Snap settles California social media addiction lawsuit days after Meta to avert trial News
Tracy Le Blanc, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Snap settles California social media addiction lawsuit days after Meta to avert trial

Snapchat parent company Snap Inc. on Monday reached a confidential settlement with two teenage plaintiffs in a California social media addiction lawsuit, averting a bellwether jury trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court two days before opening statements were scheduled to begin.

The consolidated trial before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl combined claims brought by a 16-year-old Illinois girl identified as S.J. and an 18-year-old Mississippi woman identified as K.D.B., with jury selection having already begun last week. Co-defendants TikTok and Alphabet Inc. (the parent company of YouTube) settled with the plaintiffs earlier, and Meta Platforms resolved its remaining claims with K.D.B. on Friday after previously settling with S.J.–leaving Snap as the sole remaining defendant.

Monday’s eleventh-hour agreement means Snap avoids a jury trial which would have had Snap CEO Evan Spiegel testifying in court for the first time in a proceeding on social media addiction. In a statement to the press, Snap said the parties were “pleased to have been able to resolve this matter in an amicable manner” and added that the company remains “committed to continually strengthening the safety, privacy, and well-being of our community.”

Under the master personal injury complaint in the coordinated proceeding, the plaintiffs alleged that the companies defectively designed their platforms with features such as autoplay and infinite scroll to foster compulsive use among minors, resulting in depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. Although technology companies have historically invoked section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to bar lawsuits over third-party content, legal analysts from Dynamis LLP observe that plaintiffs are now bypassing these protections by “framing claims to focus on platforms’ conduct (algorithms, product design, warnings, etc.) instead of treating them as mere publishers of user speech.” This shift is consistent with Judge Kuhl’s previous decision overruling the defendants’ demurrer, which allows plaintiffs to pursue product-liability and negligence claims targeting the platforms’ underlying design architecture.

The resolved case was the second bellwether trial in the Los Angeles coordinated proceedings, where more than 1,600 claims brought by families and school districts remain pending ahead of the next scheduled bellwether trials in March 2027. In the first bellwether trial this past March, where Snap and TikTok also settled before trial, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for negligence and awarded $6 million in damages. Since then, the companies settled the first school district bellwether in May, and Meta agreed to an $18 billion settlement with state attorneys general in August that conditioned $5 billion of the payout on states reaching parallel agreements with Snap, TikTok, and YouTube.

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