A boy in Florida posted several Russian Roulette videos of himself on Snapchat, spinning a revolver’s chamber, aiming the gun at his head and pulling the trigger. One day, he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head. His phone was nearby.
Those are among the claims made in hundreds of lawsuits filed by individuals, school districts and state officials against social media companies, alleging they purposely addicted children and teens to their platforms, allowed dangerous content and even messages from predators to reach them and created a mental health crisis of rising rates of suicide, depression and anxiety.
A suit by Harford County’s Board of Education will be among the first to go to trial when the cases, which have been consolidated into a sprawling proceeding in federal court in Northern California, begin rolling out as expected next year. School systems have claimed that they’re owed as much as tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in compensatory damages and even more in abatement costs for years of handling the harm caused by social media companies.
Harford Schools was chosen as one of six “bellwether” cases that will test the claims made in the multi-district litigation, or MDL. It’s an important role, attorneys say, to see how arguments on each side play to a jury, and perhaps prompt the social media companies to settle rather than go through trials.
“You want to be heard first,” said Rob Jenner, a Baltimore-based attorney who is not involved in the social media cases but has co-led other mass tort actions. “You’re representative of the others.”
Baltimore attorney Matt Legg, who represents Harford and some 80 other school districts in the litigation, said while he can’t speak to why the judge chose the six jurisdictions, the bellwethers are meant to reflect the diversity of the plaintiff group, which includes districts large and small, urban and rural and from every part of the country.
“It’s a cross-cutting issue,” said Legg, an attorney with Brockstedt Mandalas Federico. “School districts across the country have had incredible damages as a result of students becoming addicted to these platforms.”
In a more than 300-page complaint, school districts argue that companies including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Roblox, Discord, Snapchat and their parent companies have “intentionally induced young people to use their platforms compulsively,” borrowing techniques from “makers of slot machines and tobacco products.
“Because children’s and adolescents’ brains are not fully developed … they are uniquely susceptible to addictive features in digital products and highly vulnerable to the resulting harm,” the suit claimed. “‘Likes’ have replaced the intimacy of adolescent friendships. Mindless scrolling has displaced the creativity of art, play, and sport.”
Harford school board president Aaron S. Poynton said that despite coming from what he calls “the tech space,” he has come to see its “dark side.”
“There’s a massive addictiveness to how these algorithms work,” said Poynton, founder and CEO of Omnipoynt Solutions, a technology management consulting company. “This is a vulnerable population. Their brains are being re-wired. They can’t make reasoned decisions with judgment and wisdom that adults can make.”
Many Maryland school districts have joined the litigation, including Baltimore City and County as well as Anne Arundel, Howard, Montgomery, Prince George’s and Frederick counties.
Baltimore City’s suit was one in a 12-district pool that underwent intensive discovery and depositions of school officials before the final six bellwethers were chosen. In addition to Harford, the test cases include districts in Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, New Jersey and South Carolina.
Despite not being included in the initial wave, Joshua Civin, the city schools’ chief legal counsel, said officials “are going to monitor this first phase very closely” and look forward to making their case when the time comes.
Like other districts, the city has a new policy that bans the use cellphones and other devices during the entire school day that goes into effect this fall. But physically removing the devices from students’ hands is only part of the solution, Civin said.
“It’s important that we have a multi-faceted approach,” Civin said. “We need social medial companies to step up as well.”'
'THE FUEL' IGNITING STUDENT CONFLICTS
Schools have long wrestled with the fallout from students’ increasing reliance on social media for years.
“Oh my goodness, it’s become the most frequent thing I deal with,” said Rhonda Richetta, principal of City Springs Elementary/Middle School in East Baltimore.
Beefs will develop over something someone said to or about someone in a chat or message, she said, and suddenly entire groups are mad at each other.
“They’re braver on social media,” said Richetta, who is in her 19th year of leading the charter school. “There’s something about not being face to face with someone, you’ll say anything.”
She said she worries about how social media has made kids self-conscious about their looks, and they’ll take pictures or make videos repeatedly until they’re satisfied with how they come off.
“They see so much on social media, there’s such a focus on physical appearance,” Richetta said, particularly for girls. They’ll turn on their camera every ten seconds and look at themselves and fix their hair constantly.”
Other school staff say they’ve contended with kids who are sleep-deprived from late-night scrolling and distracted during class by some ongoing drama or thread that they’re following — what Stacy Place Tosé, the city district’s chief of schools, calls “this cycle of constantly checking.”
Tosé said there’s a financial cost as well. Schools have had to hire additional social workers and counselors, add training for teachers and other staff and otherwise contend with the anxiety, depression, sleeplessness and even increased violence that can erupt from social media addiction.
“It becomes the igniter, the fuel that makes situations harder to resolve,” she said. “Social media has exacerbated a lot of things that have gone on with our young people.”
According to a defense brief in the court files, Baltimore City is claiming up to $91 million in compensatory damages and up to $2.9 billion in abatement costs. The district’s entire budget for fiscal 2026 is $1.87 billion. Civin said the damage estimates reflect costs accrued over a period of time that dates back to 2017.
Harford County, which has about 38,100 students, about half as many as Baltimore City, is claiming up to $41.4 million in damages and up to $1.2 billion in abatement, according to the brief.
“Schools’ limited resources are pitted against Defendants’ virtually unlimited resources in that fight,” the districts’ complaint said. “This is not a fair fight, and despite considerable effort, schools are losing the battle.”
LOOKING TO BOARD THE BIG TECH 'MONEY TRAIN?'
The social media litigation is similar to the thousands of suits brought by jurisdictions against opioid manufacturers and distributors that ultimately led to tens of billions of dollars in settlements.
“School districts see the money train coming through town,” said Clay Calvert, a non-resident senior fellow with the conservative think tank, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. “Here you have the major tech companies. They’re seen as loaded and flush with cash.”
Calvert, a professor emeritus of the University of Florida law and journalism schools, said the schools may face a “tougher sell” arguing that social media is addictive than the plaintiffs in the opioid cases did.
“It’s a behavioral addiction, like a gambling addiction, not a drug,” he said.
Plaintiffs may benefit from the current climate in which tech companies are viewed much in the same way as Big Pharma or Big Agriculture, Calvert said.
“Today, let’s face it, many people don’t like Big Tech,” he said.
And indeed, two years ago, much as his predecessors warned about the dangers of tobacco, obesity and gun violence, then Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a public health advisory about the risks social media pose to “the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” Murthy was appointed to the post first by President Obama and subsequently by President Biden.
Saying up to 95 percent of teens are on a social media platform, with a third reporting they use them “almost constantly,” the advisory raises concerns about how this affects their developing brains.
“This is a period when risk-taking behaviors reach their peak, when well-being experiences the greatest fluctuations … when identities and sense of self-worth are forming [and] brain development is especially susceptible to social pressures, peer opinions, and peer comparison,” the advisory said.
Studies have shown social media use is associated with symptoms of depression, poor body image and eating disorders, and exposes young people to bullying, harassment and explicit content, according to the advisory.
Social media companies may counter with arguments that other factors have led to children and adolescents suffering mental heath problems — such as the extended time that many of them spend away from friends when schools closed for the coronavirus pandemic.
Social media companies will also argue that they’ve improved safety in the years since some of the cases were filed.
KEEPING PREDATORS, DANGEROUS CONTENT AT BAY
Roblox, the giant video game platform where and estimated 40 percent of users are under 13, has added new safety features, including age estimation technology and a way for parents to monitor children’s activity. The company, a defendant in the MDL, had been under fire after reports of adults being arrested for abducting or abusing children whom they’d first contacted via the platform.
Recently, TikTok banned the #SkinnyTok hashtag after European regulators investigated the platform’s content promoting excessive weight loss.
CBS News reported last week that it created a TikTok account for a hypothetical 15-year-old girl and found that after it viewed videos about weight loss and cosmetic surgery, similar content appeared in its “For You” recommendations.
“We know parents are worried about their teens having unsafe or inappropriate experiences online, and that’s why we’ve significantly changed the Instagram experience for tens of millions of teens,” a spokeswoman for Meta, owner of Instagram and Facebook, said in an emailed statement to The Sun.
Introduced in September, the teen accounts automatically limit contacts and content for those under 16, unless parents permit a change to those settings. Parents can also have control over how teens use Instagram, and can limit the amount of time or period of the day that they’re on the platform, according to Meta. Additionally, the tech company said, Instagram is using AI to detect teens who may have lied about their age when creating an account, monitoring the kind of language they use, the age of their followers and whether, for example, someone has wished them a Happy 15th birthday.
Social media companies have made some improvements, but they are “baby steps in the right direction,” said Matthew Bergman, a Seattle -based attorney who represents more than 1,000 individuals who have claimed harm from social media.
He is heartened that many school districts have banned cellphones during the school day.
“I think it’s a very important part of the process,” Bergman said. “But it doesn’t absolve social media companies of their responsibilities.”
It is unclear when trials might begin in the MDL, although discussion at a recent case management conference suggested it might be next summer. U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers has not yet said what order she’ll hear the bellwether cases. Harford Schools and other jurisdictions have agreed to have their trials in the Northern California district.
At the July 18 conference, lawyers discussed how much time they would need for motions and witnesses as Gonzales Rogers warned “these aren’t the only cases on my trial calendar.” She noted two other major tech cases before her, an anti-trust action against Apple and Elon Musk v. Sam Altman, pitting the Tesla and X chief against the OpenAI head.
With the high stakes involved, and the numerous lawyers representing both sides, the proceedings are already into their third year, with anyone’s guess of how much longer they may span or how contentious they will become.
Perhaps in acknowledgment of that, Gonzales Rogers said in an order last year that in at least one other MDL, the court had mandated lawyers to have dinner together before each case management conference.
“Reportedly, this helped foster better relations among counsel,” the judge’s order said. “This Court will not require the parties to do so, but nonetheless suggests that such informal interactions do serve a positive purpose.”
©2025 Baltimore Sun. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
