I don't expect this lawsuit to succeed, but it's not entirely without merit and I do think the school district has some standing if for no other reason than because TikTok is serving videos to, and accepting uploads from, students who are actually in school.
I don't doubt that the harms are real, but I do suspect that you are putting an unreasonable burden on tik tok here.
What I'm actually most curious about is when did schools start letting kids have cell phones during the school day? I was in school roughly just before smart phones were a thing, but texting was starting to become popular if you could get a plan that didn't charge per text.
The expectation was your phone stayed in your locker if you brought it to school, and anyone caught with one during class or in the hallways during class hours would have it taken away until the day was over.
You're missing the part where TikTok knows where their users are, and know when a thousand kids are clustered together inside of a known school building in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. It's not rocket science to figure out those kids are in school. They know it.
> home schooled kids
The inability to perfectly know when a kid might be "in school" doesn't make much difference in my eye. They could easily detect it most of the time, and probably do, but choose to serve those kids anyway.
Seems ridiculous to push this responsibility on companies and app engineers. It isn't society's job to child proof the world for distracted children. Parents and guardians have to take the reigns and deal with discipline issues directly.
I wrote a similar comment below. This will still be a very difficult case to win. No one ever went after Nintendo even though they knew their devices were being used during class time. AT&T can also see teens texting in class but also do not have a legal responsibility to prevent this. Parents already have a tool-- parental controls-- to prevent social media use during school hours.
If the plaintiff can show that social media companies went out of their way to specifically target children during school hours (versus any other time of the day), there might be a stronger case. But ultimately the courts will not write new laws. This is the job of the legislature. Definitely write your congressperson.
To me the whole enterprise is totalitarian, but if I were trying to build a solution, it would look something like this:
1) Add a school control mode to the devices, similar to existing parental control mode. In this mode the school can block categories of content or usage during school hours. The school administrators don’t get to look at the student browsing data.
2) Schools can enforce a policy that unenrolled devices are banned from campus. The device can make it easy to check using something like NFC or an indicator accessible from the lockscreen (similar to the existing medical ID).
