By Olivia Carvillem Bloomberg
Thousands of plaintiffs’ complaints, millions of pages of internal documents and transcripts of countless hours of depositions are about to land in US courtrooms, threatening the future of the biggest social media companies.
The blizzard of paperwork is a byproduct of two consolidated lawsuits accusing Snap Inc.’s Snapchat; Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Instagram; ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok; and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube of knowingly designing their platforms to addict users – allegedly resulting in youth depression, anxiety, insomnia, eating disorders, self-harm and even suicide.
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The litigation, brewing for more than three years, has had to overcome numerous hurdles, including the liability shield that has protected social media platforms from facing user-harm lawsuits. The social media companies have filed multiple motions to dismiss the cases on the grounds that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act prevents them from being held accountable for content posted on their sites.
Those motions have been largely unsuccessful, and courtrooms across the country are poised to open their doors for the first time to the alleged victims of social media. The vast majority of cases have been folded into two multijurisdictional proceedings, one in state and the other in federal court, to streamline the pretrial discovery process.
The first bellwether trial is scheduled to begin in Los Angeles Superior Court in late January. It involves a 19-year-old woman from Chico, California, who says she’s been addicted to social media for more than a decade and that her nonstop use of the platforms has caused anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia. Two other trials will follow soon after, with thousands more waiting in the wings. If successful, these cases could result in multibillion-dollar settlements — akin to tobacco and opioid litigation – and change the way minors interact with social media.
“This is going to be one of the most impactful litigations of our lifetime,” said Joseph VanZandt, an attorney at Beasley Allen Law Firm in Montgomery, Alabama, and co-lead plaintiffs’ attorney for the coordinated state cases. “This is about large corporations targeting vulnerable populations – children – for profit. That’s what we saw with the tobacco companies; they were also targeting adolescents and trying to get them addicted while they were young.”
Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center in Seattle, makes a similar comparison to tobacco litigation in the Bloomberg documentary Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media. “In the case of Facebook, you have internal documents saying ‘tweens are herd animals,’ ‘kids have an addict’s narrative’ and ‘our products make girls feel worse about themselves.’ You have the same kind of corporate misconduct,” Bergman says in the film, which will be available to view on Bloomberg’s platforms on October 30.
Bergman’s firm was the first to file user-harm cases against social media companies, in 2022, after Frances Haugen, a former Meta product manager-turned-whistleblower, released a trove of internal documents showing the company knew social media was negatively impacting youth mental health. The first case, which is part of the consolidated federal litigation, alleged that an 11-year-old Connecticut girl killed herself after suffering from extreme social media addiction and sexual exploitation by online predators.
What set that case apart was how it got around Section 230’s immunity blanket. Bergman argued that his case wasn’t about third-party content, which the federal law protects. Instead, he said it hinged on the way social media companies were intentionally designing their products to prioritize engagement and profit over safety.
Since then, thousands of personal injury lawsuits alleging similar youth mental health harms have been filed. Almost 4,000 have been folded into the multijurisdictional proceedings – more than a quarter of them from the Social Media Victims Law Center. They have been joined by more than 1,000 school districts and about three-quarters of all US state attorneys general. Some lawsuits, including one filed by New Mexico’s attorney general, are proceeding outside the framework of the consolidated cases and are also expected to go to trial early next year.
“All told, this is a massive legal siege on the social media industry,” said Previn Warren, a Washington-based lawyer at Motley Rice who is co-leading the federal cases. “We are the first major litigation to convince the court system that actually there are systemic wrongs on these platforms that victims should be compensated for. When the public becomes aware of the scale of evidence, I suspect that will have an impact on how they perceive their relationship – and their kids’ relationships – to social media.”
The pretrial discovery process closed in April, with the four defendants handing over more than six million documents and submitting to 150 depositions, including that of Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. In addition, more than 100 child psychologists, academics and experts have offered evidence.
The companies sought to bar all of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses in the state cases from testifying, arguing that they’re unreliable, cherry-pick from studies and over-extrapolate from data. That argument failed in state court in late September, with all but one of the proposed witnesses allowed to testify.
The defendants also filed a motion for summary judgment in state court in August, arguing that the plaintiffs haven’t produced enough evidence to warrant a trial. The companies said the plaintiffs hadn’t shown that mental health harms were caused by social media and that some of the claims, which stretch back to when the plaintiffs first started using social media, should be barred outright by California’s statute of limitations.
“These lawsuits fundamentally misunderstand how YouTube works, and the allegations are simply not true,” José Castañeda, a spokesperson for the company, said in an email. “YouTube is a streaming service where people come to watch everything from live sports to podcasts to their favorite creators, primarily on TV screens, not a social network where people go to catch up with friends.”
A Meta spokesperson said the company disagreed with the allegations raised in the lawsuits and pointed to safety tools the company has rolled out to support its youngest users, including limiting who teens can connect with and the content they see. “We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously in these cases,” the spokesperson said.
Snap and TikTok didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who is presiding over the consolidated state cases, is expected to rule on the summary judgment motion in the coming weeks. Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, a US district court judge in Oakland, California, is overseeing the federal litigation. The first federal trial, in a case filed by a school district in Kentucky, is set to kick off in June.
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