Youths Achieving Victory in Legal Battle Against Social Media Dependency

A significant ruling in a California court has allowed minors and their parents, who are suing Meta Inc.’s Facebook and other major technology companies over their children’s addiction to social media platforms, to proceed with their lawsuits.

A state judge on Friday dismissed most of the claims, but said he would allow the lawsuits to proceed based on claims that the companies were negligent — or knew that the design of their platforms would maximize use by minors and prove harmful. The plaintiffs allege that social media is designed to be addictive and cause depression, anxiety, self-harm, eating disorders and suicide.

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More than 200 such lawsuits filed across the country have been assigned to two judges in California — one in state court in Los Angeles and one in federal court in Oakland. Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl’s ruling applies only to cases in state court. His decision is part of a larger battle in which statewide bans on social media pit privacy and national security concerns over personal liberties and the use of highly popular apps — especially among young users.

In the California case, attorneys representing minors removed a legal hurdle that would allow them to argue that Facebook, Instagram, Snap Inc., TikTok Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube knew that physical harm from social media was “foreseeable and substantial.” Kuhl wrote a sentence for him. The judge referred to the “obvious disparity” between “unaccompanied minors” and Internet companies “who were in complete control of how their platforms operated.”

Internet companies have long supported Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law that has consistently shielded them from liability for comments, ads, images and videos on their platforms. Importantly, Kuhl ruled that free speech laws and Section 230 do not prevent a negligence claim in a collection of California cases from moving forward.

Kuhl opined that the social media companies could be held liable for the claims because they “are based on the fact that the design features of the platforms — not the specific content viewed by the plaintiffs — caused harm to the plaintiffs.”

“This ruling is an important step forward for the thousands of families we represent whose children have suffered permanently debilitating mental health problems at the hands of these social media giants,” attorneys for the plaintiffs said in a statement. “We are determined to use every legal tool at our disposal to hold these companies accountable for their actions and reach a just resolution.”

Google defended its practices in a statement on Friday.

“Protecting children on all our platforms has always been at the heart of our work,” Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said. “Together with child development experts, we’ve built age-appropriate experiences for kids and families on YouTube and provide parents with powerful controls. The allegations made in these complaints are simply not true.”

Other companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the decision, but they too have defended their practices in the past. Antigone Davis, Meta’s global security director, responded to one of the lawsuits in March, saying the company wants teenagers to be safe online and offers more than 30 safety tools for children and families, including monitoring and age verification technology.

The judge also rejected seven other claims in the lawsuit, including an argument that the companies should be held liable for the faulty design of their platforms. The concept of product liability “was created in a different era to solve different problems,” Kuhl wrote. Social media presents “new challenges” under the law, he said, because they are not tangible. “Can’t reach out and touch them,” he said.

Lawyers representing the minors in a related collection of lawsuits filed in federal court also face a request from the companies to dismiss the lawsuit.

The case is Social Media Cases, 22STCV21355, Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles.

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