Pittsburgh Public Schools has jumped on the hoped-for-easy-money bandwagon and filed a lawsuit against social media. And it opens a nefarious public policy window on the world of the gullible and of the greedy.

As the Tribune-Review reported on Saturday:

“Pittsburgh Public Schools officials have filed a federal lawsuit against multiple international social media companies, accusing them of fomenting ‘an unprecedented mental health crisis fueled by (their) addictive and dangerous social media platforms.’

“The school district filed the suit April 6 against Meta Platforms (Facebook’s parent company), Meta Payments, Siculus, Facebook Operations, Instagram, Snap, TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, Google and YouTube.”

In another era, this would have been akin to filing a lawsuit against “the devil purveyors of wildly insane rock ‘n’ roll music that loosens morals and attack the very fibers of civilized society.”

Or, for that matter, “Swing” music of the Big Band era.

Or, Lay’s potato chips. After all, you never can eat just one, right?

But there are more than a few problems with these kinds of lawsuits, the biggest being whether school districts even have standing to file them, according to an expert quoted by Charles Toutant, writing in the February edition of The New Jersey Law Journal.

And it doesn’t reflect kindly on the legal trade.

“It’s my position that it’s unlikely that the school districts have standing to claim the harms that are really attributed to the students’ personal lives,” says Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law.

Goldman told Toutant that if the lawsuits are being brought on contingency, “that really highlights that the real parties in interest are the plaintiffs’ lawyers, because they’re the ones who would benefit financially if they can line up more school districts to sign up, if they think they can win.”

“If the plaintiffs’ lawyers are getting a cut of the economic upside, then they want to line up as many school districts as possible,” he said.”

And, if the case is brought on contingency, “the sales pitch is pretty simple: ‘We’re not asking for money up front, we’re just going to take a cut of your back-end proceeds.’ So we could see dozens, hundreds or even thousands of lawsuits like these if the plaintiffs think they could win,” Goldman said.”

And then there’s the basic flawed extrapolation of such lawsuits, Goldman reminds.

“Think about all the things that are social ills that manifest themselves on school property—drugs, political discord, domestic violence,” he said. “Can schools sue all the potential sources of those social ills for nuisance? Can they sue the drug dealers for nuisance? Can they sue the gang organizers for nuisance?

“None of that makes sense. It’s a social problem that needs to be dealt with through traditional law enforcement means—not with school districts usurping legislatures to make their own policy and enforcement.”

And Toutant writes that Goldman also sees a problem with demonstrating causation: “How to prove social media is causing a need for more school resources, as opposed to other societal problems.”

Perhaps, just perhaps, one of the goals is to swamp social media companies with such lawsuits in an attempt to win big out-of-court settlements, for lawyers and school districts alike.

PPS, by the way, appears to have been egged on by a local law firm working in concert with a Philadelphia law firm to become a party to such a lawsuit. Things that make you go “Hmmmmm.”

And Ira Weiss, the PPS solicitor, more than intimated to KDKA Radio Monday morning that one goal of the plethora of individual school district lawsuits is to have them consolidated into a single national lawsuit to be heard on the Left, er, West Coast.

But, of course.

And but, of course, too, blaming others for our own failings has become the American way, has it not? And whatever happened to personal responsibility?

Obviously, money-grabbing has gotten in the way.

Oh, and do remember – it’s for the kids.

Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).