto a school counseling caseload that was already too big before any of this ever got started. No one's really stopped to consider this. It just became another part of our unwritten job description that nobody bothered to write down. We talk a lot about this in the mastermind, actually. Uh, counselors who are trying to figure out how to even name this category of work for their administrators because so much of it either stays invisible or gets filed under social skills, right? But really, what it needs is some numbers and some context to it, which is what I want to leave you with. Most of you who are listening to this episode when it's released are either on summer break right now or you're getting very, very close. Hallelujah. So what can you do? Nothing. Right now, nothing. But as you're thinking ahead to next school year or jotting

Start A Simple Log For Receipts

down reminders for yourself in August, here's one you can add to the list. Make a note to start a running log once you're back. It doesn't have to be a dissertation or a color-coded disaggregation, nothing like that. Just enough documentation that future you is going to have receipts. A notes app, a spreadsheet, whatever's in front of you and already in your hand. But every time you spend your counseling time on something that traces back to a screen, a cyberbullying investigation, a parent meeting about a group chat, a gaming chat gone wrong, whatever it is, log it, date it, estimate the time spent, and just write a couple words about what it was. Here's why this is not just busy work for you. Breathett County's case included real documented numbers, millions in estimated staff time diverted to handling social media related crises on top of their direct out-of-pocket costs. That figure did not come from a feeling, it came from somebody documenting it one entry at a time until it added up to something substantial enough that a court could look at. You don't need a lawsuit to use that same logic. You need it the next time you're campaigning for something in your district or pushing back on one more duty getting stacked on your plate. Here's 40 hours this semester documented on exactly this category of work is a completely different conversation than, you know, it's been a lot lately. And if start a log sounds simple now, but you know it's going to be impossible by October, I want you to know that's exactly why we've built this into the mastermind. We're setting up data systems you can actually keep going all year long, not just a system that you start with good intentions in August

Mastermind Support And Next Steps

because you got it from some webinar and then you abandon it by Halloween. Right? Let's be real. We've all been there. The mastermind supports you to actually get this data thing done instead of just telling you that you should be doing it. And that's part of what we're going to be building in the mastermind in the next couple of weeks, is the foundation for school counselors to get their year off to a good start. But if you want something you can actually use before then, we also have a masterclass we did just a while back called AI, Social Media and Gaming, What School Counselors Need to Know. That masterclass is inside the mastermind because this is exactly the kind of issue that we don't just talk about once and then leave you to manage by yourself. And really, it's a lot like this conversation. It's just longer and it has more receipts. And we walk through what the research actually says and what you can do with it once it walks into your school counseling office. So if you're interested in those, check out the link in the episode description. So go back to those two numbers at the top of the episode: 60 million, 1.1 billion. Those numbers exist because somebody finally sat down and counted what this actually cost. And you've been carrying that same cost for years with absolutely no acknowledgement. That's the thing I really want you to feel this week. Not the lawsuit, not the verdict, but just the plain fact that the moment somebody started counting this stuff, it turned out to be enormous. And your hours count too, even if nobody's put you in a courtroom to prove it. In the next episode, we're gonna pick up the other half of this because if districts now believe that this is costing them millions, you'd think that the money would go somewhere obvious, like funding more school counselors, perhaps. Well, it's not. I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast to tell you all about it. Until then, take care.