Social media giants reach settlement ahead of US school mental health trial

The settlements avoid a trial in California next month that was expected to set the tone for hundreds of similar cases.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, was the last of the four companies to reach a settlement, according to court documents filed in federal court in Oakland, near San Francisco.

Snap, TikTok and Google, which owns YouTube, reached a settlement on May 15, according to documents reviewed by AFP.

The deals come as the legal environment for social media platforms becomes increasingly hostile.

In March, a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay $6 million to a young woman, finding that their platforms were harmful and addictive, the first verdict of its kind.

The day before, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages for exposing inappropriate content to minors and sexual predators.

The Oakland case was brought by the Breathitt County School District in rural eastern Kentucky, and the district’s lawsuit was selected as a test case for more than 1,200 similar lawsuits filed by school districts across the country.

The district has sought more than $60 million to offset the cost of addressing the effects of social media on students, including sleep problems, emotional distress and conflict, and to fund a 15-year mental health program.

It also asked the court to order the platforms to change their algorithms to make them less addictive.

None of the settlements admitted any wrongdoing.

They are likely to increase pressure on the company to resolve the remaining cases, all of which are overseen by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who recently presided over the trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

By settling secretly instead of going to trial, the four companies also avoided having their internal records released in open court.

Thousands of social media addiction lawsuits are pending in U.S. courts.

More than 30 states are also suing Meta on similar charges in a separate case that could go to trial in Oakland in August.

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This article was generated from automated news agency feeds without modifications to the text.