Dear Commons Community,

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced yesterday the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Hur, to oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into the discoveries of classified documents kept by President Biden after he left office as Vice President under Barack Obama.

President Biden acknowledged yesterday that a document with classified markings from his time as vice president was found in his “personal library” at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, along with other documents found in his garage, days after it was disclosed that sensitive documents were also found at the office of his former institute in Washington.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Biden told reporters at the White House that he was “cooperating fully and completely” with a Justice Department investigation into how classified information and government records were stored. He did not say when the latest series of documents were found, only that his lawyers’ review of potential storage locations was completed Wednesday night. Lawyers found the first set on Nov. 2, days before the midterm elections, but publicly revealed that development only on Monday.

Richard Sauber, a special counsel to the president, said after the initial documents were found by Biden’s personal lawyers, they examined other locations where records might have been shipped after Biden left the vice presidency in 2017.

Sauber said a “small number” of documents with classified markings were found in a storage space in Biden’s garage in Wilmington, with one document being located in an adjacent room. Biden later revealed that the other location was his personal library.

Biden said the Department of Justice was “immediately notified” after the documents were located and that department lawyers took custody of the records. The first batch of documents had been turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration.

Regardless of the Justice Department review, the revelation that Biden potentially mishandled classified or presidential records is proving to be a political headache for Biden, who said former President Donald Trump was “irresponsible” for keeping hundreds of such records at his private club in Florida.

New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, said of the latest news: “I think Congress has to investigate this.”

“Here’s an individual that sat on ‘60 Minutes’ that was so concerned about President Trump’s documents locked in behind, and now we find that this is a vice president keeping it for years out in the open for different locations.”

The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee has requested that intelligence agencies conduct a “damage assessment” of potentially classified documents. Ohio Rep. Mike Turner on Thursday also requested briefings from Attorney General Merrick Garland and the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, on their reviews by Jan. 26.

“The presence of classified information at these separate locations could implicate the President in the mishandling, potential misuse, and exposure of classified information,” Turner wrote the officials.

Garland was to deliver a statement later Thursday but the Justice Department didn’t provide details.

Earlier this week, the White House confirmed that the department was reviewing “a small number of documents with classified markings” found at the Washington office. Biden’s lawyers had discovered the material at the offices of the Penn Biden Center and then immediately called the National Archives about the discovery, the White House said. Biden kept an office there after he left the vice presidency in 2017 until shortly before he launched his Democratic presidential campaign in 2019.

The revelation that additional classified documents were uncovered by Biden’s team came hours after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dodged questions about Biden’s handling of classified information and the West Wing’s management of the discovery.

She had said Wednesday that the White House was committed to handling the matter in the “right way,” pointing to Biden’s personal attorneys’ immediate notification of the National Archives.

But she refused to say when Biden himself had been briefed, whether there were any more classified documents potentially located at other unauthorized locations, and why the White House waited more than two months to reveal the discovery of the initial batch of documents.

The Justice Department is reviewing the records that were found at the Penn Biden Center and Garland has asked John Lausch, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, to review the the matter, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press this week. That person also was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Lausch is one of the few U.S. attorneys to be held over from Trump’s administration.

Biden has said he was “surprised to learn that there are any government records that were taken there to that office” but his lawyers “did what they should have done” when they immediately called the National Archives.

The revelation also may complicate the Justice Department’s consideration of whether to bring charges against Trump. The Republican is trying to win back the White House in 2024 and has repeatedly claimed the department’s inquiry into his own conduct amounted to “corruption.”

A political mess for the Democrats!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Governor Kathy Hochul is pressing the state’s public colleges and universities to make abortion pills available to students — a measure that has been stalled in the legislature since 2019.

Hochul, who outlined her plans on Tuesday in her 2023 State of the State, said she would ensure all colleges and universities in the State University of New York and City University of New York systems either offer abortion pills at student health centers or form relationships with local reproductive health care providers to refer students.  As reported by the New York Daily News.

“Knowing the struggle that is accessing reproductive care on campuses,” said Nihakira Rao, co-founder of the student advocacy group the Reproductive Justice Collective, “there’s a difference between something being legal and something being truly accessible.”

Hazel Crampton-Hays, a spokeswoman for the governor, said the proposal “can either be done administratively by these respective institutions or legislatively.”

Spokesmen for both systems indicated they would work with the governor to ensure access to reproductive health care. The rep for CUNY added that all health centers have practitioners who can at minimum prescribe the pills or make referrals to nearby providers.

A bill in Albany to offer abortion medication on public college campuses, proposed in 2019, was still in committee at the end of last session. It originally just applied to SUNY, but was expanded to include CUNY last year, according to Assemblyman Harvey Epstein, its sponsor in the chamber alongside State Sen. Cordell Cleare.

Epstein estimated the directive could include $5 million in state funding to support the schools that do not yet have the infrastructure or resources in place, mostly community colleges.

The governor’s upcoming executive budget will include additional policies and funding details related to the proposal, the spokesperson confirmed.

Student advocates see improving abortion access on campus as vital after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in June — leading some states to enact near-blanket bans and their residents to seek reproductive health care elsewhere in places like New York.

Brigid Alliance, a service that provides logistical support for people traveling to abortions, has reported a 60% increase in clients coming from those states to New York.

“What medication on campus does is students don’t have to experience delays and wait times, which can go into weeks,” said Rao, a senior at Barnard College, adding that abortion pills are only prescribed for the early weeks of pregnancy. “That week-long delay can mean a difference in the procedure you can have access to.”

Rao added that students seeking getting their health care needs met on campus can reduce the load on clinics for the general public.

Plus, many of the clinics have become hotspots for clashes with abortion opponents, according to Hennessy Garcia, a student at CUNY Medgar Evers College in Crown Heights — who as a member of NYC for Abortion Rights counters protesters at Planned Parenthood in SoHo. Having access on campus could help students avoid those confrontations.

“It would definitely reduce fear among students,” said Garcia, who also organizes with the Reproductive Justice Collective.

Students can also face barriers to abortion related transportation, prohibitive costs or trouble navigating student health insurance coverage. Some colleges limit the number of students allowed cars on campus, and the New York school furthest from a clinic is more than 68 miles away, the advocacy group found.

Last October, Barnard, a women’s college, announced it would prepare and train campus providers to offer abortion medication by fall 2023. California and Massachusetts have already passed similar legislation to provide the pills at public university health centers.

“It’s really embarrassing for New York to be third!” Rao said.

Absolutely!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Biden’s aides found a new batch of classified documents at a second location associated with Mr. Biden, a person familiar with the situation said yesterday. It was the second such disclosure in three days.  As reported by The New York Times.

Republicans reveled in the new disclosures, accusing Mr. Biden of hypocrisy in calling former President Donald J. Trump irresponsible for hoarding sensitive documents at his private club and residence in Florida. This week, the new Republican chairman of the House oversight committee issued a far-ranging request to the National Archives and Records Administration, which is supposed to receive all highly sensitive materials after an administration leaves office, for documents and correspondence.

It is not clear where or when the records were recovered. But Mr. Biden’s aides have scoured various places since November, when his lawyers discovered a handful of classified files, including briefing materials on foreign countries, as they closed a think tank office in Washington. The Justice Department is reviewing the discovery to determine how to proceed.

A White House spokesman and a member of Mr. Biden’s legal team did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

On Tuesday, Mr. Biden told reporters in Mexico City that he was “surprised” to learn in the fall that his lawyers found classified government documents in his former office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

He said his staff had fully cooperated with the National Archives and the Justice Department.

A day later, NBC News reported that another cache had been found at a different, undisclosed location.

Under government regulations, access to classified documents is limited to people who are currently authorized to see them and the materials must be stored in special security containers to limit the risk of exposing sensitive information. The Presidential Records Act says official documents in the White House — classified and unclassified alike — should be turned over to the National Archives when an administration departs.

After Mr. Trump left office, officials with the archives identified sensitive documents that had not been recovered, prompting numerous appeals for their return. The matter was eventually referred to the Justice Department, which conducted a court-approved search of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and turned up classified materials, including some bearing the most restrictive top secret markings.

By contrast, the first set of documents found by Mr. Biden’s lawyers was voluntarily returned to the archives in November, and had not been logged as missing. It is not clear if the archives had flagged the new materials.

A spokesman for the archives declined to comment.

The discovery of the second batch raises new questions about the handling of sensitive documents by a Biden team that has prided itself for adhering to norms and rules flouted by his predecessor.

But the circumstances of the two cases appear strikingly different. Unlike Mr. Trump, who resisted returning the records stored at Mar-a-Lago and failed to fully comply with a subpoena, Mr. Biden’s team appears to have acted swiftly and in accordance with the law, immediately summoning officials with the National Archives to retrieve the files. The archives then alerted the Justice Department, according to the White House.

Biden and his staff have given Republicans lots of fodder for criticism and sloppiness!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Nick Perez of The Chronicle of Higher Education compiled online college enrollments based on data collected by United States Department of Education for the years 2017 to 2021. As backdrop, when Covid-19 was officially declared a pandemic in March 2020, campuses were swiftly evacuated and instruction moved online en masse. New preliminary federal data, released in late 2022, charts what has happened in distance-education patterns, both throughout the sector and at individual institutions, through fall 2021.

The share of students who were enrolled only in distance-education classes dropped to 30.4 percent in 2021 from 45.6 percent in 2020 (see trend data above), according to a Chronicle analysis of USDOE data for close to 3,900 public and private four-year and two-year institutions. But it’s still higher than pre-pandemic numbers: In 2017, the share of students who were enrolled only in distance-learning classes was 15.7 percent.

The share of students who were enrolled only in distance education grew 12.8 percentage points between 2019 and 2021.  the increases differed among higher education institutions (see data below).

The Chronicle has also established an online database where the user can access data for any college in the USDOE data system.  Login and/or account required.  Below is the data for my own Hunter College.

Tony

Allen Weisselberg

Dear Commons Community,

Allen Weisselberg, a longtime executive for Donald Trump ’s business empire whose testimony helped convict the former president’s company of tax fraud, was sentenced yesterday to five months in jail for dodging taxes on $1.7 million in job perks.

Weisselberg, 75, was promised that sentence in August when he agreed to plead guilty to 15 tax crimes and to testify against the Trump Organization, where he’s worked since the mid-1980s and until his arrest, had served as chief financial officer.

He was handcuffed and taken into custody moments after the sentence was announced and was expected to be taken to New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex. Weisselberg will be eligible for release after a little more than three months if he behaves behind bars.  As reported by the Associated Press.

As part of the plea agreement, Judge Juan Manuel Merchan also ordered Weisselberg to pay nearly $2 million in taxes, penalties and interest — which he has paid as of Jan. 3. Additionally, the judge ordered Weisselberg to complete five years of probation after his jail term is finished.

Weisselberg faced the prospect of up to 15 years in prison — the maximum punishment for the top grand larceny charge — if he were to have reneged on the deal or if he didn’t testify truthfully at the Trump Organization’s trial. He is the only person charged in the Manhattan district attorney’s three-year investigation of Trump and his business practices.

Weisselberg testified for three days, offering a glimpse into the inner workings of Trump’s real estate empire. Weisselberg has worked for Trump’s family for nearly 50 years, starting as an accountant for his developer father, Fred Trump, in 1973 before joining Donald Trump in 1986 and helping expand the family company’s focus beyond New York City into a global golf and hotel brand.

Weisselberg told jurors he betrayed the Trump family’s trust by conspiring with a subordinate to hide more than a decade’s worth of extras from his income, including a free Manhattan apartment, luxury cars and his grandchildren’s private school tuition. He said they fudged payroll records and issued falsified W-2 forms.

A Manhattan jury convicted the Trump Organization in December, finding that Weisselberg had been a “high managerial” agent entrusted to act on behalf of the company and its various entities. Weisselberg’s arrangement reduced his own personal income taxes but also saved the company money because it didn’t have to pay him more to cover the cost of the perks.

Prosecutors said other Trump Organization executives also accepted off-the-books compensation. Weisselberg alone was accused of defrauding the federal government, state and city out of more than $900,000 in unpaid taxes and undeserved tax refunds.

The Trump Organization is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday and faces a fine of up to $1.6 million.

Weisselberg testified that neither Trump nor his family knew about the scheme as it was happening, choking up as he told jurors: “It was my own personal greed that led to this.” But prosecutors, in their closing argument, said Trump “knew exactly what was going on” and that evidence, such as a lease he signed for Weisselberg’s apartment, made clear “Mr. Trump is explicitly sanctioning tax fraud.”

A Trump Organization lawyer, Michael van der Veen, has said Weisselberg concocted the scheme without Trump or the Trump family’s knowledge.

Weisselberg said the Trumps remained loyal to him even as the company scrambled to end some of its dubious pay practices following Trump’s 2016 election. He said Trump’s eldest sons, entrusted to run the company while Trump was president, gave him a $200,000 raise after an internal audit found he had been reducing his salary and bonuses by the cost of the perks.

Though he is now on a leave of absence, the company continues to pay Weisselberg $640,000 in salary and $500,000 in holiday bonuses. It punished him only nominally after his arrest in July 2021, reassigning him to senior adviser and moving his office.

He even celebrated his 75th birthday at Trump Tower with cake and colleagues in August, just hours after finalizing the plea agreement that ushered his transformation from loyal executive to prosecution witness.

Rikers Island, a compound of 10 jails on a spit of land in the East River, just off the main runway at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, has been plagued in recent years by violence, inmate deaths and staggering staffing shortages.

Though just 5 miles (8 kilometers) from Trump Tower, it’s a veritable world away from the life of luxury Weisselberg schemed to build — a far cry from the gilded Fifth Avenue offices where he hatched his plot and the Hudson River-view apartment he reaped as a reward.

This sentence seems light to me!  Why about a year or so for Trump?

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The US Justice Department is reviewing a batch of possibly classified documents found in the Washington office space of President Joe Biden’s former institute, the White House said yesterday.

Special counsel to the president Richard Sauber said “a small number of documents with classified markings” were discovered as Biden’s personal attorneys were clearing out the offices of the Penn Biden Center, where the president kept an office after he left the vice presidency in 2017 until shortly before he launched his 2020 presidential campaign in 2019. The documents were found on Nov. 2, 2022, in a “locked closet” in the office, Sauber said. 

Sauber said the attorneys immediately alerted the White House Counsel’s office, who notified the National Archives and Records Administration — which took custody of the documents the next day. As reported by the Associated Press.

“Since that discovery, the President’s personal attorneys have cooperated with the Archives and the Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in the possession of the Archives,” Sauber said.

A person who is familiar with the matter but not authorized to discuss it publicly said Attorney General Merrick Garland asked U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John Lausch to review the matter after the Archives referred the issue to the department. Lausch is one of the few U.S. attorneys to be held over from former President Donald Trump’s administration.

Irrespective of the Justice Department review, the revelation that Biden potentially mishandled classified or presidential records could prove to be a political headache for the president, who called Trump’s decision to keep hundreds of such records at his private club in Florida “irresponsible.”

Trump weighed in yesterday on his social media site, asking, “When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?”

The revelation comes as Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives and are promising to launch widespread investigations of Biden’s administration.

It also may complicate the Justice Department’s consideration on whether to bring charges against Trump, who has launched a repeat bid for the White House in 2024 and has repeatedly claimed that the department’s inquiry of his own conduct amounted to “corruption.”

The National Archives did not immediately respond to a request for comment yesterday. Spokespeople for Garland and Lausch declined to comment.

Rep. James Comer, the new GOP chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said  that the revelation raised questions about the Justice Department’s handling of the Trump probe.

“Is the White House going to be raided tonight? Are they going to raid the Bidens?” he asked reporters. “This is further concern that there’s a two-tier justice system within the DOJ with how they treat Republicans versus Democrats, certainly how they treat the former president versus the current president.”

His Democratic counterpart, Rep. Jamie Raskin, said Biden’s attorneys “appear to have taken immediate and proper action.”

“I have confidence that the Attorney General took the appropriate steps to ensure the careful review of the circumstances surrounding the possession and discovery of these documents and make an impartial decision about any further action that may be needed,” he added.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, said  that the American public deserved to know earlier about the revelation of classified documents.

“They knew about this a week before the election, maybe the American people should have known that,” Jordan told reporters. “They certainly knew about the the raid on Mar-a-Lago 91 days before this election, but nice if on November 2, the country would have known that there were classified documents at the Biden Center.”

Jordan is among House Republicans pushing for the creation of a “select subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal government” within the Judiciary Committee.

Votes on creating that committee are expected as soon as this week, setting up a showdown between Republicans and the prosecutors leading various federal investigations, including the ones into Trump.

It wasn’t immediately clear why the White House didn’t disclose the discovery of the documents or the DOJ review sooner. CBS was first to report Monday on the discovery of the potentially classified documents.

The Justice Department for months has been investigating the retention of roughly 300 documents that were marked as classified and were recovered from the Trump’s Florida estate. In that instance, prosecutors say, representatives of Trump resisted requests to give back the full stash of classified documents and failed to fully comply with a subpoena that sought their return.

FBI agents in August served a search warrant at the Mar-a-Lago property, removing 15 boxes of records.

That investigation is being led by special counsel Jack Smith. Prosecutors have interviewed an array of Trump associates and have been using a grand jury to hear evidence.

There is little to nothing here legally but it is a political embarrassment for President Biden.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Florida’s Lake County School District has  banned a book about an actual same-sex penguin couple from classrooms and school libraries.  As reported by the Huffington Post.

The award-winning 2005 children’s book “And Tango Makes Three” features a real-life male chinstrap penguin couple — Roy and Silo — that built a nest together at the zoo in New York’s Central Park. The birds ended up “adopting” an orphan penguin chick (Tango) and raising it as their own. (Other same-sex penguin couples have since been discovered in other zoos.)

Yet Florida’s Lake County School District has determined that such facts are forbidden to young children under the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law engineered by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), the independent journalism site Popular Information reported Thursday. The law essentially bars discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in Florida schools through third grade.

Popular Information found the district’s list of forbidden books in public records obtained through the Florida Freedom to Read Project. The district claimed the book, by authors Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, was one of the books it “administratively removed” to comply with DeSantis’ law.

Free speech organization PEN reported last year that Florida’s Collier County School District attached warning labels to the descriptions of over 100 books — including “And Tango Makes Three” — listed on the district’s online library catalog. Physical labels were also attached to hard copies of the books.

The ultra-conservative Florida Citizens Alliance lists “Tango” among books that it inaccurately insists contain “indecent and offensive material” in its 2021 report “Porn in Schools.” (The book contains no explicitly sexual material.) Critics complain that books on these lists are almost always automatically banned in Florida because school district leaders don’t want the headache of dealing with an organized band of book-banning zealots, The New York Times reported last month.

Even contributions of dictionaries to schools have been held up because of tangled requirements that reading material now must be assessed for suitability by specially trained state readers.

“Tango” is often a target of book banners. In 2015, The Daily Express named it on its list of surprising banned books — which also included “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Where’s Waldo.” The newspaper called “Tango” a “delightful kiddies’ tale of two penguins who fall in love and adopt a baby” that “doesn’t exactly scream out controversy.”

At least 50 groups across the nation are working to ban an increasing number of books from school libraries, according to a PEN report.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Chaos unfolded in Brazil yesterday as supporters of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro stormed the country’s Congress building and other government sites.

In a shocking scene reminiscent of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters smashed windows and wreaked havoc inside Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace in Brasilia, the country’s capital.

Demonstrators called for the former president to return to office, a week after the inauguration of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who defeated Bolsonaro in the Oct. 30 election.

The hectic scene occurred when Congress and Supreme Court security was likely limited, with footage appearing to show a lack of authorities present as protesters swarmed the buildings.   As reported by the Associated Press and the Daily News.

Bolsonaro, who held the Brazilian presidency from January 2019 through Dec. 31, 2022, traveled to the U.S. before Lula’s inauguration last week and is living in Florida, where former U.S. President Donald Trump has a home. He hasn’t publicly commented on Sunday’s incidents.

The 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol involved Trump supporters storming the Capitol in Washington to protest the results of the 2020 election, in which President Biden defeated the Republican incumbent.

“Brazilian authorities had two years to learn the lessons from the Capitol invasion and to prepare themselves for something similar in Brazil,” Mauricio Santoro, a political science professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, said Sunday.

“Local security forces in Brasilia failed in a systematic way to prevent and to respond to extremist actions in the city. And the new federal authorities, such as the ministers of justice and of defense, were not able to act in a decisive way.”

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday the U.S. “condemns any effort to undermine democracy in Brazil.”
“President Biden is following the situation closely and our support for Brazil’s democratic institutions is unwavering,” Sullivan said. “Brazil’s democracy will not be shaken by violence.”

The United States has become the example of how democracy works for the rest of the world!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, Patsy Moskal, sent the above to me.  It is a request from Governor Ron DeSantis’ Budget Director asking for information on university expenditures for “diversity, equity, and inclusion, and critical race theory.”    Here is a comment from Florida State Representative, Anna V. Eskamani 

“Despite HB7’s implementation on higher ed being temporarily stopped by the courts, the Governor’s efforts to censor higher ed and attack institutions of learning has continued.

This memo from the Governor’s office requires state university & college systems in Florida to report expenditures and resources “utilized” for campus activities related to diversity, equity, inclusion and critical race theory.

Everyone should be alarmed by this, regardless of political affiliation.”

Just think that DeSantis is the front-runner to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Seattle public school district has filed a lawsuit against the tech giants behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, seeking to hold them accountable for the mental health crisis among youth.

Seattle Public Schools filed the lawsuit on Friday in U.S. District Court. The 91-page complaint says the social media companies have created a public nuisance by targeting their products to children.

It blames them for worsening mental health and behavioral disorders including anxiety, depression, disordered eating and cyberbullying; making it more difficult to educate students; and forcing schools to take steps such as hiring additional mental health professionals, developing lesson plans about the effects of social media, and providing additional training to teachers. As reported by the Associated Press.

“Defendants have successfully exploited the vulnerable brains of youth, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse of Defendants’ social media platforms,” the complaint said. “Worse, the content Defendants curate and direct to youth is too often harmful and exploitive ….”

Meta, Google, Snap and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

While federal law — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — helps protect online companies from liability arising from what third-party users post on their platforms, the lawsuit argues that provision does not protect the tech giants’ behavior in this case.

“Plaintiff is not alleging Defendants are liable for what third-parties have said on Defendants’ platforms but, rather, for Defendants’ own conduct,” the lawsuit said. “Defendants affirmatively recommend and promote harmful content to youth, such as pro-anorexia and eating disorder content.”

The lawsuit says that from 2009 to 2019, there was on average a 30% increase in the number of Seattle Public Schools students who reported feeling “so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row” that they stopped doing some typical activities.

The school district is asking the court to order the companies to stop creating the public nuisance, to award damages, and to pay for prevention education and treatment for excessive and problematic use of social media.

While hundreds of families are pursuing lawsuits against the companies over harms they allege their children have suffered from social media, it’s not clear if any other school districts have filed a complaint like Seattle’s.

Internal studies revealed by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021 showed that the company knew that Instagram negatively affected teenagers by harming their body image and making eating disorders and thoughts of suicide worse. She alleged that the platform prioritized profits over safety and hid its own research from investors and the public.

We wish the Seattle School District good luck in this lawsuit!  Other school districts should consider same!

Tony