Verdicts supercharge plaintiffs’ hopes in social media addiction cases

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In brief

• New Mexico jury awards $375 million against Meta under consumer protection law
• California jury finds Meta and YouTube liable for youth mental health harm
• Courts shifting focus to product design and failure-to-warn claims
• MDL with over 2,400 cases expected to begin bellwether trials later this year

A pair of multi-million-dollar jury verdicts handed down by state court juries last month bode well for plaintiffs’ attorneys hoping to chalk up similar wins in many of the thousands of ongoing lawsuits alleging that addictive features of social media sites such as Facebook and TikTok harmed young users.

A New Mexico jury on March 24 found Meta Platforms liable for $375 million in civil penalties for violating the state’s unfair practices act by misleading consumers about the safety of its sites and endangering children.

The next day, a California jury found Meta and Google’s YouTube liable for more than $3 million in compensatory damages for designing addictive social media platforms that caused severe mental injuries to the plaintiff during her preteen and teenage years. The jury would subsequently award $3 million in punitive damages.

The verdicts will have a profound impact on “social media addiction” litigation going forward, according to Attleboro personal injury lawyer Tracy Paulsen.

“They were both landmark verdicts for different reasons,” she said. “We’ve moved into a very different phase in the litigation, both nationally and locally.”

Prior to the recent outcomes, much of the focus in the litigation of personal injury claims was on social media content and defenses under the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Paulsen said.

“Now, we’re looking at these claims as product design and warning cases rather than pure speech and content moderation cases,” she said. “This sets a new threshold for these cases.”

Regarding the New Mexico verdict, Paulsen said it was important that a jury found Meta liable and imposed significant penalties in an enforcement action brought by an attorney general under state consumer protection laws.

“In light of both of these verdicts, the litigation looks less speculative,” she said. “Here, we have a number of cases in the federal [multidistrict litigation] pending, with AG cases, school district cases, and personal injury cases. Now we have the backing of two juries to support the claim that Big Tech is on the line and responsible for youth harm.”

Plymouth personal injury attorney Walter Kelley said he expects the recent verdicts to prompt a surge in similar lawsuits.

“Will there be a flood? Absolutely,” Kelley said. “But I’d caution lawyers who haven’t been in this space to understand what they’re walking into. These are resource-intensive cases. The defendants have unlimited money for experts, for experienced defense counsel, for delay. If you’re going to take one of these cases, take it because you have a strong client with a well-documented injury and the ability to see it through.”

Bad week for Big Tech

In K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms, a Superior Court jury in Los Angeles returned its verdict after a month-long trial and nine days of deliberation.

The 20-year-old plaintiff alleged that she began using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram when she was 9. According to the plaintiff, the platforms’ design features, which included algorithmic content recommendations, beauty filters and push notifications, caused her to experience anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and suicidal thoughts.

“The evidence showed that Meta and YouTube knew their platforms were hooking children and harming their mental health, and instead of fixing the problem they kept developing features to maximize the time kids spent on their apps,” the plaintiff’s lead counsel, W. Mark Lanier of Houston, said in a published statement.

The jury found both Meta and YouTube liable for negligence and failure to warn. It further found Meta 70 percent liable and YouTube 30 percent liable for the plaintiff’s injuries.

In State v. Meta Platforms, tried in the state District Court in Sante Fe, the jury found Meta liable for two violations of New Mexico’s unfair practices act after several hours of deliberation.

“New Mexico is proud to be the first state to hold Meta accountable in court for misleading parents, enabling child exploitation, and harming kids,” AG Raúl Torrez said in a statement.

The verdict was the first result in a two-phase trial in the case. In a bench trial to begin May 4, the state will make its case on a public nuisance claim seeking additional damages and injunctive relief requiring Meta to make changes to its platforms.

Massachusetts and Rhode Island have both filed similar suits.

In October 2023, Attorney General Andrea J. Campbell brought suit in Suffolk Superior Court against Meta Platforms and its subsidiary, Instagram, for violating Chapter 93A by purposefully designing their applications to addict young users and deceiving the public about the danger posed to young people by overuse of their products.

In December, the Supreme Judicial Court heard oral argument in the state’s case against Meta to address the question of whether “immunity under the Communications Decency Act extends to defendants that allegedly violated G.L.c. 93A, §2, and created a public nuisance by designing and using addictive design features on Instagram to exploit children’s psychological vulnerabilities and that they falsely represented to the public that their features were not addictive and that they prioritized youth health and safety.”

The SJC ruled on April 10 that the Communications Decency Act does not bar the commonwealth’s Chapter 93A and public nuisance claims against Meta Platforms alleging the company designed its Instagram social media platform to addict children.

In October 2024, Campbell filed a similar suit in Suffolk Superior Court against TikTok and its affiliates.

Meanwhile, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha joined 41 other AGs in suing Meta in federal and state court in October 2023, alleging that the company violated state consumer protection laws and the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

All eyes on MDL

The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation centralized all litigation in October 2022 against Meta and other social media platforms in the Northern District of California before U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

According to the MDL’s website, there were 2,465 cases pending before Rogers as of April 1.

The plaintiffs’ lead counsel in the MDL, Previn Warren of Washington, D.C., could not be reached for comment on the status of the cases. But his Motley Rice colleague, Jonathan D. Orent of Providence, reported that the California court “is moving ahead quite well, has made some excellent decisions, and is quite familiar with these issues.”

The first trials are expected to start later this year, Orent added.

The social media verdicts give us stronger wind at our backs. My hope and expectation is that courts that were skeptical of addiction-by-design theories six months ago will look at these verdicts and recalibrate.

— Walter Kelley, Plymouth

The MDL includes cases brought by various government entities in Rhode Island. For example, in April 2023, the city of Providence sued Meta, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other social media platforms, asserting claims for public nuisance and negligence. The case was transferred to the MDL the following month.

The MDL also includes lawsuits brought by the Barrington, Cranston and Warwick public school districts.

Paulsen said she currently has 12 cases in the MDL, the majority of which involve Massachusetts plaintiffs.

She noted that Massachusetts plaintiffs can still file their social media addiction claims in state court. However, if the complaints are similar to those in which defendants have had success removing them to federal court based on diversity jurisdiction, their cases would also likely be removed to federal court and wind up in the MDL.

“People with cases from Rhode Island and elsewhere can directly file in the MDL,” Orent added. “The requirement to be barred in California or have local California counsel has been removed so that [local counsel] can adequately represent their clients in court there.”

For the federal MDL, “they’re pushing the school district cases first and then the AG cases,” Paulsen said.

Legislative action

As of press time, the Massachusetts House was expected to pass a bill that would ban social media use for children under 14. The measure imposing a ban on social media use was added to a bill passed by the Senate last July that would ban cellphones for students during the school day.

Under the proposed legislation, social media platforms would be required to implement an age-verification system that would prohibit minors under 14 from using their site. The measure would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to use social media platforms with verifiable consent from a parent.

[Editor’s note: On April 8, The state House of Representatives on a 129-25 vote passed  S. 2581 as amended, which would  restrict social media use for children and ban student cellphone use during the school day. The measure passed by the House added language aimed at addressing addictive feeds and protecting certain vulnerable groups.]

Boston business litigator Anthony T. Panebianco said passage of the measure would raise concerns in the business community.

“Massachusetts has a vote on this as to whether or not they’re going to have age restrictions and social media in schools, which would have a lot of power,” Panebianco said. “That would worry me as a company. These are business decisions they have to make. If they see the writing on the wall, they’ll need to consider what they can do to protect themselves from additional lawsuits of the same vein or greater value.”

Kelley suggested the California and New Mexico verdicts could open the door to other types of claims as well.

“My video-game-addiction clients are watching this very closely, and for good reason,” he said. “The underlying neuroscience is the same: dopamine loops, variable reward schedules, deliberately engineered compulsive engagement targeting young, developing brains. The social media verdicts give us stronger wind at our backs. My hope and expectation is that courts that were skeptical of addiction-by-design theories six months ago will look at these verdicts and recalibrate.”

In evaluating the viability of a potential client’s personal injury claim, Paulsen said she looks to the individual’s user profile, the social media platforms they were on, the nature of their injury, and causation.

“The strongest cases for personal injury are going to involve a young user with substantial and prolonged use in the named platforms with well-documented mental health harm and a factual record that shows that,” Paulsen said. “The plaintiff should be able to argue that these platforms were a substantial factor in producing harm.”

Orent said part of his firm’s vetting process includes examining other potential contributing factors for claimed injuries.

“We look to see if there are other major factors in this person’s life that could have contributed in a greater way than the social media,” Orent said. “In the cases we bring, we make the analysis that social media is the predominant cause of the harm.”