The legal strategy that school districts in Texas and across the country are using in a lawsuit against the big social media companies is one governments have employed against major corporations for the past 30 years, an expert in tort law said.

Last week, Fort Worth ISD’s board voted to hire a pair of Texas-based law firms to represent it in the lawsuit, which already includes more than 200 other school districts nationwide. In the suit, the districts are seeking damages for the cost of responding to a youth mental health crisis they say was fueled by social media.

“What the school districts and their lawyers are doing, they’ve taken a page out of the tobacco litigation from the 1990s,” said Randy Gordon, a professor at the Texas A&M University School of Law.

Lawsuit targets four social media giants

The lawsuit, which was filed last year in San Francisco federal court, targets four big social media companies: Google, which owns YouTube; Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram; ByteDance, owner of TikTok; and Snap, owner of Snapchat. In the suit, the school districts allege that the platforms those companies run “have rewired how adolescents think, learn, feel, and behave,” contributing to a mental health crisis that the districts had to deal with.

Among other things, the suit alleges that the platforms are designed in a way that encourages addiction among children and teens, and doesn’t provide parents with adequate safeguards. They point out that children are especially vulnerable to addiction because their brains aren’t fully developed.

Fort Worth ISD’s board hasn’t officially voted to join the suit, but if it does, it won’t be the first Texas district to do so: Houston ISD and San Antonio’s Northside ISD joined the suit earlier this month.

Legal strategy succeeded in tobacco, opioids lawsuits

Gordon, the Texas A&M law professor, said the strategy the districts are using goes back decades. In the 1950s, dozens of individual plaintiffs sued tobacco manufacturers for damages, saying using those companies’ products caused the plaintiffs to have medical issues like lung damage and emphysema.

But those lawsuits were unsuccessful, he said, because juries were persuaded by the tobacco companies’ arguments that it was commonly known that smoking was unhealthy, so the plaintiffs were responsible for their own decisions.

But in the 1990s, Gordon said, state attorneys general came up with a different strategy: Instead of suing on behalf of individual people who had suffered health effects as a result of tobacco use, they began filing litigation seeking compensation for the medical costs their states had been forced to absorb.

In November 1998, the four largest cigarette manufacturers agreed to a settlement with 46 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. As a part of the settlement, the tobacco companies agreed to pay hundreds of billions of dollars and curtail their marketing practices. More recently, Gordon noted that states and tribal governments used a similar strategy when they sued pharmaceutical companies for their roles in the opioid epidemic.

Gordon said the school districts’ lawsuit against the big social media companies is similar in that it seeks to hold private companies accountable for their role in creating a public health crisis — in this case, a crisis of mental health. But a key difference is that, while lawyers in the tobacco and opioid lawsuits had ample evidence to show that those products led to serious health consequences, Gordon said the school districts may have a harder time establishing a clear link between social media use and mental health issues.

Although there’s strong research to suggest that a youth mental health crisis exists, he said, it could be a challenge for the school districts to show that social media, rather than some other driver like video games or the online world more broadly, is the primary cause.

“There’s not an obvious straight line like there is with opioid addiction, for instance,” he said.

______

©2025 Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Visit star-telegram.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.