Seattle Public Schools has sued major tech companies, saying the companies are responsible for worsening students’ mental health crisis and are directly interfering with the school system’s ability to carry out its educational mission.

The lawsuit, filed Friday against Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Snap and ByteDance, alleges the companies are designing products in an effort to hook young people onto their platforms, creating a mental health crisis.

The lawsuit says the companies’ actions bear substantial responsibility for the mental health crisis affecting young people. “The defendants successfully exploited the vulnerabilities of young people’s brains, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of overuse and abuse of social media platforms,” the lawsuit states.

Students with mental health issues perform worse, forcing schools to take action that includes training teachers to identify and treat these symptoms, hiring trained staff, and creating additional resources to warn students of the dangers of social media, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit seeks compensation for moral damages and other penalties.

In 2021, US lawmakers accused Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg of acting motivated by greater profits at the expense of children’s mental health after whistleblower Frances Haugen testified.

Facebook has always said it disagrees with the information presented by Haugen, which claims the company has failed to protect teenage girls on Instagram. “The argument that we deliberately post content that makes people angry is deeply illogical,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page in response.

“We make money from ads, and advertisers keep telling us that they don’t want their ads to appear next to harmful content. And I don’t know of any tech companies that have set out to create products that make people angry or depressed.”