After Seattle Public Schools filed lawsuits against all major social media platforms last week accusing them of damaging youth mental health, today the district announced it is settling with TikTok for a record 600,000 likes, 300,000 favorites, and 20,000 shares of a video of Superintendent Jones.
“Here at SPS, we’ll always care enough about our students’ mental health to launch futile, headline-baiting lawsuits against multi-billion-dollar social media behemoths—even if that means a couple more months or years of not having the bandwidth to hold accountable many of our own staff members for doing the same thing to our students every day,” said SPS spokesman Hal Bradshaw. “We considered extending our suit against TikTok to avoid talking about how one mental health counselor per 2,000 students was probably never enough, but they gave us an offer we couldn’t refuse: finally getting more than 20 likes on one of our SPS TikTok posts. Omg, we’re finally going viral, guys!”
SPS says they hope the settlement brings attention to how much better students’ mental health was before social media.
“I don’t know why scrolling through social media feeds accurately informing them about the mostly unabated, precipitous acceleration of climate change and fascism is causing so much anxiety and depression, but it just is,” Bradshaw said. “We need to get back to a simpler time when teens spent less time listening to TikTok therapists and learning funny dances, so they have more time getting back to escalating teen pregnancy and gang violence rates. The 90s are back in style anyway, right?”
Bradshaw pushed back against critics of SPS who say the lawsuits are just a crazy and frivolous PR stunt.
“Excuse me – how else are we supposed to fund the mental health resources we need for students? By creating a Washington state income tax that makes funding our public schools’ basic needs even remotely possible? Now THAT’s nuts.”
