Columbus City Schools has voted to join a sprawling national lawsuit accusing TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms of designing addictive products that harm children, adding Ohio's largest school district to a legal fight already worth tens of millions of dollars to school systems elsewhere in the country. The school board approved the move this week, making Columbus the first local Ohio district to sign on to the case.
The lawsuit, first reported by Axios, alleges that social media companies including TikTok, Instagram and YouTube built addictive designs that harm children and leave school districts to manage the fallout. Columbus City Schools, which operates on an annual budget exceeding $1 billion, says it has spent money on counseling, mental health services and staff training tied to students' social media use. Per the same report, a district board resolution states that Columbus students have shown excessive and problematic social media use. The district will be represented by the law firm Grossman & Kelly, which will receive a fee.
A National Legal Movement Reaches Central Ohio
Columbus's case joins claims from more than 1,000 school districts nationwide, including one from Cincinnati, according to the same Axios account. Litigation against the platforms has been consolidated in federal multidistrict litigation, MDL 3047, before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California, according to the First Amendment Encyclopedia. That court structure gathers both individual personal-injury claims and institutional public-nuisance filings from districts like Columbus's.
The legal groundwork for these claims was set in October 2024, when Judge Gonzalez Rogers upheld parts of the school district suits, limited some claims under Section 230 and the First Amendment, and rejected dismissal under the economic-loss doctrine, according to Levin Papantonio. That ruling allowed some district claims concerning platform design and related costs to proceed, rather than ending the suits at the dismissal stage.
What Other Districts Have Won
The financial stakes were demonstrated in May, when Kentucky's Breathitt County School District, acting as a national bellwether plaintiff, reached a $27 million settlement with Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube to resolve claims without the companies admitting liability, the Axios report notes. Meta paid $9 million of that total, with Snap and TikTok each contributing $8 million and YouTube adding just over $2 million. That $27 million resolution exceeded Breathitt County's entire $25 million annual operating budget, according to Reuters reporting cited in the dossier.
Juries have also weighed in directly. In March, a California jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in the nation's first youth social media addiction personal injury trial to reach a verdict, awarding an individual plaintiff $3 million, per the Axios account. That case is part of a broader California proceeding dating back to 2022, and school trials involving districts in Arizona and South Carolina are scheduled for February 2027, the outlet reports.
Columbus Has Not Put a Number on Its Claim
Columbus City Schools has not estimated how much money it might recover through the litigation, according to Axios. Michael Brown, an attorney representing the district, said Columbus City Schools seeks meaningful changes including stronger youth safety requirements and design changes limiting addictive features, in addition to any financial payout. The district has said it plans to reinvest any recovery in the well-being of its students.
Social media companies have pushed back on the underlying premise of these suits. The companies argue that plaintiffs' costs, including counseling and staffing expenses, are too indirectly connected to their platforms to establish legal responsibility, per Axios. That argument has featured in the underlying MDL litigation, while the California case cited by Axios went to trial.
Ohio's Parental Consent Law Remains Frozen
The lawsuit lands alongside a separate, unresolved fight over Ohio's youth social media law. Ohio passed a law in 2023 requiring parental consent for social media users under 16, and the measure remains blocked, according to Axios. In June, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit had overturned a lower court injunction against the law, ruling that requiring parental consent for users under 16 was a constitutional protection for minors, as reported by Courthouse News.
That win was short-lived. In August, the Sixth Circuit granted a motion by tech industry group NetChoice to stay its own mandate, keeping Ohio's parental-consent law blocked while NetChoice prepares to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to MediaPost. NetChoice represents major platforms including Meta, Google, TikTok and X. Ohio lawmakers separately required public school districts to adopt cell phone restriction policies, and Columbus City Schools instituted a mandatory no-cell-phone policy during the school day ahead of the 2025-2026 academic year, per the Ohio Department of Education.
A Separate Settlement Sends Money to the State, Not the District
Last month, Meta agreed to a $17.1 billion settlement with 47 state attorneys general, and Ohio is set to receive more than $300 million from that deal for state-level youth mental health and digital safety programs, according to Axios. That settlement included plans for new youth safety measures. But that money flows to state agencies, not to individual school district budgets, a distinction Legal Newsline has drawn in coverage of the broader litigation landscape — Columbus City Schools must pursue its own federal case to recover the direct costs of counseling, crisis intervention and administrative oversight tied to student social media use.
The lawsuit arrives as Columbus City Schools works through a severe budget crunch. The district approved $50 million in annual cuts in late 2025 and has warned of deficits potentially growing toward $100 million, driven by state funding changes, staff overspending and declining enrollment, as Hoodline has previously reported on the district's deficit. The district has already proposed closing multiple elementary and middle schools to manage the shortfall, making any eventual recovery from the social media litigation a potentially significant, if still unquantified, addition to its budget picture. According to Columbus City Schools, Columbus voters approved Issue 11 in November 2023, providing approximately $60.5 million annually for permanent improvements.
National survey data lends some support to the concerns driving the litigation. CDC survey data released in 2024 showed that high social media usage among U.S. adolescents strongly correlates with persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness, affecting roughly 50% of high school girls surveyed, according to Consumer Notice. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2023 United States Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that 77.0% of students reported frequent social media use, a national association that does not by itself establish that platforms caused Columbus schools' costs. For now, Columbus joins a growing list of districts betting that federal courts, rather than state legislatures still tangled in constitutional fights, offer the clearer path to holding platforms accountable.
