TikTok settles second addiction lawsuit, leaving Meta and Snap to face judge alone
The TL;DR
TikTok settled with the Florida teenager ahead of the second bellwether social media lawsuit, leaving Meta and Snap as the remaining defendants.
TikTok has reached a confidential settlement with a Florida teenager who accused the platform of contributing to her mental health problems, removing herself from a jury trial scheduled to begin on July 27 in Los Angeles. The settlement, first reported by Bloomberg on Tuesday, makes TikTok the second defendant to withdraw from the case in recent weeks. YouTube settled with the same plaintiff last week.
The plaintiff, a 15-year-old boy identified in court by his initials, accuses Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap of designing their platforms to be addictive through features such as endless scrolling and self-play. He has been using social media since he was eight, according to his lawyers. He was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder linked to his social media use, and began seeing therapists in 2023 for those conditions, including suicidal thoughts.
With TikTok and YouTube out, Meta and Snap are the only defendants still facing the jury. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, who was removed from the witness list after Snap settled the previous lawsuit, may testify in court for the first time in this case. Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who presided over the first bellwether, will also preside over this one.
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The settlement follows a pattern that TikTok has now doubled. The company also settled the first bellwether lawsuit before it went to trial earlier this year, along with Snap. That first case ended in March when a jury found Meta and Google guilty and awarded six million dollars in damages, the first social media addiction case to reach a verdict.
The platforms face thousands of similar complaints. More than 10,000 individual lawsuits and nearly 800 school district claims are pending multidistrict litigation. The bellwether structure exists because each attempt will take decades, so early decisions and solutions set goals by which all others are informed.
The plaintiff’s attorneys said the July trial will provide a different perspective than the first case, which focused on a young woman. “The impact on a male and a minor currently involves different circumstances and factors for the judge to assess,“Attorney Rahul Ravipudi told NBC News. His legal team plans to call some of the same key witnesses who have testified before, where Mark Zuckerberg and the head of Instagram Adam Mosseri both took the stand.
The trajectory of the school-district litigation continues to shift in one direction. Snap, YouTube, and TikTok settled one school case before trial, and Meta later settled a Kentucky case in what would have been the first school district lawsuit over teen mental health. Companies that pay do not disclose anything, while those that go to trial risk a number on the decision form that becomes a reference for all subsequent cases.
Meta now enters its second consecutive test as a company that has refused to settle. The July 27 hearing in Los Angeles will test whether the second jury reaches the same conclusion as the first, and whether the two decisions exert enough pressure to change the balance of the thousands of pending cases.
