Colorado school districts are joining hundreds of others across the U.S. in suing social media companies, alleging that platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat are contributing to the mental health crisis among their students.

School boards overseeing the state’s two largest districts — Denver Public Schools and Jeffco Public Schools — recently agreed to join the national lawsuit, as has the Aspen School District.

The Douglas County School District is also discussing whether it will move forward with the lawsuit, with employees expected to present a final recommendation to the Board of Education “at a future date,” district spokeswoman Paula Hans said.

“We want to join in on this lawsuit because we’re in agreement that harm has been done to our students in terms of the addiction to social media and what has been done to the mental health of our students,” board President Xóchitl “Sochi” Gaytán said of the DPS board’s decision, adding, “It’s affecting the learning of our students.”

She said the lawsuit has no upfront costs to DPS, but that the attorneys representing the school districts will take a percentage of any financial settlement or award that comes from the litigation.

The school districts are being represented by a national law firm coalition led by Wagstaff & Cartmell in Kansas City, Missouri.

Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against the social media companies in federal courts across the country.

The cases have been consolidated in a multidistrict litigation that will go before a California judge, who will manage discovery and pretrail briefings. Afterward, the cases will be sent back to the federal district court in the school districts’ home states for individual trials unless there is a settlement, according to a fact sheet provided by Jeffco Public Schools’ Board of Education.

Attorneys with Wagstaff & Cartmell did not respond to interview requests.

The Aspen School District filed its lawsuit in June in the U.S. District Court for Colorado against TikTok; Alphabet Inc., the Google owner that manages YouTube; Meta Platforms, which operates Facebook and Instagram; and Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat. 

Districts are the ones taking on the social media companies because their schools are where children spend most of their time and their educators are the ones on the front lines of the mental health crisis, said Aspen School District Superintendent David Baugh.

The goal, he said, is to have social media platforms become less addictive and to change their algorithms so that children will see less content that makes them feel inadequate and insecure.

“We’re just asking these social media companies to stop it,” Baugh said. “It’s unfortunate that we have to litigate this, but we think unless we litigate it, nothing will change.”

Companies that run the social media companies pushed back on the school districts’ allegations.

“Protecting kids across our platforms has always been core to our work,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement. “In collaboration with child development specialists, we have built age-appropriate experiences for kids and families on YouTube, and provide parents with robust controls. The allegations in these complaints are simply not true.”

A spokesperson for Snap Inc. said they couldn’t comment on a specific case, but that the app isn’t like other platforms because it opens to a camera rather than a feed of content.

“We aren’t an app that encourages perfection or popularity, and we vet all content before it can reach a large audience, which helps protect against the promotion and discovery of potentially harmful material,” the company said in a statement.

Representatives for TikTok and Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

The school districts’ lawsuit comes as the teen mental health crisis has worsened. The U.S. Surgeon General has issued an advisory on the affects social media can have on children and teens.

And Children’s Hospital Colorado declared a pediatric mental health “state of emergency” in 2021 as behavioral health visits to the hospital’s emergency departments increased.

“We’re still seeing very high rates of mental health crisis in our emergency rooms across the state, in our outpatient clinics,” said Dr. Ron-Li Liaw, director of the hospital’s division of child and adolescent mental health.

There’s still more research that needs to be done to understand social media’s role in adolescent mental health, but the platforms can affect children both positively and negatively, Liaw said.

Children and teens can build connections and friendships online that they might not otherwise have in their communities or school, creating a sense of belonging and a space for self-expression. This is especially so for students who are members of the LGBTQ community, Liaw said.

But children can also be exposed to harmful and inappropriate content for their age and development if safeguards aren’t in place, she said. Children’s use of social media platforms can also affect their sleep, which in turns affect their energy, Liaw added.

Cyberbullying is also a concern. A 2019 report by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office found that cyberbullying was one of several risk factors for youth suicide. (Suicide is complicated and rarely caused by a single event. Multiple factors can increase the risk of suicide, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

Unlike in the past, cyberbullying doesn’t leave when a student leaves school grounds — it follows them home, Liaw said.

In the classroom, teachers are seeing the effect of the pandemic and social media on students’ mental health, including their ability to self-regulate emotions, said Collette Simkins, a theater and art teacher at West High School in Denver.

“The attention spans of our students have just kind of decreased,” she said, adding, “We are all, as teachers, having to really adjust because that’s where our students are at.”

Lessons have to be taught in almost three- or five-minute increments before switching to something else before returning to the previous topics to keep students engaged, Simkins said.

In her theater class, Simkins has noticed her students are also more hesitant to take risks in class because they fear that they will be recorded, the video will be posted online and then they will be judged.

Now, she said, they are less willing to “allow themselves to be weird.”

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