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A Florida teen whose lawsuit claimed Meta’s platforms were to blame for his depression and anxiety dropped his case against the company just days before the trial in Los Angeles was set to start, his attorneys said on Wednesday. It was the latest in a massive series of high-stakes lawsuits against social media companies for allegedly designing addictive products that lead to the harm of children.
The lawsuit, brought by a 15-year-old boy known as RKC, originally named four defendants, Google’s YouTube, Meta’s Instagram, Snap Inc’s Snapchat and ByteDance’s TikTok. YouTube and TikTok settled in June and Snap reached a tentative settlement in the case, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The terms of those settlements were confidential.
RKC, who started using social media when he was about eight, said he became addicted to it, losing sleep and suffering from depression and anxiety, according to court filings.
“In light of the overall successful result of the litigation and his concerns about enduring a grueling weeks-long trial, he has elected to withdraw his claims against Meta,” attorneys for RKC said in a statement. “He’s ready to close this chapter and focus on his recovery and engage in therapy as he aspires to have a normal life.”
A spokesperson for Meta said RKC had dropped the claims without receiving any payment.
“The claims never held up,” the company said in a statement. This outcome makes clear that we will not back away from defending ourselves against baseless lawsuits.”
The dropped case comes after Meta and YouTube suffered a bruising loss in March in the same Los Angeles court. That trial lasted six weeks and ended with the two companies being ordered to pay a young woman $6m in damages. In the landmark decision, the jury found Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately designing addictive products and negligent for having failed to provide adequate warnings about the potential dangers of their platforms.
In a separate lawsuit in March brought by New Mexico’s attorney general, a jury ordered Meta to pay $375m in civil penalties over claims that it misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and enabled harm, including child sexual exploitation, against its users. The back-to-back verdicts are the first ever to find social media companies liable for how their products affect young people.
These cases were the first to go to court, and are slated to be followed by more trials from two coordinated groups of more than 2,000 plaintiffs, including families, school districts and state attorneys general, who have brought lawsuits against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap.
The four social media companies also settled another major lawsuit just before trial in May, brought by a school district in Kentucky over similar claims of addictive products leading to harm in children.
This month, Meta appealed the verdict in its loss at the Los Angeles court. It challenged the jury’s decision that found the company liable for designing addictive products to hook in young people.
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Meta and the other social media companies have vigorously defended their business models, saying their products aren’t addictive. In a post on Wednesday, Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, wrote that RKC’s claims “never held up” and that he “averaged just minutes a day on Facebook and Instagram”.
Lawyers for RKC said they achieved what they set out to do by bringing awareness to social media’s alleged harms.
“RKC came into this process wanting to hold social media companies accountable and push for changes to protect young people like himself,” the lawyers said. “He did that.”
Reuters contributed reporting
