Meta settles social media addiction case with Breathitt County School District
Meta, the parent firm of social-media platforms Facebook and Instagram, settled a social media addiction lawsuit with Breathitt County on Thursday, May 21.
Ronald Johnson, a Louisville lawyer and the lead attorney for Breathitt County Schools in the case, confirmed the resolution to the Herald-Leader on Friday, Valerie Honeycutt Spears reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader.
“Our focus remains on pursuing justice for the remaining 1,200 school districts who have filed cases,” Johnson told Honeycutt Spears. Johnson said he worked with Chris Seeger and Previn Warren in the case.
BBC reports that “Breathitt County School District’s case was chosen as a test case for more than a thousand U.S. school districts which have pursued claims against social media companies.” The lawsuit was set to go to trial next month in federal court in Oakland, California.
The lawsuit claimed that Meta intentionally designed and deployed addictive technologies, resulting in “significant costs for mental health counseling, tech programs and other services that schools paid for,” Honeycutt Spears reports.
The school district settled the same case last week with three other defendants: TikTok, Snap Inc., and Google’s YouTube, multiple media outlets report.
Terms of the settlement with Meta have not been disclosed, but the school district’s lawsuit was seeking more than $60 million in damages, according to the Herald-Leader.