is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.
Over the next year, top social media executives are expected to take the witness stand to defend their companies from an avalanche of claims about their failure to protect kids.
The first of many trials is set to begin this month in California, when Meta, TikTok, and YouTube face claims that tech addiction harmed a teenager’s mental health. This case is just the tip of the legal iceberg. It kicks off one of two sets of so-called bellwether trials, where judges will hear a selection of cases that represent similar claims, whose outcomes will likely inform settlement amounts for the remaining cases. There are still thousands more cases behind them.
They’re significant both because they’ve managed a rare feat of overcoming Section 230 objections — which protect online platforms from being held liable for their users’ speech — to reach a full trial phase, and because of the evidence they could reveal regarding what social media platforms knew and did — or didn’t do — about the harms they could cause kids. “When we started doing this work, it was a given that we could not even get past a motion to dismiss,” Matthew Bergman, the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, which represents the plaintiff in the first of the trials taking place this month, said at a recent briefing. “The simple fact that a social media company is going to have to stand trial before a jury and account for its design decisions is unprecedented in American jurisprudence. This has never happened before.”
“This has never happened before”
All of the companies named in the cases — Meta, Google’s YouTube, TikTok, and Snap — say they have robust policies to keep kids safe online. “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” YouTube spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement. “The allegations in these complaints are simply not true.” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone pointed to the company’s recent blog post, which said that blaming social media companies for teens’ mental health issues “oversimplifies a serious issue.” Stone added, “We strongly disagree with these allegations and are confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people.” TikTok did not provide comment by publication time, but has defended its trust and safety measures in the past.
Snap settled with the plaintiff in the first case going to trial, and Snap spokesperson Monique Bellamy said in a statement that “The Parties are pleased to have been able to resolve this matter in an amicable manner.”
In the trials, plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages and changes to social platforms. But no matter the outcome, new revelations from these trials could create more pressure on both the companies and lawmakers to enact changes.
How the bellwether cases work
Thousands of individuals, school districts, and state attorneys general from across the country have filed suit against social media companies which they allege harmed teens’ mental health. Since the cases hit on similar themes requiring similar discovery and legal procedures, they were consolidated to more efficiently manage the caseload. These groupings of cases are known as the Judicial Council Coordination Proceedings (JCCP) for the state system and Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) for the federal system. Within each grouping, a subgroup of bellwether cases will be tried first and are roughly representative of the whole group’s claims. When one bellwether concludes, they will move onto the next.
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