Meta and Google Face Social Media Addiction Case Alone After TikTok Settles

Jury selection will continue for several days in a lawsuit against Meta’s Facebook and Instagram and Google’s YouTube that was brought by a California teen and her mother who claim the social media companies designed their algorithm to addict young users.TikTok agreed to settle the suit on Tuesday, hours before the trial began. “Plaintiff KGM and Defendant TikTok have reached an agreement in principle to settle her case,” an attorney for the woman, Joseph VanZandt said in a statement.Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc., also settled the case last week. Details of the two settlements were not immediately revealed.The landmark suit involves a 19-year-old, identified in court papers at “KGM”, and is being closely watched as a test case against the companies, which face more than a thousand similar suits.KGM claims that she started using social media at the age of 6 and suffered depression and suicidal thoughts after becoming addicted. The suit alleges social media companies knowingly designed addictive features like autoplay and infinite scroll that make it difficult for people to stop consuming content.Health experts have warned for years about the potential for young people to be “hooked” by the platforms, going down rabbit holes that could lead to mental health issues. In 2024, then-US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said there was a mental health crisis emergency among young people and called for a warning label on social media platforms similar to what is required on tobacco products.The social media suit has drawn comparisons to litigation that big tobacco faced in the 1990s. In 1998 the industry reached a $246 billion settlement in the largest civil litigation settlement in American history.Meta’s chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, could be called to testify. He publicly apologized, during a 2024 congressional hearing, to parents who claimed their children had been armed by social media.Meta has tried to deflect blame, claiming it has made concrete changes to help protect teens online.“Recently, a number of lawsuits have attempted to place the blame for teen mental health struggles squarely on social media companies. But this oversimplifies a serious issue,” Meta said in a release earlier this month.“Despite this complexity, plaintiffs’ lawyers have selectively cited Meta’s internal documents to construct a misleading narrative, suggesting our platforms have harmed teens and that Meta has prioritized growth over their well-being.”Instagram launched teen accounts last year but anti-tech advocates say the fix appears more cosmetic than structural.“Unfortunately, without clearer transparency or independent validation of their efficacy, families have little reason to trust that today’s updates will meaningfully improve teen safety,” Heat initiative said in a statement at the time of the launch.YouTube claims it has spent more than a decade building tools to protect children on its platform including stricter policies and safeguards for younger audiences. This month it gave parents a control to set the amount of time their child, with supervised accounts, can scroll video feeds of quick videos called Shorts.The technology companies have relied on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that protects online platforms from liability for content posted by third-party users but this lawsuit does not target content, instead targeting the design of the platforms themselves.The plaintiffs’ case may hinge on the tech companies own internal research, including court filings detailing efforts the companies took to attract and keep teens consuming content on their platforms.But one expert says they may struggle to prove the features cause addition. “Assuming that there is this thing called addiction that’s legally recognized, who causes that addiction?” an associate dean for research at Santa Clara University School of Law, Eric Goldman asked the Washington Post. “How do we measure the causal components of that?”The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified damages. The trial, taking place at Los Angeles, is expected to last several weeks.

Meta and Google Face Social Media Addiction Case Alone After TikTok Settles

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