Social media addiction lawsuit against Meta is dropped

A Florida teenager identified by the initials R.K.C. has dropped his social media addiction lawsuit against Meta, a day after Snap tentatively settled with him and left Meta as the only remaining defendant. In a statement, Meta said the plaintiff chose to drop his case without receiving any payment. TikTok and Google’s YouTube had previously reached settlement agreements with him, and Snap confirmed on Tuesday that a tentative agreement had been reached.

The bellwether jury trial — a test case meant to help gauge how the broader wave of litigation might be resolved — had been set to begin next week in the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles. The plaintiff had sued the social media companies for creating addictive platforms; his case was one of thousands of similar lawsuits from teens, schools, and state attorneys general accusing the companies of knowingly creating addictive platforms. The precedent the lawsuit and others like it could have set might have affected how the companies build apps known for features that keep people engaged, such as infinite scroll and a continual stream of notifications.

The plaintiff’s decision to drop the case follows a defeat for Meta earlier this year in a New Mexico courtroom — the company’s first courtroom loss over the harms of its social media platforms. In that case, Meta was ordered to pay $375 million in penalties after being found to have misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and to have endangered children. Then, in March, a Los Angeles jury ruled against both Meta and Google in a separate case, awarding roughly $6 million in damages.

Meta had been prepared to argue that the plaintiff allegedly used his Facebook and Instagram accounts for only minutes per day on average, and planned to claim that most of his accounts had been created after he hired a lawyer. In its statement, Meta said: “this outcome makes clear that we will not back away from defending ourselves against baseless lawsuits.”

Why it matters

A jury verdict in this case could have set a precedent affecting how social platforms design engagement features like infinite scroll and notifications; its dismissal leaves that legal question untested for now.