Recent reportage distinguishes two "buckets" of TikTok harm -- spying on specific people versus the Chinese party-state swaying population segments from afar -- but destroying kids' mental health, so untidy a third bucket since it more obviously implicates domestic companies too, is clearly a national security matter. In 1983, an education commission's report A Nation at Risk warned: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Now, four decades later, a 2023 study found teens use phones every day for a median of over four hours, almost always including at school; half watch TikTok, some upward of seven hours daily. Meanwhile thirteen year olds' "basic skills" are in "historic" decline. Greater screen time, linked to deficits in child language skills, dominos into occupational problems, psychopathology, poor school readiness. ByteDance executive Alex Zhu, cofounder of an app the Chinese company merged into TikTok, said in 2016 that Chinese "teens are super busy in school studying for tests, so they don't have the time and luxury to play social media apps," but "Teenagers in the U.S. are a golden audience."

Whether remotely triggered from Beijing, Silicon Valley, or elsewhere, those targeted perform such autogenocide, as Heather Marsh calls it, on themselves. Distractions and inclusion-exclusion group dynamics have been with humans forever. But this century's high-tech, gamified accelerations have lately seen teachers begging parents for help and posting that they have entire elementary classes unable to tie shoes and first graders in diapers. None of that is a prescription for developing a strong civil service, well-functioning civil society, or even just plain happy, thriving neighborhoods. "This is what happens when the base unit of the building blocks of power start to crumble," Marsh wrote in 2023. "If women are refusing to raise children to the requirements of schools, the whole system cannot continue as it was."

But some school districts and state legislatures are fighting back, if with mixed-bag approaches and in fits and starts.

In 2023, Seattle Public Schools (technically, Seattle School District No. 1) sued, among others, ByteDance, YouTube, and Meta (Facebook and Instagram's parent company), alleging that, in order to maximize ad revenue, the companies intentionally "exploit the psychology and neuropsychology of their users into spending more and more time on their platforms" including by targeting "the vulnerable brains of youth." Underfunded as public education generally is, the plantiff pointed out that the accused companies' harm to students forced the district to divert and spend resources for hiring additional counselors, investigating rising cyberbullying, teaching schoolkids about social media dangers, trying to keep the addictive platforms out of classrooms, and on and on."Plantiffs cannot keep up with the increased need for mental health services," they said, arguing that under Washington state public nuisance law, the tech titans should be the ones to pay for the fallout.

That lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed in December 2023 from the Northern District of California, but was refiled in the Superior Court of California, Los Angeles County as part of JCCP coordination with some 600 other school districts. That's before Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl. (With complex discovery, scheduling, etc. afoot, the JCCP in California state court is coordinating with the separate but parallel Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) ongoing in federal court, to which Seattle Public Schools isn't a party at the time of this writing.)

Created by Douglas Lucas in May 2024 as a footnote for his Aug. 27, 2024 article at Foreign Policy, "Banning TikTok Won't Keep Your Data Safe: Pompous billionaires, authoritarian regimes, and opaque oligarchs are hoarding our data. Only an alternative online ecosystem will stop them." (Gift link; alternate hyperlink.)