US Court Rules Meta and Other Tech Companies Must Face Thousands of Social Media Addiction Lawsuits

U.S. Appeals court letsThousands of lawsuits charging Big Tech companies with facilitating social media addiction can proceed - a legal victory for parents, school districts, states and the more than 3,000 cases targeting Meta, Google, TikTok, among others.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on the 9th on Monday declined to strike down the lawsuits early after overturning Google’s request to throw the cases out. The plaintiffs’ lawsuits alleged they were victims of negligent design due to the technology companies producing addictive and mentally unhealthy platforms.

Some lawsuits include claims that each and every day they spent on Facebook and Instagram (Meta) the plaintiffs struggled to quit those apps due to their design.

And others also allege they received advertisements targeting minors when it was illegal to do so. The latter claim, if successful in trials, has the potential to yield very large monetary outcomes as companies would need to prove they didn’t do anything wrong. Some of the cases accuse tech giants like Google and Facebook (Meta) with actively choosing their product’s engaging designs to keep youth hooked on the devices from even young ages, despite knowing such use causes real mental harm.

Big Tech had argued that legal shieldSection 230 - which generally protect online platforms from liability from content posted by users - should have been enough to dismiss numerous of cases because the lawsuits sought to penalize them not for content but for design issues. However the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals rejected the companies’ attempt to shield themselves with the existing, broadly worded federal anti-internet censorship law at this early stage of proceeding.

“Section 230 protects speech,” the appeals court reasoned that there are instances when these defenses do not protect against a specific design of product or business practice. While not saying anything conclusive regarding these thousands of cases on the substance of each of these cases in relation to the protection Section 230 should be given against them; nonetheless allows all sides to continue their battles in the courts.

Many of the more than 150 lawsuits involve youths in school; with other claims coming from parents, states and counties. These individual lawsuits allege the “engaging features”-such as algorithmically powered, ever-refreshing content feeds and auto-playing videos- were designed specifically to encourage hours of interaction with addictive media, despite knowable harm in the children, teens or young adult that use their platforms and the public at large; according to filings. “They didn’t just design the products…it just was too good and this has resulted in widespread teen depression in all of the schools that you know the plaintiffs are from,” David N. Friedman, co-lead counsel for thePlaintiffs in the many individual school district and school based cases said in a telephone briefing Tuesday.

Google and Meta say their platforms help with life, social connections and also a variety of free services. Plus, it says it has safeguards for youth under age 13. But the companies are clearly on the Defense side of what promises to become long, bruising battles against a growing wave of legal challenges, said to be thousands, that, if successful could have massive financial, and reputational repercussions.

This isn’t the first time Big Tech platforms have fallen short on defenses of these issues. Back in July, a jury in Los Angeles held Google and Meta liable in a case brought against them for harms to a young plaintiff with similar allegations related to products; and the decision of that matter may well be used as evidence in any later, or similar cases.

Google along with another tech heavyweight, Meta has been hit with charges from dozens of state governments. An array of 29 state governments accuse Meta of deliberately engaging in tactics with intent and practices designed to dupe children, teens, and their guardians into addictive use, while simultaneously collecting harmful amounts of youth data without proper permission. It stands apart from this new ruling however, by not involving a particular young people or their’s specific damage suffered, only asking for government’s civil remedies.

These type of actions “may have significant monetary and structural implications for major tech firms, both directly and through encouraging reform, as well as potentially influencing the courts' approaches to Section 230 challenges to product design liability” says The Associated Press.

Section 230’s “purpose is not to immunize from any possible future claim for damages”, “even when the claim “only refers to harms stemming from the ‘platform’ rather than the content itself”, the ruling said. And the appeals court “urged careful consideration of which features actually constitute speech.””