Over the next year, top social media executives are expected to take the witness stand to defend their companies from an avalanche of claims about their failure to protect kids.
The first of many trials is set to begin this month in California, when Meta, TikTok, and YouTube face claims that tech addiction harmed a teenager’s mental health. This case is just the tip of the legal iceberg. It kicks off one of two sets of so-called bellwether trials, where judges will hear a selection of cases that represent similar claims, whose outcomes will likely inform settlement amounts for the remaining cases. There are still thousands more cases behind them.
They’re significant both because they’ve managed a rare feat of overcoming Section 230 objections — which protect online platforms from being held liable for their users’ speech — to reach a full trial phase, and because of the evidence they could reveal regarding what social media platforms knew and did — or didn’t do — about the harms they could cause kids. “When we started doing this work, it was a given that we could not even get past a motion to dismiss,” Matthew Bergman, the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, which represents the plaintiff in the first of the trials taking place this month, said at a recent briefing. “The simple fact that a social media company is going to have to stand trial before a jury and account for its design decisions is unprecedented in American jurisprudence. This has never happened before.”
“This has never happened before”
All of the companies named in the cases — Meta, Google’s YouTube, TikTok, and Snap — say they have robust policies to keep kids safe online. “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” YouTube spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement. “The allegations in these complaints are simply not true.” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone pointed to the company’s recent blog post, which said that blaming social media companies for teens’ mental health issues “oversimplifies a serious issue.” Stone added, “We strongly disagree with these allegations and are confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people.” TikTok did not provide comment by publication time, but has defended its trust and safety measures in the past.
Snap settled with the plaintiff in the first case going to trial, and Snap spokesperson Monique Bellamy said in a statement that “The Parties are pleased to have been able to resolve this matter in an amicable manner.”
In the trials, plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages and changes to social platforms. But no matter the outcome, new revelations from these trials could create more pressure on both the companies and lawmakers to enact changes.
How the bellwether cases work
Thousands of individuals, school districts, and state attorneys general from across the country have filed suit against social media companies which they allege harmed teens’ mental health. Since the cases hit on similar themes requiring similar discovery and legal procedures, they were consolidated to more efficiently manage the caseload. These groupings of cases are known as the Judicial Council Coordination Proceedings (JCCP) for the state system and Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) for the federal system. Within each grouping, a subgroup of bellwether cases will be tried first and are roughly representative of the whole group’s claims. When one bellwether concludes, they will move onto the next.
The idea is that by trying a sampling of cases, parties will have a sense for how juries will tend to rule on certain kinds of claims, and the amount of damages they might be awarded, which can inform the terms of a broader settlement. (This is distinct from a class action lawsuit, where a group of similarly situated parties join a single lawsuit and the outcome applies to all of them equally.) Additionally, evidence from earlier trials can be referenced in later ones — so high-profile tech CEOs, for instance, are likely to only testify once.
Individual cases or defendants may choose to settle at any point, but ultimately the parties will likely try to reach a global settlement that resolves the remaining, larger pile of cases — similar to what’s happened in litigation over the opioid epidemic.
While several defendants may be facing similar claims during the trials, each company will have an opportunity to make its own case, and a jury might find some liable, but not others.
California state court cases
The first of the social media product liability cases are set to go to trial Tuesday in a state court in Los Angeles in front of Judge Carolyn Kuhl. The case involves an unnamed teen identified as K.G.M., now 19 years old, who says she experienced an addiction to several social media apps that resulted in other mental health issues. The week before the trial, Snap reached a settlement, but the trial will still include Meta, TikTok, and YouTube as defendants, as of Monday. Top company executives including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are expected to testify, as is K.G.M.
The trial is expected to last at least six weeks. Once it concludes, the court will move down the list of an initial three bellwether cases.
The federal cases consolidated into the MDL in the Northern District of California include cases brought by school districts, individual plaintiffs, and state attorneys general. The first six bellwether cases will represent school districts across the country essentially arguing that the design of social media platforms have kept their students compulsively using them, leading the school districts to expend resources on mental health and other issues. The board of education in Breathitt County, Kentucky, will be the first to try its case beginning in June before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland.
This is the litigation from which a trove of internal social media company documents has already come to light, revealing, for example, that a user experience researcher at Meta allegedly compared Instagram to a drug. The internal communications are just an example of the kinds of evidence that could come out in the various trials in the months to come.
There is a significant hearing slated for Monday, where the judge will hear arguments on a motion for summary judgment. The results of that hearing will determine what issues are allowed to be included in the trials later this year.
Beginning February 2nd, Meta will face a trial brought by the New Mexico attorney general for allegedly creating a “marketplace for predators in search of children” on its platforms. To make it to trial, the case notably overcame arguments from Meta that Section 230 should shield it from the litigation.
To test their claims, the New Mexico attorney general’s office created accounts on Meta’s services posing as kids or parents seeking to traffic them and said they found that the service quickly surfaced the accounts to strangers, garnering largely adult male followings. Using the underage decoy accounts, the government arrested several suspected child predators who the AG’s office said solicited sex from the accounts. “While New Mexico makes sensationalist, irrelevant and distracting arguments, we’re focused on demonstrating our longstanding commitment to supporting young people,” Stone, the Meta spokesperson, said in a statement.
