Social Media Addiction Cases Are Settling Before Trial. What Does It Mean?

Varsha Bansal is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

Opening statements were scheduled this week in Los Angeles Superior Court in another bellwether trial over social media addiction, where two teenage plaintiffs: Kadence, an 18-year-old from Mississippi and Shawna, a 16-year-old from Illinois, were going to have their cases tried together before a single jury. This jury would decide if Snapchat’s design harmed its young users.

But, Monday morning, Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, settled. This was just days after Meta had settled with both plaintiffs. TikTok and YouTube did the same, but weeks prior. The terms of these settlements remain confidential.

The plaintiffs, who are referred to only by their first names, had alleged that these companies made deliberate design choices making their products and platforms addictive and causing harm to young users like them.

“Our ultimate goal is to hold these social media companies accountable for how their ⁠actions have impacted millions of children across the country, and these settlements allow us to keep building toward that goal,” John Morgan and ​Emily Jeffcott, trial attorneys for plaintiff Kadence, said in a statement.

Child safety expert and a long-time Snap critic Sarah Gardner believes that Snap’s settlement of this case indicates the company was fearful of its internal documents revealing damning evidence. “Snap wanted to do everything in their power to settle this case,” said Gardner, co-founder of the nonprofit Heat Initiative. “They know that if this case went to trial, the public would gain access to thousands of documents detailing how they knowingly addicted kids and justifying enormous levels of harm to millions of children across the globe.”

But this speaks to a much larger trend this year: social media addiction cases settling right before they go to trial or during trial.

In September, TikTok settled with Alabama , agreeing to pay a minimum $100 million. A month prior, Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion as part of its landmark settlement with 52 attorney generals from US states and more, where it had been accused of designing addictive platforms and profiting from exploiting the attention and time of children. An individual plaintiff bellwether trial that was scheduled for July did not make it to court after TikTok, YouTube and Snap settled with the plaintiff, who then dropped the case against Meta.

Carolina Rossini, a law professor at University of Massachusetts, says she has “mixed feelings” about the growing wave of settlements. “They are certainly important for the parties involved, and they signal that companies are taking litigation risks seriously,” she told Tech Policy Press. “They may also increase pressure to settle the remaining bellwether cases, particularly as companies assess the financial and reputational costs of going to trial. But settlements are not admissions of liability, nor do they establish legal precedent.”

What’s the point of a bellwether trial?

Thousands of different kinds of social media addiction cases have been filed in recent years. Over 3,000 cases were consolidated into a Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding or JCCP. Kadence and Shawna were part of this JCCP. Their trial was one among the many chosen as a “bellwether,” or a representative test case. The first bellwether trial from the JCCP was held in February in Los Angeles, which was also the first ever in the country to reach a verdict: when a 20-year-old woman who went by the initials K.G.M. won against Meta and Google after a jury found them liable. The companies were ordered to pay $6 million in damages. (Meta is appealing this verdict).

A second tranche of cases has been consolidated into a sprawling multi-district litigation, which also has combined over 3,000 cases with several different tracks under it. In addition, there are cases filed by individual states.

For the thousands of cases consolidated into JCCP or the MDL, the judges decided that they would pick “test” cases as representative or “bellwether” that would help determine the verdict for others as well.

“The point of the bellwether trials is to essentially answer two questions. One, are the plaintiffs' claims likely to succeed across the hundreds or thousands of other cases? And two, if so, how should each case be valued,” said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. “And with that information, the [other] parties would potentially have enough information to settle, because then at that point they can start to estimate what each case might be worth.”

But that’s not how the bellwethers have been going. “We have seen more of them settle than reach trial, and settlements of bellwether cases doesn't really answer any relevant question because the whole point was to do some statistical sampling, so if the litigants opt out of that sample, we still don't get the data that we need.”

Gregory Dickinson, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska, echoes similar concerns about the settlement nullifying the bellwether approach. “That takes something away from the bellwether process. Bellwethers exist to show what juries will do, and every settlement leaves both sides valuing the remaining cases with less information,” said Dickinson.

Taking no chances with a jury

Experts say that one main reason why the companies have been settling their cases is because they don’t want to take any chances with the jury, given that the first trial that went to the jury reached a positive verdict for the plaintiff.

“I think the settlements show the companies are worried about how their arguments will play with juries. They have some decent defenses, especially on causation, because it's hard for a plaintiff to show that a specific feature caused her harm,” said Dickinson. “But that's a nuanced argument to make to a jury, and these companies aren't sympathetic defendants right now. So they're settling even cases they might win to avoid the risk of a massive verdict.”

A big concern that Rossini has with the spate of settlements is that they may “limit the larger policy conversation we desperately need to have about platform accountability.”

“While I understand why plaintiffs settle, and why these agreements may represent meaningful victories for families, I don’t think we should confuse a wave of settlements with systemic accountability or meaningful regulatory reform,” said Rossini. “In some ways, we risk privatizing the resolution of what are fundamentally public-interest questions.”

Ultimately, she adds, she would like to see these cases contribute to “a broader public conversation about the responsibilities of platforms, the incentives behind their design choices, and the need for transparency and independent oversight.” These confidential settlements, she worries, may close that door even before there’s a chance to learn enough about what is behind it.