Meta agreed to settle a major lawsuit on Thursday with a school district in Kentucky over claims that its social networks are designed to be addictive, leading to harm in children. The settlement comes less than three weeks before the case was scheduled to go to trial in federal court in California.
About 1,200 school districts from across the US came together to each sue Meta, TikTok, Snap and YouTube for allegedly fueling a mental health crisis in children. TikTok, Snap and YouTube settled their suits with Kentucky over the past couple of weeks.
“We’ve resolved this case amicably and remain focused on our longstanding work to build protections like Teen Accounts that help teens stay safe online, while giving parents simple controls to support their families,” said a Meta spokesperson. The company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, did not disclose the terms of the settlement.
A YouTube spokesperson also said the matter was resolved amicably and confidentially and that “for more than a decade, we’ve built YouTube responsibly – working with teachers, administrators, and parents’ groups to give students safer, more helpful experiences online”.
TikTok and Snap did not immediately return requests for comment.
Breathitt county schools, a small rural district in Kentucky, had accused the social media companies of designing addictive products that led to students having anxiety and depression and engaging in self-harm. The school district said it was left dealing with the fallout.
The lawsuit sought more than $60m to cover the costs of mental health needs for students in the district and to pay for a 15-year program to improve the issue. Lawyers also sought a court order requiring the social media companies to change the way their platforms worked to have fewer addictive features.
Meta’s legal woes are far from over. Attorneys for the school districts said in a statement on Thursday that “our focus remains on pursuing justice for the remaining 1,200 school districts who have filed cases”.
The next two lawsuits against the social media companies are scheduled to go to trial in July. One was brought by an individual in California state court, the other by the attorney general of Tennessee in federal court. The next school district case is being brought by the Tucson unified school district in federal court in January 2027.
Found liable before
The settlement comes after Meta and YouTube suffered a bruising loss in March during a similar trial in Los Angeles that lasted six weeks and ended with the two companies being ordered to pay a young woman $6m in damages. The jury found Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately designing addictive products and negligent for having failed to provide adequate warnings about the potential dangers of their platforms.
In a separate lawsuit brought by New Mexico’s attorney general, a jury ordered Meta to pay $375m in civil penalties in March over claims that it misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and enabled harm, including child sexual exploitation, against its users. The back-to-back verdicts are the first ever to find social media companies liable for how their products affect young people.
Thousands more lawsuits have been brought against Meta, TikTok, Snap and YouTube by individuals, school districts and attorneys general over claims that their products are addictive and harm children. Once young people are hooked, the plaintiffs allege, they fall prey to depression, eating disorders and other mental health issues.
Parents and lawyers outside the court after the jury found Meta and Google liable for harming children’s mental health, in Los Angeles on 25 March. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters
The plaintiffs’ arguments mirror those brought against big tobacco in the 1990s, which focused on cigarettes’ addictive qualities and companies’ public denials despite knowledge of their products’ harms. Lawyers allege some of the features that social media companies built into their platforms, such as an infinitely scrollable feed and video autoplay, were designed to keep people on the apps and make the products addictive.
Both the cases brought by the young woman in Los Angeles and the Kentucky school district were considered “bellwether” trials, which are used as a test to gauge juries’ reactions as well as set legal precedent. The Los Angeles case was part of a massive series of lawsuits brought in California known as a judicial council coordination proceeding (JCCP). And the Kentucky school district case is part of a separate coordinated group of thousands of federal lawsuits known as multidistrict litigation (MDL).
