TikTok has agreed to settle the first in a series of closely-watched product liability cases, bowing out on the eve of a landmark trial that could upend how social media giants engage their youngest users and leave tech titans on the hook for billions in damages.
The settlement was reached as jury selection was set to begin in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Tuesday and comes a week after Snap reached a deal with the same plaintiff, a Chico, Calif., woman who said she became addicted to social media starting in elementary school.
“This settlement should come as no surprise because that damning evidence is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, an industry watchdog. “This was only the first case — there are hundreds of parents and school districts in the social media addiction trials that start today, and sadly, new families every day who are speaking out and bringing Big Tech to court for its deliberately harmful products.”
TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment about Monday’s settlement.
“The Parties are pleased to have been able to resolve this matter in an amicable manner,” Snap spokeswoman Monique Bellamy said of the settlement.
The remaining defendants, Instagram’s parent company Meta and Google’s YouTube, still face claims that their products are “defective” and designed to keep children hooked to apps its makers know are harmful.
Those same arguments are at the heart of at least 2,500 cases currently pending together in state and federal courts. The Los Angeles trial is among a handful of bellwethers meant to clarify the uncharted legal terrain.
Social media companies are protected by the 1st Amendment and by Section 230, a decades-old law that shields internet companies from liability for what users produce and share on their platforms.
Attorneys for the Chico plaintiff, referred to in court documents as K.G.M., say the apps were built and refined to snare youngsters and keep them on the platforms without regard for dangers the companies knew lurked there, including sexual predation, bullying and promotion of self-harm and even suicide.
As the claims against Meta and YouTube head to trial, jurors will be asked to weigh whether those dangers are incidental or inherent, and if social media companies can be held responsible for the harm families say flowed from their children’s feeds.
Scores of potential jurors filled the beige terrazzo hallway outside Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl’s courtroom downtown Tuesday morning, most passing the time on social apps on their phones. Some watched short-form videos while others thumbed through their feeds, pausing every so often to tap a like on a post.
Roughly 450 Angelenos will be vetted this week for spots on the jury. The trial is expected to last through March.
Instagram is 15 years old, YouTube almost 21. Finding Angelenos unfamiliar with either is likely impossible. The trial comes at a moment when public opinion around social media has soured, with a growing sentiment among parents, mental health professionals, lawmakers and even children themselves that the apps do more harm than good.
The judge told prospective jurors that lawyers on the case could not review their online profiles. “We know many of you use defendants’ social media and video-sharing platforms, and you’re not being asked to stop, but until you’re excused, you should not change how you use social media and you should not investigate features you don’t usually use,” Kuhl said in court.
Phones are now banned in California public school classrooms. Many private schools impose strict rules around when and how social media can be used.
In study after study, pluralities of young users — among them the youngest of “Anxious Generation” Zoomers and the oldest Gen Alpha’s iPad kids — now say they spend too much time on the apps. A disputed but growing body of research suggests some portion are addicted.
According to a study last spring by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, roughly half of teens say social media is bad for people their age, that it interferes with their sleep and that it hurts their productivity. Almost a quarter say it has brought down their grades. And 1 in 5 say it has hurt their mental health.
Experts say social media has also helped drive the increase in suicides among teen girls, and a post-pandemic surge in eating disorders.
K.G.M., the first bellwether plaintiff, said she started watching YouTube at age 6, and was uploading content to the site by age 8.
Today, about 85% of children under 12 watch YouTube and half of those watch it daily, according to Pew.
At 9, according to K.G.M.’s lawsuit, she got her first iPhone and joined Instagram.
By the time she joined Snapchat at age 13, she was spending almost every waking hour scrolling, posting and agonizing over her engagement, despite bullying from peers, hate comments from strangers and sexually explicit overtures from adult men.
“When I was in middle school, I used to go and hide in the counselor’s office … just to go on my phone,” she said in a deposition last year.
Around that time, she said Instagram began serving her content about self-harm and restrictive eating.
“I believe that social media, her addiction to social media, has changed the way her brain works,” the plaintiff’s mother, Karen, said in a related filing. “She has no long-term memory. She can’t live without a phone. She is willing to go to battle if you were even to touch her phone.”
“There became a point where she was so addicted that I could not get the phone out of her hand,” she said.
K.G.M.’s sister was even more blunt.
“Whenever my mom would take her phone away … she would have a meltdown like someone had died,” the sister said. “She would have so many meltdowns anytime her phone was taken away, and it was because she wouldn’t be able to use Instagram.”
“I wish I never downloaded it,” the plaintiff later told her sister, according to the deposition. “I wish I never got it in the first place.”
Boosters of the litigation compare their quest to the fight against Big Tobacco and the opioid-maker Purdue.
“This is the beginning of the trial of our generation,” said Haworth, the tech industry watchdog.
But the gulf between public opinion and civil culpability is vast, attorneys for the platforms say. Social media addiction is not a formal clinical diagnosis, and proving that it exists, and that the companies bear responsibility for it, will be an uphill battle.
Lawyers for YouTube have sought to further complicate the picture by claiming their video-sharing site is not social media at all and cannot be lumped in with the likes of Instagram and TikTok.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs say such distinctions are ephemeral, pointing out that YouTube has by far the youngest group of users, many of whom say the platform was an on-ramp to the world of social media.
“I am equally shocked … by the internal documents that I have seen from all four of these defendants regarding their knowing decision to addict kids to a platform knowing it would be bad for them,” said attorney Matthew Bergman of the Social Media Victims Law Center. “To me they are all outrageous in their decision to elevate their profits over the safety of kids.”
