Good morning. Welcome, Naxios today. It's Wednesday, January 11th. I'm Nyla Budu.

Here's what we're covering today. More deaths in California as winter storms rage on.

Plus, what we know about the classified documents found from Biden's VP days.

But first, the escalating fight over big tech and kids. That's today's one big thing.

Seattle public schools are suing big tech for helping cause a quote, youth mental health crisis.

The school district is going after TikTok, meta, snap, and other companies.

And this is just one of many cases that seek to hold social media platforms responsible for harm to children.

Naxios tech reporter Ashley Gold has been covering this. Hey, Ashley.

Hi, thanks for having me.

What are scientists saying about the growing evidence of a correlation between heavy social media use?

Heavy social media use and mental health disorders, particularly in teenagers.

So we have seen scientific evidence that growing use of social media by teenagers is detrimental to mental health.

Of course, tech companies would dispute those studies and point out what they say are flaws in them.

But on the other hand, we've had other studies that say that teens and children largely view their experiences on social media as positive.

So whatever you take from that, it's playing a big role in kids' lives.

Is it fair to say this could be a major turning point for tech platforms?

I think so.

Lawyers that I talk to that are working on this case and advocates that have been sort of agitating for action against social media for a long time

are comparing this current moment to the fight against big tobacco or the fight against opioid abuse.

They compare it to that because there's been documents that have been revealed from inside the company.

We're talking about Francis Hogan's revelation about meta.

The Facebook whistleblower that dumped a whole trove of documents out into the public domain that sort of revealed the inner workings of Facebook and its algorithm.

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