TL;DR
TikTok settled with a Florida teen ahead of second trial for social media addiction, leaving Meta and Snap as the remaining defendants.
TikTok has reached a confidential settlement with a Florida teenager who accused the platform of contributing to his mental health problems, removing himself from a jury trial scheduled to begin 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 reached a settlement with the same plaintiff last week.
The plaintiff, a 15-year-old boy identified in court documents by his initials, accuses Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap of designing their platforms to be addictive through features like infinite scrolling and autoplay. He has been using social media since he was eight years old, according to his lawyers. He was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder related to his social media use, and began seeing therapists in 2023 for those conditions, including suicidal ideation.
Now that TikTok and YouTube are available, 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 chaired the first survey, will also oversee this one.
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The deal follows a pattern that TikTok has repeated twice. The company also resolved the first referring case before it went to trial earlier this year, along with Snap. That first case ended in March when a jury found Meta and Google liable and awarded $6 million 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 reference structure exists because judging them one by one would take decades, so the first verdicts and agreements establish the terms under which the rest are valued.
The plaintiff’s attorneys said the July case will offer a different perspective than the first trial, which focused on a young woman. “The impacts on a man and someone underage currently involve different circumstances and things that the jury must evaluate,“Attorney Rahul Ravipudi told NBC News. His legal team plans to call some of the same key witnesses who testified earlier, where Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram boss Adam Mosseri took the stand.
The litigation path between the school district has been moving in the same direction. Snap, YouTube and TikTok resolved a school reference 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 don’t reveal anything, while those that go to trial risk getting a number on a verdict form that becomes a benchmark 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 of the thousands of cases still pending.
