Updated January 27, 2026 at 9:17 AM PST
Social media apps have long been accused of being harmful to children. Now those claims will come before a jury for the first time in a trial kicking off Tuesday in a Los Angeles courtroom.
A key question will be whether tech companies deliberately built their platforms to hook young users, contributing to a youth mental health crisis. The jury's decision could have big consequences for the tech industry and how children use social media.
Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, and Google's YouTube will stand trial in California state court after TikTok settled the lawsuit on the eve of the trial. Terms of the settlement were confidential, said Matthew Bergman of the Social Media Victims Law Center, who represents the plaintiff. Tiktok didn't respond to a request for comment about the settlement on Tuesday. Snapchat was also named as a defendant in the lawsuit but reached its own undisclosed settlement with the plaintiff last week.
The LA case is the first of a wave of lawsuits headed for trial this year that have been brought against social media companies by more than 1,000 individual plaintiffs, hundreds of school districts and dozens of state attorneys general. It's drawing comparisons to the legal campaign against Big Tobacco in the 1990s, which accused cigarette makers of covering up what they knew about the harms of their products.
The suits accuse Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat of engineering features that make their apps nearly impossible for kids to put down, like infinite scroll, auto-play videos, frequent notifications and recommendation algorithms, leading in some cases to depression, eating disorders, self-harm and even suicide. (Snapchat and TikTok remain defendants in the other lawsuits.)
The plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages as well as changes to the way social media apps are designed.
The trial starting on Tuesday in LA will give a rare look inside how the most popular and powerful social media platforms operate. Jurors will be presented with thousands of pages of internal documents, including research on children conducted by the companies; expert witnesses; and the testimony of the teenage plaintiff, identified as K.G.M., who says her excessive use of social media led to mental health problems.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, are also set to take the stand in the trial, which is expected to last several weeks.
"The public is going to know for the first time what social media companies have done to prioritize their profits over the safety of our kids," said Bergman, who represents K.G.M. and other plaintiffs.
The tech companies argue that there's no clinical diagnosis of addiction to social media and that no direct link between using social media and mental health problems has been proved. They say they've rolled out safety features for kids in recent years, including parental controls, guardrails on who can contact teen accounts and time limits.
They also cite the First Amendment, saying that just as people's speech is protected from government censorship, the decisions that social media companies make about content are also a type of "protected speech" — an argument the Supreme Court has affirmed.
Both Meta and YouTube parent Google said in statements that the allegations in the lawsuits are baseless.
"These lawsuits misportray our company and the work we do every day to provide young people with safe, valuable experiences online," Meta said in a statement. "Despite the snippets of conversations or cherry-picked quotes that plaintiffs' counsel may use to paint an intentionally misleading picture of the company, we're proud of the progress we've made, we stand by our record of putting teen safety first, and we'll keep making improvements."
"The allegations in these complaints are simply not true," said Google spokesperson José Castañeda. He added that YouTube works with experts to provide "age-appropriate experiences" and "robust" parental controls.
YouTube will also argue that its video platform works differently from apps such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
TikTok declined to comment on its approach to the trial.
Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law who studies internet law, is skeptical of the plaintiffs' argument that the companies should be held liable for the features they've designed.
"Essentially what the plaintiffs are trying to do is argue that social media is the virtual equivalent to a soda bottle, like a Coca-Cola bottle, that explodes and sends shards of glass to anyone in the nearby area," he said. "And if that doesn't make any sense to you, it doesn't make any sense to me either. The entire premise of treating publications as products is itself architecturally flawed."
"A compulsion to engage"
The cases are on two tracks: some in state court and others in federal court. In each, a handful of "bellwether" cases head to trial first. The outcome of those cases could affect how the rest play out and could open the door for wide-ranging settlement talks.
Jury selection in the first bellwether case starts Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The plaintiff K.G.M, now 19 years old, says her use of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok led to depression, anxiety and body dysmorphia.
K.G.M. began using social media at age 10, despite her mother's efforts to block her from the apps, according to the complaint. She "developed a compulsion to engage with those products nonstop" as a result of their "addictive design" and "constant notifications."
"The more K.G.M. accessed Defendants' products, the worse her mental health became," the complaint says.
"She is going to be able to explain in a very real sense what social media did to her over the course of her life and how, in so many ways, it robbed her of her childhood and her adolescence," Bergman told reporters at a briefing last week. "She is very typical of so many children in the United States, the harms that they've sustained and the way their lives have been altered by the deliberate design decisions of the social media companies."
Last week, Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, settled with K.G.M., meaning it will not be involved in the first trial. No details about the settlement were publicly released. Still, the company remains a defendant in the other cases in both the state and federal consolidated proceedings.
"The Parties are pleased to have been able to resolve this matter in an amicable manner," Snap said in a statement. The company has previously disputed the allegations in the lawsuits. "Snapchat was designed differently from traditional social media; it opens to the camera, allowing Snapchatters to connect with family and friends in an environment that prioritizes their safety and privacy," its lawyers told Bloomberg News in November.
"The internet is on trial"
It has been an uphill battle for the plaintiffs to bring their claims at all, because online platforms are broadly protected by a controversial legal shield known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
The plaintiffs hope to get around the immunity usually afforded to tech companies by focusing on features they say are designed to keep kids coming back to social media apps rather than on the specific posts or videos that users encounter.
"We are not talking about third-party content. We are talking about the reckless design of these platforms that are designed not to show kids what they want to see, but what they can't look away from," Bergman said.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who is overseeing the consolidated state cases, including K.G.M.'s, has struck some plaintiffs' claims on the grounds they were about third-party content and therefore covered by Section 230. But she said the question of whether features like infinite scrolling could contribute to harming users is something a jury should decide.
Goldman, the Santa Clara University law professor, said the potential damages should the plaintiffs win pose "an existential threat" to the social media companies and beyond — not just in terms of financial impact but also if tech companies were forced to change how their products work.
"The internet is on trial in these cases," he said. "If the plaintiffs win, the internet will almost certainly look different than it does today. And probably it will be a far less conversational one that we have today."
Google is a financial supporter of NPR.
Copyright 2026 NPR
