Thousands of lawsuits, millions of pages of internal records, and endless hours of deposition transcripts are about to hit U.S. courtrooms — posing a serious threat to the future of the biggest social media giants.
The avalanche of paperwork stems from two massive lawsuits accusing Snap’s Snapchat, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, ByteDance’s TikTok, and Alphabet’s YouTube of deliberately designing their platforms to keep users hooked — a choice allegedly linked to rising rates of depression, anxiety, insomnia, eating disorders, self-harm, and even suicide among young people.
The lawsuits, more than three years in the making, have faced a maze of legal obstacles — chief among them, the powerful liability shield that has long protected social media companies from user-harm claims. The platforms have repeatedly sought to have the cases thrown out, arguing that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act bars them from being held responsible for content posted by users.
Most of those efforts have fallen flat, and courtrooms across the country are now preparing to hear from alleged victims of social media for the first time. To keep the process efficient, the bulk of the cases have been consolidated into two massive proceedings — one in state court and the other in federal court — to streamline pretrial discovery.
The first bellwether trial is set to begin in Los Angeles Superior Court in late January. It centers on a 19-year-old woman from Chico, California, who says she’s been addicted to social media for more than a decade — and that her constant use has fueled anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia. Two more trials are slated to follow soon after, with thousands of others waiting in the wings. If successful, these cases could trigger multibillion-dollar settlements — comparable to past tobacco and opioid lawsuits — and forever change how minors engage with social media.
“This is going to be one of the most impactful litigations of our lifetime,” said Joseph VanZandt, an attorney at Beasley Allen Law Firm in Montgomery, Alabama, and co-lead plaintiffs’ attorney for the coordinated state cases. “This is about large corporations targeting vulnerable populations – children – for profit. That’s what we saw with the tobacco companies; they were also targeting adolescents and trying to get them addicted while they were young.”
Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center in Seattle, draws a striking parallel to the tobacco lawsuits in Bloomberg’s upcoming documentary Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media. “In the case of Facebook, you have internal documents saying ‘tweens are herd animals,,’ say ‘kids have an addict’s narrative,’ and admit that ‘our products make girls feel worse about themselves." Bergman says in the film. “It’s the same kind of corporate misconduct.” The documentary will be available on Bloomberg’s platforms starting October 30.
Bergman’s firm was the first to bring user-harm lawsuits against social media companies in 2022, following revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen — a former Meta product manager who leaked internal documents showing the company knew its platforms were harming young users’ mental health. The firm’s first case, now part of the consolidated federal litigation, involved an 11-year-old girl from Connecticut who died by suicide after suffering from severe social media addiction and sexual exploitation by online predators.
What made that case stand out was the way it sidestepped Section 230’s broad shield of immunity. Bergman argued the lawsuit wasn’t about third-party content — which the federal law protects — but about how social media companies deliberately designed their platforms to favor engagement and profit over user safety.
Since then, the floodgates have opened. Thousands of personal injury lawsuits claiming social media has damaged young users’ mental health have been filed nationwide. Nearly 4,000 are now part of the multijurisdictional proceedings — with more than a quarter coming from the Social Media Victims Law Center. They’re joined by over 1,000 school districts and about three-quarters of all U.S. state attorneys general. Others, like a separate case led by New Mexico’s attorney general, are proceeding independently and could go to trial as early as next year.
“All told, this is a massive legal siege on the social media industry,” said Previn Warren, a Washington-based lawyer at Motley Rice who is co-leading the federal cases. “We are the first major litigation to convince the court system that actually there are systemic wrongs on these platforms that victims should be compensated for. When the public becomes aware of the scale of evidence, I suspect that will have an impact on how they perceive their relationship – and their kids’ relationships – to social media.”
Pretrial discovery concluded in April, with the four tech giants turning over more than six million documents and sitting for 150 depositions — including those of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. On top of that, more than 100 child psychologists, scholars, and other experts provided evidence for the cases.
The tech giants sought to prevent the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses from testifying in the state cases, arguing their findings were unreliable, cherry-picked, and over-extrapolated from the data. In late September, the court rejected that challenge, allowing all but one of the experts to present their testimony.
In August, the defendants filed a motion for summary judgment in state court, arguing that the plaintiffs had not presented enough evidence to justify a trial. The companies contended that the plaintiffs failed to prove social media caused the alleged mental health harms and that some claims — stretching back to the plaintiffs’ earliest use of the platforms — should be barred by California’s statute of limitations.
“These lawsuits fundamentally misunderstand how YouTube works, and the allegations are simply not true,” José Castañeda, a spokesperson for the company, said in an email. “YouTube is a streaming service where people come to watch everything from live sports to podcasts to their favorite creators, primarily on TV screens, not a social network where people go to catch up with friends.”
Meta said it rejects the claims made in the lawsuits and pointed to safety measures designed to support its youngest users, such as limiting who teens can interact with and controlling the content they see. “We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously in these cases,” the company’s spokesperson said.
Representatives for Snap and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.
Judge Carolyn Kuhl of the Los Angeles Superior Court, who is handling the consolidated state cases, is expected to issue a ruling on the summary judgment motion in the weeks ahead. Across the state, U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland is managing the federal lawsuits. The first federal trial, filed by a Kentucky school district, is set to start in June.
Photo: Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg addresses the audience during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington in 2024. (via Bloomberg)
