TL;DR
TikTok settled with a Florida teenager ahead of its second social media addiction lawsuit, leaving Meta and Snap as the remaining defendants.
TikTok has recused itself from a jury trial scheduled to begin July 27 in Los Angeles, reaching a confidential settlement with a Florida teenager who accused the platform of contributing to his mental health problems. contract, This was reported by Bloomberg on Tuesday. It makes TikTok the second defendant to drop out of the case in recent weeks. YouTube settled with the same plaintiff last week.
The 15-year-old plaintiff, identified in court filings only by initials, accuses Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap of making their platforms addictive through features like infinite scrolling and autoplay. According to his lawyers, he has been using social media since he was eight years old. He was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder related to social media use, and in 2023 began seeing therapists for these conditions, including suicidal thoughts.
TikTok and YouTube are already out, Meta and Snap are the only defendants still before the jury. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, who was removed from the witness list after Snap settled the previous case, may testify in court for the first time in this trial. Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who presides over the first bell, will also oversee it.
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The reception follows a pattern that TikTok has repeated twice. The company too solved the first call case before being tested with Snap earlier this year. That first case ended in March with a jury finding Meta and Google liable and awarding them six million dollars in damages, the first ever social media addiction case.
The platforms face thousands of similar complaints. More than 10,000 individual cases and nearly 800 school-district lawsuits are pending in federal multidistrict litigation. The bell structure exists because it will take decades to try them one by one, so early verdicts and settlements set the terms on which the rest will be judged.
The plaintiff’s attorneys said the July case will present a different perspective than the first trial involving the young woman. “Effects on a male and a minor currently involve a variety of situations and things for a jury to assess,Attorney Rahul Ravipudi told NBC News. His legal team plans to call some of the same key witnesses who previously testified where Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri both took the stand.
The school-district dispute is going in the same direction. Snap, YouTube and TikTok rang a school bell before the trial, and Meta later settled the Kentucky case, which would be the first school-district court involving youth mental health. Companies that settle do not disclose anything, and those that go to trial bear a number of risks in terms of the verdict form, which becomes the reference point for every subsequent case.
Meta is now heading into its second consecutive trial as a company that has consistently refused to settle. A July 27 trial in Los Angeles will test whether the second jury reached the same conclusion as the first, and whether the two verdicts create enough pressure to change the calculations for the thousands of cases still pending.
