Great Neck and 10 other Long Island school districts took a good first step last week by suing Facebook and other leading social media companies to address mental health problems among students.
The school districts, which have been joined by the Herricks School District, allege the platforms have caused them “serious financial and resource disruptions.”
This includes added costs of employing mental health professionals, adapting lesson plans to educate children on alleged harm caused by social media and investigating online threats to school communities.
The districts want the social media platforms to cover the cost of the harm they have allegedly caused.
State Attorney General Letitia James and attorneys general from 32 other states filed similar suits in October 2023.
They alleged the companies created addictive features that have negatively affected young people’s mental health.
And two weeks ago, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for a cigarette-style label on social media platforms warning they are “associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.”
Murthy said in an op-ed in The New York Times that the mental health crisis among young people is an “emergency – and social media has emerged as an important contributor.”
The average daily use among adolescents of social media, he said, was 4.8 hours while studies showed that those spending more than three hours a day face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms.
Vivek cited tobacco warning labels as evidence that a surgeon general’s warning label would prompt parents to limit or monitor their children’s social media use.
Congress should act immediately to approve the warning labels.
There is bipartisan support in Congress to make social media safer.
Still, we all know that Congress has hardly been reliable in passing meaningful legislation these days, especially when the other side has as much money as social media companies.
So, we shouldn’t count on them to respond.
That makes it the responsibility of parents to limit or monitor their children’s social media use—warning labels or no warning labels.
The social media platforms deny that they are harming adolescents.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have denied the allegations of school districts.
Snapchat and Google, which also owns YouTube, both say social media actually helps adolescents.
But then again, the tobacco industry denied the harmful effects of cigarettes for decades – during which time millions of Americans died.
The school districts and their lawyers also express concern about the misinformation and disinformation available on social media – something that is a crisis for adults as well.
They also call for strong safeguards to protect how social media companies obtain students’ personal information and track their internet activity. This, too, applies to adults.
Social media companies gather and make money from users’ data that exceeds what totalitarian governments could only dream of decades ago.
Another campaign aimed at helping students that Long Island school districts should adopt—restricting cellphone use in schools—would help the fight against social media-related problems.
The words cell phone is misleading since many “cell phones” are smartphones that are, in reality, computers and camera phones wrapped into one convenient package.
They are devices that provide access to social media programs.
One-third of public K-12 teachers say that students being distracted by cell phones is a “major problem,” according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center last year.
And the older the students are, the worse the problem.
By high school, 72% of teachers said phones were a major problem.
David Banks, the chancellor of New York City Public Schools, recently said he and Mayor Eric Adams plan to ban the use of phones as early as January.
“They’re not just a distraction. Kids are fully addicted now to phones,” Banks said in an interview with local Fox affiliate WNYW. “And many parents will understand this because even when kids are not in school, it’s very hard to get them to even talk to each other anymore. They’re buried in their phones 20 hours out of the day.”
A Common Sense Media analysis of a small group of adolescents found they received nearly 240 cell phone notifications daily, a fourth of them during school.
Stateline reported that in a survey in 37 states and Alberta, Canada, the average respondent college spent 19% of their class time on a smart device for non-class use.
New York’s plan to ban cell phones follows the Los Angeles Unified School District’s decision earlier this month to ban student cell phone and social media use starting next year.
Other school districts around the country have already acted with some requiring students to leave their phones in lockers and others to store them in pouches that cannot be accessed until the end of the day.
Three states recently passed laws banning or restricting cell phone use in schools. Florida was the first to do so in 2023.
Some allow students to use their phones during lunch and between classrooms, while others ban any use in school buildings.
We’ll leave the particulars to state legislators and the governor, but New York should develop its own plan to restrict the use of cell phones in school.
As should school districts in Nassau County.
The surgeon general endorsed making classroom learning a phone-free experience.
He also called for parents to create phone-free zones around bedtime, meals and social gatherings. And to wait until middle school to allow access to social media.
Murty noted at the end of his New York Times op-ed that FAA grounded about 170 planes when a door plug came off one Boeing 737 Max 9 while the plane was in the air and a massive recall of dairy products was conducted because of a listeria contamination that claimed two lives.
He asked why we are not responding that quickly to something impacting students’ lives across the country.
Good question.
Parents, school districts and state legislators should respond as quickly to the threat cell phones and social media now pose to kids on Long Island.