Social media.
Adolescent addiction litigation.
Federal and state mass-tort litigation alleging that Meta, ByteDance, Snap, and Google designed their platforms to addict adolescent users, causing depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and self-harm. The first state bellwether trial featured testimony from Mark Zuckerberg.
The plaintiff theory.
The platforms. The harm.
The social media litigation consolidates claims against Meta (Facebook, Instagram), ByteDance (TikTok), Snap, and Google (YouTube) brought by individual adolescent users, school districts, state attorneys general, and Native American tribes. The core legal theory: these platforms are defectively designed products whose features — infinite scroll, algorithmic content prioritization, push notifications, intermittent variable rewards — were engineered to addict young users at the expense of mental health.
The most consequential procedural innovation in the litigation has been the design-versus-content distinction. For decades, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shielded platforms from liability for user content. Plaintiffs in MDL 3047 advanced a different theory: the lawsuits target platform design, not user content. Courts in both the MDL and the JCCP have allowed design-based product liability claims to proceed, denying platform motions to dismiss.
The factual case draws on internal platform research — including Meta's own studies showing Instagram made one in three teen girls feel worse about their bodies — alongside epidemiological evidence linking compulsive social media use to depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicide attempts. The litigation has been compared structurally to the 1990s tobacco litigation: internal documents proving the harm, contrasted with public denial.
Procedural posture.
Through the first state bellwether.
The first state bellwether trial in the JCCP — KGM v. Meta & YouTube, before Judge Carolyn Kuhl in Los Angeles Superior Court — began jury selection on January 27, 2026, with trial proceedings opening February 10. Mark Zuckerberg testified during the plaintiff's case-in-chief. Closing arguments began March 12, 2026. The outcome is expected to materially shape settlement posture across the full litigation.
In the federal MDL, six school district bellwether cases have been selected for the first wave of trials, anticipated to begin summer 2026. The litigation also includes individual personal-injury cases brought by adolescent users and their families, attorney general actions from multiple states, and parallel claims by Native American tribes citing community-level harm.
Acquisition. Screening.
Retention.
Social media addiction intake requires careful eligibility screening on platform usage history (which apps, starting at what age, frequency of use), documented mental-health diagnosis (depression, anxiety, eating disorder, self-harm), and a credible causation narrative connecting the two. Cases are stronger when platform usage began before age thirteen, when the user can document specific design features they encountered, and when the mental-health diagnosis has clinical documentation. We have built docket-specific intake protocols and trained specialists for the medical-record retrieval this docket requires.
Acquisition runs across paid social (carefully — with attention to platform policy on litigation-related advertising), paid search, and connected TV. Creative is built specifically for this docket with compliance review on every iteration. Every claimant flows through our multi-vendor fraud-detection suite — Anura, CHEQ, ActiveProspect, TrustedForm, Blacklist Alliance, and Plaid — before reaching the partner firm. Retained cases land directly in the firm's case management system in real time.
For partner firms holding social media dockets, we provide standing operational reporting on retained cases delivered, cost per qualified retention, and case-tier mix against your screening criteria. Strategy sessions cover docket-portfolio decisions: how the KGM trial outcome reshapes case-value expectations, which platform-and-injury combinations are driving the highest recoveries, and how to balance federal MDL versus California JCCP case mix.
Start a conversation.
Speak with our team.
A LeadClient case-acquisition strategist will reach out to talk through your docket.