Google’s YouTube has settled a social media addiction lawsuit brought by a 15-year-old in Florida, the latest in a string of legal challenges facing tech companies over the alleged mental health effects of their platforms on young users.
The teenager, identified in court documents only by the initials R.K.C., alleged that YouTube and other social media firms designed their platforms to be addictive. The case was resolved before trial, according to a statement Google provided to the BBC. “This matter has been amicably resolved and our focus remains on building age-appropriate products and parental controls that deliver on that promise,” Google spokesman José Castañeda said.
R.K.C. is continuing with lawsuits against Instagram-parent Meta, TikTok, and Snap Inc. That trial is scheduled to begin July 27 in Los Angeles Superior Court, where Judge Carolyn Kuhl is overseeing a series of bellwether trials intended to resolve more than 1,000 similar cases consolidated in California.
The teen’s allegations mirror those made by a 20-year-old California woman known as K.G.M., whose trial earlier this year became a landmark. K.G.M. accused Meta and YouTube of intentionally engineering their platforms to be addictive. A jury awarded her $6 million — the first time a court found that Meta and YouTube were liable for the mental health effects of their platforms on certain users. Snap and TikTok both settled with K.G.M. before trial for undisclosed sums.
R.K.C.’s attorneys, John Morgan and Emily Jeffcott, said in a statement that “as jurors saw in the first bellwether trial, leadership at these social media companies have been strategizing for years to hook children early and maximize their usage.”
The same week as the K.G.M. verdict, a jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million for misleading users about the safety of its platforms for children.
In May, Google settled another case that was heading to trial in which a Kentucky school district accused YouTube, Meta, Snap, and TikTok of creating a mental health crisis for its students. Both Snap and TikTok also settled before trial in that case, and the school district had sought changes to the companies’ purportedly addictive features as well as compensation for costs incurred helping students with anxiety, depression, and self-harm allegedly linked to social media use.
A trial in the multi-district litigation brought by U.S. states against Meta is scheduled to begin in August in federal court in Oakland, California.
Google said it has built YouTube “responsibly — working with families to give young people safer, more helpful experiences online” for more than a decade, and noted the 2015 launch of YouTube Kids, a version designed and curated for children.