Capitol News

The Lansing School District will be involved in an ongoing lawsuit against social media platforms.

The decision was made at the May 18 board meeting with Superintendent Ben Shuldiner saying that the mediums are an avenue for students to develop harmful and addictive tendencies that lead to outbursts.

“There was a presentation that was made by our counsel to the board officers about a possible litigation where school districts are joining to basically be part of litigation against social media,” he said. “The idea being that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., causes quite a lot of harm to children.”

Several months ago, the East Lansing Police Department wrote on a March 8 Facebook post that they were told by school officials that threats had been made on social media regarding “potential threats of active violence.”

The department added that they had tracked down the IP address in order to talk to the party who had made the threats and shut down the school district and city hall.

Shuldiner explained that they “are showing huge costs to the district, everything from TikTok challenges to destroy bathrooms to bullying and fighting, etc. We were approached by our counsel to be part of this larger litigation, and the board officers got a presentation. They seemed interested, and in order for us to move forward, we of course want to and have to take action about that.”

He believes that “certainly there's a lot of school districts over the next couple of months that are going to be part of it.” 

Board President Rachel Willis added that there was no fee to file the lawsuit, unless the district was awarded money.

“One of the things that specifically would be one of the non-monetary potential outcomes would be injunctive relief,” she added. “That would at least require some specific guardrails around parental controls. And when I heard that even if that's all we get out of this, it's better oversight and parental controls for permission for use. I think we're winning.” 

She also explained that it would be possible the district is chosen as one to present additional evidence in federal courts of the physical impact on their district, but that staff would not have to testify.

The board did vote to participate in the case, which began in the Northern District of California courts and has been labeled MDL No. 3047. 

The lawsuit calls out defendants like “Meta Platforms Inc., Instagram LLC, Snap Inc., TikTok Inc., ByteDance Inc., YouTube LLC, Google LLC and Alphabet Inc.” and accuses them of “conduct [which] results in various emotional and physical harms, including death.”