U.S. appeals court allows thousands of youth social media addiction lawsuits to proceed

In the first lawsuit to go to trial in the California litigation, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent for designing social media platforms that harm young people

Platforms like Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google are facing a long road of litigation.

A U.S. appeals court on Monday allowed thousands of lawsuits to move forward against Meta Platforms , Alphabet's Google, ByteDance's TikTok, and other social media companies over claims they designed their products to be addictive to young users. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the companies’ bid to reverse a lower court’s ruling forcing them to face more than 3,000 lawsuits over the claims filed in federal court, concluding that the appeal came too early in the litigation. The defendants, which also include Snap Inc's Snapchat, had argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 -- which generally shields online companies from claims over content posted by their users - also bars lawsuitsclaiming they failed to warn the public about the addictive nature of their platforms. Most appeals come after a case has concluded with a ruling or a verdict. Meta had argued that Section 230 provided it broad immunity and that it should be able to appeal the lower court's decision immediately. But the 9th Circuit said Section 230 provides a def

Thousands of lawsuits accusing major social media companies of harming young users can proceed after a US appeals court rejected an early appeal