Snap Inc has settled a lawsuit filed by two teenagers who say years of compulsive scrolling and posting on the company’s photo-sharing app contributed to their mental health struggles.
The agreement, reached partway through jury selection in Los Angeles, allows the company to avoid the next high-profile social media addiction trial. The case in California state court was set to be the latest test of thousands of such lawsuits. The teenagers previously reached confidential settlements with Meta Platforms Inc, TikTok and Google’s YouTube.
"Our ultimate goal is to hold these social media companies accountable for how their actions have impacted millions of children across the country, and these settlements allow us to keep building toward that goal,” John Morgan and Emily Jeffcott, attorneys for one of the teens, said in a statement announcing the agreement. Terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed.
In a separate statement, Snap said "the parties are pleased to have been able to resolve this matter in an amicable manner.”
The two cases, which were combined by the judge, would have been the second to go to trial among complaints filed by young users and their family members accusing the social media companies of engineering their platforms to profit at the expense of young people’s safety and mental health.
The companies deny these allegations and stress that they have rolled out tools and resources to support parents with teens on the platform. They’ve also sought to highlight positive experiences that users have online.
A Snap spokesperson added on Nov 2 that the company has built safeguards, launched tutorials and consulted with experts, and it remains committed to strengthening the safety, privacy and well-being of its online community.
Snap, with a market cap of roughly US$9.4bil (RM38.3bil), is vastly smaller than its rivals, making it more vulnerable to the legal backlash against social media that has been gaining momentum over the last five years. Bloomberg Intelligence (BI) has estimated that Snap’s exposure to social media harm litigation through 2029 could be as much as US$3bil (RM12.2bil).
"Snap’s relatively smaller market cap, revenue and cash leave it less able to absorb settlements, and the market may be underestimating the total exposure,” BI analyst Matthew Schettenhelm said in an Oct 26 note.
The teenage plaintiffs in the case that was scheduled to go to trial this week are identified in court documents as SJ, a 16-year-old girl from Illinois, and KDB, an 18-year-old woman from Mississippi. Both claim their heavy use of Snapchat and other social media platforms caused and contributed to their depression, anxiety and eating disorders.
Families shouldn’t have to seek jury trials "to solve a problem this big,” Mark Lanier, the plaintiffs’ trial counsel for the case, said in a statement. "What these teenagers need is a permanent fix, real design changes that protect kids, not case-by-case patches. Until that happens, we will keep trying these cases.”
SJ and KDB’s lawsuits were selected from the larger pool of litigation to serve as so-called bellwether cases. The outcomes of these early trials could encourage broader settlement talks by showing lawyers the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments and evidence – and ultimately how much the remaining cases are worth.
The first bellwether case went to trial earlier this year against Meta Platforms Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google. A 20-year-old woman was awarded US$6mil (RM24.47mil) after a jury found the companies were negligent in the design and operation of their platforms and should have warned that their products could harm young users. Snap and TikTok reached confidential settlement agreements with the woman before that trial. – Bloomberg
