Meta, TikTok Must Face 3,000+ Youth Addiction Lawsuits After Court Ruling

A federal appeals court in San Francisco has dealt a significant blow to Meta and TikTok by rejecting their attempt to dismiss over 3,000 lawsuits accusing them of designing addictive products and failing to warn the public. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does not shield platforms from liability for claims related to product design and user safety.

The ruling is a major setback for the companies, which had argued that they should be protected by the law from being sued over their products' addictive nature. The court held that Section 230 only offers a defense that can be raised at trial, not a jurisdictional immunity that lets defendants avoid lawsuits altogether.

The consolidated federal litigation includes suits from states, school districts, municipalities, and individual families, as well as roughly 3,300 related cases moving through California state court. Meta's second loss of the day came when it asked the court to freeze a trial set to begin Wednesday brought by 29 state attorneys general who allege Meta illegally harvested children's data, engineered its platforms for compulsive use, and misled the public about the risks.

Attorneys Lexi Hazam and Previn Warren, representing thousands of school districts and individuals in the federal litigation, framed the ruling as a win for transparency. A trial is how the public finally learns what these companies knew about the harm their products caused, when they knew it, and what they did with that knowledge.

The ruling comes just days after a New Mexico court hit Meta with a $567 million public-nuisance judgment tied to teen mental health. In March, a Los Angeles jury delivered the first verdict in the parallel California state litigation, finding Meta and Google negligent in a case brought by a young woman who says she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child.