TikTok, YouTube and Meta likely headed to trial over schools' social media addiction claims

OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) —  Despite pushback from social media giants, a federal judge signaled Monday that a massive multidistrict case regarding supposed addictive features on their platforms affecting minor students will be heard in a jury trial.

U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers didn’t seem convinced Monday by YouTube, Snap Inc., TikTok and Meta’s claims that school districts in Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey and South Carolina didn’t provide specific evidence of compulsive use of social media by adolescent students.

The social media giants are fighting against letting negligence, failure to warn about the social media’s addictive features, and public nuisance claims by four of six named school district plaintiffs go to a jury trial.

But Rogers didn’t seem inclined to grant them summary judgment — “Somebody is going to trial, the question is who,” the Barack Obama appointee said, referring to which school district will be tried first.

“The mechanisms of addiction used by these platforms are largely behind a veil,” plaintiffs’ attorney Previn Warren said. “That’s why we have a why have a failure to warn. The platforms know that their products are addictive.”

In the sprawling 2023 lawsuit, the school districts say they were harmed and continue to be injured with elementary to high school students’ incessant use of social media during school hours. They identified features like “Snapchat streaks,” or how many consecutive days two people send Snaps to each other, and beauty filters as causing addictive behavior or mental health harms.

The plaintiffs further claimed that the school district’s limited resources were diverted by needing to use teachers and staff time to stop social media use or to handle issues that are brought up by social media such as bullying, distraction and absenteeism.

In February 2025, Rogers dismissed many of the suit’s claims, citing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 as the basis for dismissing claims that Meta and Snap failed to remove, report or take action against child sex abuse material on their platforms.

The social media platforms argued most of the evidence the plaintiffs rely on is still content-based, which would fall under the protection of Section 230, with the tech companies not liable for the content created by third parties that may induce kids to addictive behavior.

“The court held that a number of features such as infinite scroll, notifications, recommendation algorithms are protected and are no longer a part of this case,” Snap, Inc. attorney Jonathan Blavin said. “Plaintiffs have ignored the court’s directives at each step of this case.”

Rogers countered saying that protected and unprotected content may be part of the plaintiffs’ evidence and wasn’t a reason not to go to trial.

“Juries are frequently called upon to decide those kinds of issues,” she said. “When the eggs are scrambled, so to speak.”

Questions remain about causation, the statute of limitations, sealing documents and what the plaintiffs seek as both past damages for the school staffs’ “lost time” due to dealing with students’ social media use, and their future plans to remedy the harms of social media’s addictive features, including what injunctive relief may look like.

The initial multidistrict litigation consolidated hundreds of personal injury lawsuits on behalf of children and adolescents by school districts, local governments and state attorneys general. These plaintiffs claim that Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Google’s YouTube, ByteDance’s TikTok and Snap’s Snapchat are designed to foster compulsive use by minors.

In the February 2025 dismissal ruling, loss of consortium claims filed by loved ones of the injured for the loss or impairment of the intangible benefits of a relationship were dismissed in 24 states, including California and D.C. However, the same claims were allowed to endure in all remaining states.

In a joint lawsuit filed in late 2023, 33 states claimed that Meta built a business model that maximizes young users’ time on its platforms and employs psychologically manipulative platform features. They accused the tech behemoth of publishing misleading reports on user harm and continuing to downplay the negative consequences of its products.

Warren asked for six-week trials for each of the districts and at least two to be scheduled this summer, with the first one to start on June 15.

In Los Angeles, a similar lawsuit over over the role of social media in teen addiction kicked off this week. That bellwether trial — where Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, has been ordered to testify in person — revolves around a teenager claiming the companies contributed to her anxiety, depression and social media addiction.