By LINDA CHION KENNEY
In what could prove to be “highly consequential for K-12 education — win, lose or settle,” Hillsborough now has a center seat in nationwide litigation against social media companies, thanks to its newly announced position as a bellwether district.
Jim Porter, counsel for the Hillsborough County school system, the nation’s seventh-largest school district, announced the district’s status at the March 19 school board meeting.
“We have been invited by the attorneys handling [the class action lawsuit] to become what is called a bellwether district, which means that we would be out in front of the litigation,” Porter said. If the lawsuit is successful, Porter added, “the financial rewards that we would receive would be much greater.”
To illustrate, Porter noted Hillsborough’s participation in a nationwide class action lawsuit against JUUl Labs and its parent company Altria, pertaining to youth vaping predatory advertising, fraud, addiction and injury.
“In that case, we were not a bellwether district, and we received approximately $13 million, which we’ll get over four years,” Porter said. Meanwhile, the Palm Beach school district, which was a bellwether district, “received about $35 million, and they’re smaller than us,” Porter said, “so the scale of [the social media case] is huge.”
The attorney stressed that the cost to participate in the social media lawsuit is “absolutely nothing,” as the case is being handled by an outside law firm. A bellwether trial, especially common in multi-district litigation practice, is a test case intended to try a widely contested issue.
No vote was necessary, as school board members in September voted to join the class action lawsuit, which stems from an investigation that attorneys say has revealed that social media companies engaged in deceptive practices by designing and promoting their products to attract and addict children.
As of a January report in Education Week, more than 200 school districts had joined to sue the major social media companies, starting with a single lawsuit filed by Seattle public schools a year earlier. According to the highly respected publication covering national K-12 education, this has “morphed into an all-out offensive against the social media platforms that adolescents spend multiple hours a day on.”
The article described the case as “highly consequential for K-12 education — win, lose or settle.”In a statement about the case from Wagstaff & Cartmell, the case targets social media companies, like Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube/Google, and represents “school districts and public entities combating the youth mental health crisis caused by social media companies.” Attorneys contend that “a new generation of children are suffering from addiction and other related mental health issues, which has uniquely impacted schools and forced them to incur a multitude of costs to address this problem.” “Everything about these products—from inadequate age verification measures, insufficient parental controls, endless scrolling, constant notifications and targeted algorithms—have been designed to addict teen and adolescent users,” the statement reads.
The Wagstaff and Cartmell statement notes also that the case against social media companies is predicated on a cause of action known as “public nuisance,” which has been used “to redress several similar public health epidemics, most notably the JUUL e-cigarette epidemic, current opioid crisis and the original tobacco litigation in the 1990’s.”
In summing up his comments about the case at the March 19 board meeting, Porter said it was “really significant” to be named a bellwether district, “and it’s something, fingers crossed, that will be very beneficial to the district down the road.” Meanwhile, Hillsborough school officials on the district’s website offer resources for internet safety, with topics covering online safety, digital relationships and communication, digital footprint and reputation, information literacy, creative credit and copyright, self-mage and identity, cyberbully, cybersecurity and sexting. The district’s social media policy is covered as well. Visit www.hillsboroughschools.org/Page/6356/.