The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board in North Carolina is joining the list of nearly 200 school districts that have sued the owners of major social media platforms for contributing to the youth "mental health crisis."
The school board filed its 184-page complaint with the U.S. District Court for North Carolina's Western District Aug. 24. The suit lists Meta, Snap, TikTok and Google as defendants.
According to the complaint, social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube have made concerted efforts to "induce young people to compulsively use" their platforms, in turn negatively affecting their mental health.
"American children are suffering an unprecedented mental health crisis fueled by Defendants' addictive and dangerous social media products," the lawsuit reads. "In the past decade, Americans' engagement with social media grew exponentially, nowhere more dramatically than among our country's youth."
The suit also alleges that the explosion of social media use among children has caused them to hire more staff to deal with students' mental, emotional and social health issues, in addition to taking away from class instruction and learning.