School District Lawsuits Over Social Media Impact on Student’s Mental Health Cleared To Move Forward

The U.S. District Judge presiding over all teen social media addiction lawsuits brought throughout the federal court system has rejected efforts by the owners of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other major platforms to dismiss claims brought by school districts nationwide, which seek damages stemming from mental health problems among students in recent years.

The school district social media lawsuits are just one piece of the litigation facing Meta, Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, YouTube LLC, Snap Inc., TikTok Inc., ByteDance Inc. and other popular internet companies, involving allegations that the platforms were intentionally designed to manipulate and maximize user engagement, as part of a coordinated effort to addict teens to their apps.

These tactics have led to widespread social media addiction among a generation of teens, allegedly causing self-destructive behavior, anxiety, depression, eating disorders and other long-term psychological damage.

School district lawsuits seek reimbursement for costs incurred in recent years establishing various mental health programs, mobile crisis units and other measures to combat social media addictions among students. However, the platforms also face hundreds of individual lawsuits brought by families of teens and young adults who experienced specific injuries from their social media addiction.

Given common questions of fact and law raised in complaints filed through the federal court system all social media lawsuits over teen addiction were consolidated in an MDL last year, centralizing the cases before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California, for coordinated discovery and pretrial proceedings. This included both the individual injury lawsuits, as well as the school district lawsuits.

Early in the litigation, the social media platforms filed a motion to dismiss lawsuits filed by school districts, arguing that any costs incurred dealing with the mental health effects from social media addiction among their students were too remote from the actions of the individual platforms to move forward.

On October 24, Judge Rogers issued an order (PDF) rejecting attempts to dismiss the claims entirely, finding that negligence causes of action can move forward under the “derivative injury” rule. However, the court did impose certain limits on the scope of the claims, finding that certain theories of injury are not cognizable under the First Amendment, or involve non-foreseeable intervening conduct of third parties, which will need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis.

“[W]ith respect to the expenditure of resources to manage youth mental health and addiction issues, the school districts’ alleged injuries are both a sufficiently direct and foreseeable consequence of the defendants’ deliberate design of their platforms to foster compulsive use in minors,” Judge Rogers said in a 45 page order.

Judge Rogers noted that claims of negligence are a “flexible mechanism” for redressing causes of harm in such situations, allowing the claims to move forward into the discovery and bellwether process.

Student Social Media Addiction Lawsuit Bellwether Trials

As the multifaceted litigation moves forward for lawsuits involving both individual student injuries and school district claims, Judge Rogers has indicated that several bellwether trials will be held, to help gauge how juries are likely to respond to certain evidence and testimony likely to be repeated throughout the claims.

In March, Judge Rogers scheduled the first social media addiction bellwether trial to begin on October 25, 2025, and the parties have identified a pool of injury claims that are currently going through case-specific discovery in preparation for this trial date. However, last month that first trial was pushed back, and is now not likely to begin until sometime in 2026.

Although the outcome of these early trial dates will not have any binding impact on other families pursuing lawsuits, or claims brought by school districts, the average payouts awarded by the juries may impact the amount the companies may be required to pay in any social media settlements over the teen addiction problems.