When a school district sues social media companies claiming they can’t educate kids because Instagram filters exist, that district is announcing to the world that it has fundamentally failed at its core mission. That’s exactly what New York City just did with its latest lawsuit against Meta, TikTok, and other platforms.
The message is unmistakable: “We run the largest school system in America with nearly a million students, but we’re unable to teach children that filtered photos aren’t real or help them develop the critical thinking skills needed to navigate the modern world. So we’re suing someone else to fix our incompetence.”
This is what institutional failure looks like in 2025.
NYC first got taken in by this nonsense last year, as Mayor Adams said all social media was a health hazard and toxic waste. However, that lawsuit was rolled into the crazy, almost impossible to follow, consolidated version of that lawsuit in California that currently has over 2300 filings on the docket. So, apparently, NYC dropped that version, and has now elected to sue, sue again. With the same damn law firm, Keller Rohrback, that kicked off this trend and are the lawyers behind a big chunk of these lawsuits.
The actual complaint is bad, and everyone behind it should feel bad. It’s also 327 pages, and there’s no fucking way I’m going to waste my time going through all of it, watching my blood pressure rise as I have to keep yelling at my screen “that’s not how any of this works.”
The complaint leads with what should be Exhibit A for why NYC schools are failing their students—a detailed explanation of adolescent brain development that perfectly illustrates why education matters:
Children and adolescents are especially vulnerable to developing harmful behaviors because their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed. Indeed, it is one of the last regions of the brain to mature. In the images below, the blue color depicts brain development.
Because the prefrontal cortex develops later than other areas of the brain, children and adolescents, as compared with adults, have less impulse control and less ability to evaluate risks, regulate emotions and regulate their responses to social rewards.
Stop right there. NYC just laid out the neurological case for why education exists. Kids have underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes? They struggle with impulse control, risk evaluation, and emotional regulation? THAT’S LITERALLY WHY WE HAVE SCHOOLS.
The entire premise of public education is that we can help children develop these exact cognitive and social skills. We teach them math because their brains can learn mathematical reasoning. We teach them history so they can evaluate evidence and understand cause and effect. We teach them literature so they can develop empathy and critical thinking.
But apparently, when it comes to digital literacy—arguably one of the most important skills for navigating modern life—NYC throws up its hands and sues instead of teaches.
This lawsuit is a 327-page confession of educational malpractice.
The crux of the lawsuit is, effectively, “kids like social media, and teachers just can’t compete with that shit.”
In short, children find it particularly difficult to exercise the self-control required to regulate their use of Defendants’ platforms, given the stimuli and rewards embedded in those platforms, and as a foreseeable and probable consequence of Defendants’ design choices tend to engage in addictive and compulsive use. Defendants engaged in this conduct even though they knew or should have known that their design choices would have a detrimental effect on youth, including those in NYC Plaintiffs’ community, leading to serious problems in schools and the community.
By this logic, basically any products that children like are somehow a public nuisance.
This lawsuit is embarrassing to the lawyers who brought it and to the NYC school system.
Take the complaint’s hysterical reaction to Instagram filters, which perfectly captures the educational opportunity NYC is missing:
Defendants’ image-altering filters cause mental health harms in multiple ways. First, because of the popularity of these editing tools, many of the images teenagers see have been edited by filters, and it can be difficult for teenagers to remain cognizant of the use of filters. This creates a false reality wherein all other users on the platforms appear better looking than they actually are, often in an artificial way. As children and teens compare their actual appearances to the edited appearances of themselves and others online, their perception of their own physical features grows increasingly negative. Second, Defendants’ platforms tend to reward edited photos, through an increase in interaction and positive responses, causing young users to prefer the way they look using filters. Many young users believe they are only attractive when their images are edited, not as they appear naturally. Third, the specific changes filters make to individuals’ appearances can cause negative obsession or self-hatred surrounding particular aspects of their appearance. The filters alter specific facial features such as eyes, lips, jaw, face shape, and face slimness—features that often require medical intervention to alter in real life
Read that again. The complaint admits that “it can be difficult for teenagers to remain cognizant of the use of filters” and that kids struggle to distinguish between edited and authentic images.
That’s not a legal problem. That’s a curriculum problem.
A competent school system would read that paragraph and immediately start developing age-appropriate digital literacy programs. Media literacy classes. Critical thinking exercises about online authenticity. Discussions about self-image and social comparison that have been relevant since long before Instagram existed.
Instead, NYC read that paragraph and decided the solution is to sue the companies rather than teach the kids.
This is educational malpractice masquerading as child protection. If you run a million-student school system and your response to kids struggling with digital literacy is litigation rather than education, you should resign and let someone competent take over.
They’re also getting sued for… not providing certain features, like age verification. Even though, as we keep pointing out, age verification is (1) likely unconstitutional outside of the narrow realm of pornographic content, and (2) a privacy and security nightmare for kids.
The broader tragedy here extends beyond one terrible lawsuit. NYC is participating in a nationwide trend of school districts abandoning their educational mission in favor of legal buck-passing. These districts, often working with the same handful of contingency-fee law firms, have decided it’s easier to blame social media companies than to do the hard work of preparing students for digital citizenship.
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what schools are supposed to do. We don’t shut down the world to protect children from it—we prepare children to navigate the world as it exists. That means teaching them to think critically about online content, understand privacy and security, develop healthy relationships with technology, and build the cognitive skills to resist manipulation.
Every generation gets a moral panic or two, and apparently “social media is destroying kids’ brains” is our version of moral panics of years past. We’ve seen this movie before: the waltz would corrupt young women’s morals, chess would stop kids from going outdoors, novels would rot their brains on useless fiction, bicycles would cause moral decay, radio would destroy family conversation, pinball machines would turn kids into delinquents, television would make them violent, comic books would corrupt their minds, and Dungeons & Dragons would lead them to Satan worship.
As society calmed down, eventually, after each of those, we now look back on those moral panics as silly, hysterical overreactions. You would hope that a modern education system would take note that they have an opportunity to use these new forms of media as a learning opportunity.
But faced with social media, America’s school districts have largely given up on education and embraced litigation. That should terrify every parent more than any Instagram filter ever could.
The real scandal isn’t that social media exists. It’s that our schools have become so risk-averse and educationally bankrupt that they’ve forgotten their core purpose: preparing young people to be thoughtful, capable adults in the world they’ll actually inherit.
