School districts across the country are increasingly taking on social media, filing lawsuits that argue that Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube have helped create the nation’s surging youth mental health crisis and should be held accountable.
Media
School systems sue social media companies for unprecedented toll on student mental health
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The legal action started in January, with a suit by Seattle Public Schools, and picked up momentum in recent weeks as school districts in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida have followed. Lawyers involved say many more are planned.
San Mateo County, home to 23 school districts and part of the Silicon Valley in northern California, filed a 107-page complaint in federal court last week, alleging that social media companies used advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to create addictive platforms that cause young people harm.
“The results have been disastrous,” the filing asserts, saying more children than ever struggle with their mental health amid excessive use of the platforms. “There is simply no historic analog to the crisis the nation’s youth are now facing,” it said.
The suit points to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing climbing rates of depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts among the nation’s high school students. The increasing popularity of social media, it contends, “tracks precisely” with a youth mental health decline. It quotes President Biden’s remarks in his State of the Union address that tactics used by social media companies are an “experiment they are running on our children for profit.”
San Mateo County Superintendent of Schools Nancy Magee said in an interview that rampant social media use has left a mark on schools, to the point where administrators have observed a spike in mental health emergencies during the school day. There have been “very serious” cyberbullying incidents related to social media — with content “nearly impossible” to get the companies to take down — and school threats that have kept students at home, she said.
Magee also pointed to other harms — for example, vandalism in high school bathrooms during what was called the “Devious Lick Challenge.” Students across the country stole soap dispensers, flooded toilets, shattered mirrors — then showed off their stunts on TikTok.
“The social media companies create the platforms and the tools but the impacts are felt by schools, and I would really like to see an understanding of that, ” Magee said. “And then that the education community receives the resources in both people and tools to help support students adequately.”
Social media companies did not directly comment on the litigation but in written statements said they prioritize teen safety and described measures to protect young users.
TikTok cited age-restricted features, with limits on direct messaging and livestreams, as well as private accounts by default for younger teens. It also pointed to limits on nighttime notifications; parental controls, called Family Pairing, that allow parents to control content, privacy and screen time; and expert resources, including suicide prevention and eating disorder helplines, directly reachable from the app.
You Tube, which is owned by Google, has Family Link, which allows parents to set reminders, limit screen time and block certain types of content on supervised devices, said spokesperson José Castañeda. Protections for users under 18 include defaulting uploads to private and well-being reminders for breaks and bedtime.
Meta, which owns Instagram, said more than 30 tools support teens and families, including age-verification technology, notifications to take regular breaks and features that allow parents to limit time on Instagram. “We don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, and of the content we remove or take action on, we identify over 99 percent of it before it’s reported to us,” said Antigone Davis, Global Head of Safety of Meta.
Snapchat said its platform “curates content from known creators and publishers and uses human moderation to review user generated content before it can reach a large audience.” Doing so “greatly reduces the spread and discovery of harmful content,” a spokesperson said, adding that Snapchat works with mental health organizations to provide in-app tools and resources for users.
The first of the lawsuits, filed Jan. 6 for Seattle Public Schools, said research shows that the social media companies “exploit the same neural circuitry as gambling and recreational drugs to keep consumers using their products as much as possible” and that social media is so popular it is used by 90 percent of those ages 13 to 17. One study showed users check Snapchat 30 times a day, it said. Nearly 20 percent of teens use YouTube “almost constantly,” it said.
Seattle has seen a surge in the share of youth “who say they cannot stop or control their anxiety, who feel so sad and hopeless they stop doing the activities they used to love, who are considering suicide,” or made plans to take their lives or attempted suicide, the suit said.
Outside Philadelphia, officials in Bucks County filed suit Tuesday against the social media companies, laying out a similar case. It’s not because they are against social media, said Commission Chair Bob Harvie — who points out the county itself has used TikTok — but rather that the algorithms that get teens to “keep looking, keep focusing, keep scrolling” take a toll on kids’ mental health.
“The way we look at it, it’s not unlike the way cigarette companies used to manipulate nicotine levels to make sure that people kept smoking,” Harvie said. “… Our number one priority is just to get the behavior of these companies to change.”
School districts are generally seeking that the conduct of social media companies be declared a public nuisance, that their practices change and that damages be paid to fund prevention, education and treatment for excessive and problematic use of social media.
The 109-page lawsuit on behalf of Bucks County highlights worsening mental health data, saying the problems have “advanced in lockstep with the growth of social media platforms deliberately designed to attract and addict youth to the platforms by amplifying harmful material, dosing users with dopamine hits, and thereby driving youth engagement and advertising revenue.”
Later, it says social apps “hijack a tween and teen compulsion – to connect – that can be even more powerful than hunger or greed.”
In northern New Jersey, the School District of the Chathams has invested increasing resources over the years to help students struggling with anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts, said attorney Michael Innes, whose firm is representing the district in its litigation filed in mid February. The firm filed a similar action for another New Jersey school district, Irvington Public Schools, in early March.
“We’ve spoken to school districts that have made a decision between spending on mental health and spending on classroom education,” Innes said.
For Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist and senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, the lawsuits may make a lot of sense but parents, coaches and others involved in teens’ lives need to become more effective in talking to adolescents about the benefits and hazards of social media.
One problem, Weissbourd said, is that many parents are preoccupied with their own devices. In recent research, he said, many teens reported that their primary caregiver was using a smartphone or computer at times when they wanted help or to be together.
Marisol Garcia, a staff therapist at the Family Institute at Northwestern University, said social media can be a powerful means of connection but the downsides are significant too. She was not surprised schools have begun filing lawsuits, saying they want to do what they think is good for their students’ mental and physical health.
The long-term ramifications of social media use — on attention span, social skills, mental health — are unclear, she said. The legal action, she said, “could be a positive thing.”
Media
Henry Winter’s surprise exit a sign of the fracturing evolution of the football media – The Guardian
For more than three decades, English football media was a Winter wonderland. An eternal Winter. Winter extending an icy grip over the landscape. But even Winter, it seems, can end up being frozen out. Given the cold shoulder. It’s time to wrap up for Winter, now this particular Winter’s tale has reached its final chapter.
That, with apologies, was the opening paragraph to a column about Henry Winter’s dismissal by the Times, written in the style of Henry Winter for the Times. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible you haven’t the faintest idea what, or who, I’m talking about. Which to an oblique and probably self-defeating extent is actually the point.
Winter is the chief football writer of the Times, at least until he was suddenly made redundant last week. It was the dismissal heard around the world, if by “the world” you mean “the WhatsApp groups of newspaper sports journalists”. And in a low-key, navel-gazing sort of way, a move that actually tells us quite a lot about how, and through whom, we consume football these days.
Because over his 35 years at the Independent, the Telegraph and the Times, Winter probably became the closest thing football journalism has ever had to a celebrity. Players know him. Managers know him. He was ubiquitous, respected, pretty much untouchable. When the Times hired him they announced the signing with a lavish television advertising campaign. And though he rarely set out to ruffle feathers, when he pursued a cause – the Hillsborough survivors’ fight for justice, or his distaste at the cross on the recent England kit – his voice invariably lent that cause extra weight.
Winter and I were colleagues at the Telegraph for seven years, but our interactions were brief. Invariably he was out on the road: notching up hundreds of games a season, thousands of miles, match reports by the kilo, interviews by the ream, pre-season tours, under-21 tournaments, Friday night Championship games: every waking second of every waking day funnelled into this existence, a career that became a life, and vice versa.
On the writing side you might even describe him as a kind of personal inspiration: a reminder of the timeless virtues of simple, elegant prose. Extremely short sentences. Like these. No unnecessary adjectives, no undue nuance, no pun too excruciating. Barcelona v Chelsea is “the Catalans among the London pigeons”. Birmingham 0-7 Liverpool is “seven-up for Liverpool, grapes of wrath for Steve Bruce”. Mario Götze’s winning goal in the 2014 World Cup final becomes “Mario de Janeiro.” The fans are invariably “wonderful” or “magnificent”.
And what was this existence? Perhaps from a non-industry perspective, the most macabrely fascinating aspect of Winter’s career is the way it represents one of the media’s last concerted attempts to embody what you might term “the authentic voice of football”: authoritative, omniscient, unaffiliated, gospel. Ultra on the streets, Shakespeare on the sheets. And by extension the idea that this sport is a common space, a singular space. That when we watch football we are all essentially watching the same thing, together.
This is, in case you hadn’t noticed, an idea that has been in recession for quite some time, a process that largely mirrors the evolution of the football media as a whole. But for decades it was the way we all received the game: through the giants of television and radio, the doyens of Fleet Street, camel-coated men who offered not so much opinion but judgement. When Alan Hansen said something on Match of the Day, or Brian Woolnough opined in the Sun, it became truth by the very dint of being uttered, by the sheer absence of alternative or dissenting voices.
More latterly that role was assumed by Twitter, a website where – as a friend once memorably described it – journalists could pretend they were celebrities and celebrities could pretend they were journalists. Naturally Winter, with his million-plus followers, was at the vanguard of the migration, holding court in the digital town square, still road-testing those puns, still toasting those magnificent fans.
But, under the surface, the terrain has been fracturing for years: attention and influence draining away not just from traditional newspapers, but from everybody. Even television has lost its power to unite us: its live action now mostly paywalled, its pundits now invariably partisan, its content disposable. What once constituted our shared football space has splintered into a million galaxies: forums and fan media, podcasts and YouTube channels, blogs and specialist websites, Reddit and TikTok, the curated feeds that allow us to view a game through whatever filter we choose: tribal, social, banter, fantasy team.
The old world – a drowned world of traditional gatekeepers and newspaper dukes and lukewarm Gareth Southgate quotes embargoed until 10.30pm Friday – is gone. And perhaps the last people yet to notice are the dwindling few still inside it.
What might an “authentic voice of football” sound like in 2024? What kind of journalist could meaningfully speak to all the sport’s various silos? They would need to be an expert in men’s and women’s football, the game’s social and historical context, geopolitics and finance, transfers and tactics, analytics and sports science, banter and rage, all the major European leagues and quite a few others besides. And, of course, they would be conversant in all the dizzying new languages of visual media, across all conceivable formats and platforms. That person, in case you’re wondering, doesn’t actually exist. It’s all football. But increasingly, it’s too big for any one entity to conceive, let alone cover.
And for the avoidance of doubt, none of this is necessarily a bad thing. For all its inequities and inefficiencies, the landscape of football media is broader and richer place than it has ever been. You have Fabrizio Romano for transfers, Grace Robertson for tactics, Versus for football culture, Stadio podcast for the global game, Mark Goldbridge for performative rants about Erik ten Hag, the Guardian for chin-strokey think-pieces written by the guys picked last at PE. In a way, there has never been a better time to consume football. The garden is blooming. But for spring to begin – and yes, you know it’s coming – first winter has to end.
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Media
Pakistan says it blocked social media platform X over ‘national security’ – Al Jazeera English
The platform remained inaccessible to users, but government officials refused to acknowledge any restrictions, until now.
Pakistan blocked access to social media platform X around the time of elections in February, the interior ministry said, citing national security concerns.
Users had reported problems using the platform, formerly known as Twitter, since mid-February, when jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party called for protests against a government official’s admission of vote manipulation.
At the time, both the government and the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the state regulatory body, refused to comment on the outages that were also widely reported by internet watchdog groups.
On Wednesday, the Ministry of Interior mentioned the shutdown in a written court submission.
“It is very pertinent to mention here that the failure of Twitter/X to adhere to the lawful directives of the government of Pakistan and address concerns regarding the misuse of its platform necessitated the imposition of a ban,” said the report, seen by the Reuters news agency, which confirmed the long-suspected shutdown.
“The decision to impose a ban on Twitter/X in Pakistan was made in the interest of upholding national security, maintaining public order, and preserving the integrity of our nation,” the ministry said, according to the report submitted to the Islamabad High Court in a challenge to the shutdown.
It additionally said the platform had been reluctant to resolve the issue.
Activists challenging the ban said it was designed to quash dissent after the February 8 general elections that were marred by widespread opposition claims of vote rigging and protests.
The authorities had shut down mobile services on the day of the elections, citing security concerns. NetBlocks, an internet monitor, also reported that users could not access X on February 10 while the country was awaiting the results.
The decision to temporarily block X was taken after considering confidential reports from Pakistan’s intelligence and security agencies, the report said.
It claimed that “hostile elements operating on Twitter/X have nefarious intentions to create an environment of chaos and instability, with the ultimate goal of destabilising the country and plunging it into some form of anarchy”.
The Sindh High Court on Wednesday ordered the government to restore the platform within one week, the AFP news agency reported, citing lawyer Moiz Jaaferi, who launched a separate challenge against the ban.
Access to X has been sporadic, occasionally available for short cycles based on the internet service provider, forcing users to use virtual private networks, said Alp Toker of NetBlocks.
Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) party is the most prolific user of social media platforms, particularly after the country’s traditional media began censoring news about the former cricket star and his party in the run-up to the polls. Khan has 20.6 million followers on X.
Media
Biden’s dig at Trump Media stock plummet draws laughs from crowd – CNN
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