TikTok settles second addiction case, leaving Meta and Snap to face a jury alone

TikTok has reached a confidential settlement with a Florida teenager who accused the platform of contributing to his mental health problems, removing itself from a jury trial scheduled to begin on July 27 in Los Angeles. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg on Tuesday, makes TikTok the second defendant to exit the case in recent weeks. YouTube settled with the same plaintiff last week.

The plaintiff, a 15-year-old boy identified in court filings by his initials, accuses Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap of designing their platforms to be addictive through features such as infinite scroll and autoplay. He has been using social media since he was eight years old, according to his attorneys. He has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder tied to his social media use, and began seeing therapists in 2023 for those conditions, including suicidal ideation.

With TikTok and YouTube now out, Meta and Snap are the only defendants still facing the jury. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, who was removed from the witness list after Snap settled a previous case, could testify in court for the first time in this trial. Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who presided over the first bellwether, will also oversee this one.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

The settlement follows a pattern TikTok has now repeated twice. The company also settled the first bellwether case before it went to trial earlier this year, alongside Snap. That first case ended in March with a jury finding Meta and Google liable and awarding six million dollars in damages, the first social media addiction case to reach a verdict.

The platforms are facing thousands of similar complaints. More than 10,000 individual cases and nearly 800 school-district claims are pending in federal multidistrict litigation. The bellwether structure exists because trying them one by one would take decades, so early verdicts and settlements set the terms on which the rest get valued.

The plaintiff’s attorneys said the July case will offer a distinct perspective from the first trial, which centred on a young woman. “The impacts on a male and on somebody who’s a minor currently involve different circumstances and things for the jury to evaluate,” attorney Rahul Ravipudi told NBC News. His legal team plans to call some of the same major witnesses who testified previously, where Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri both took the stand.

The school-district track of the litigation has been moving in the same direction. Snap, YouTube, and TikTok settled one school bellwether before trial, and Meta later settled the Kentucky case that would have been the first school-district trial over youth mental health. Companies that settle disclose nothing, while those that go to trial risk a number on a verdict form that becomes a reference point for every case that follows.

Meta now heads into its second consecutive trial as the company that has most consistently refused to settle. The July 27 trial in Los Angeles will test whether a second jury reaches the same conclusion as the first, and whether two verdicts create enough pressure to change the calculus for the thousands of cases still waiting.