Social media addiction lawsuit against Meta is dropped
A closely watched social media addiction lawsuit that had been set to go to trial next week has been dropped after the plaintiff voluntarily dismissed his claims against Meta, leaving none of the major tech companies facing trial in the case.
A day after Snap tentatively settled with the plaintiff in a social media addiction lawsuit, leaving Meta as the only remaining defendant, the case has been dropped. In a statement, Meta said the plaintiff chose to drop his case against Meta without receiving any payment.
TikTok and Google’s YouTube had previously reached settlement agreements with the plaintiff. (Snap on Tuesday confirmed a tentative agreement had been reached.)
The bellwether jury trial had been set to begin next week in the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles.
The plaintiff, a Florida teenager known by the initials “R.K.C.,” had sued the social media companies for creating addictive platforms. It was one of thousands of similar lawsuits from teens, schools, and state attorneys general that had accused the big tech companies of knowingly creating addictive platforms.
The precedent that would have been set by this lawsuit and others could have impacted how the companies build their apps, known for features that keep people engaged, like the infinite scroll and their continual buzz of notifications.
The plaintiff’s decision to drop the case follows Meta’s loss in a New Mexico case earlier this year, which marked its first courtroom defeat over social media harms. Meta was ordered to pay $375 million in penalties after the company was found to have misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and endangered children.
In March, a Los Angeles jury also handed both Meta and Google another defeat, awarding the defendant in that case some $6 million in damages.
Meta had been prepared to argue that the plaintiff in this case had allegedly only used Facebook and Instagram accounts for minutes per day on average, and was planning to claim that most of his accounts had been created after hiring a lawyer.
In its statement, Meta said that, “this outcome makes clear that we will not back away from defending ourselves against baseless lawsuits.”
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