Hajra Naz
A day after Snap reached a tentative settlement with the plaintiff, the social media addiction lawsuit took another turn—this time in Meta’s favor. The case against the company has now been dropped entirely, leaving Meta out of the legal battle without having to pay a cent in settlement.
According to Meta, the plaintiff chose to dismiss the case voluntarily, and no payment changed hands to resolve the claims. That puts Meta in a very different position than the other platforms named in the suit.
TikTok and YouTube had already struck their own settlement deals with the plaintiff before this, and Snap confirmed its tentative agreement just on Tuesday.
The timing is notable too. This lawsuit had a jury trial scheduled for next week, set to be heard in the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles — so the dismissal comes right before things would have gone in front of a jury.
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The plaintiff, a Florida teenager known only by the initials R.K.C., accused several major social media companies of deliberately designing their platforms to be addictive. His case sits among thousands filed across the US by teenagers, school districts, and even state attorneys general, all making a similar argument: that big tech companies knew exactly what they were doing when they built features meant to hook users and keep them scrolling.
Endless feeds, constant notifications, and other attention-grabbing design choices have all come under scrutiny in these cases. Legal experts had suggested this particular lawsuit could have carried real weight beyond just the plaintiff—a ruling against the companies might have shaped how social platforms design their apps going forward.
Meta walking away from this one doesn’t erase its recent legal troubles, though. Just months ago, the company lost its first courtroom case tied to social media harms, in New Mexico, where a court ordered Meta to pay $375 million after finding it had misled consumers about platform safety and failed to protect children.
Then in March, a Los Angeles jury ruled against both Meta and Google in a separate case, awarding the plaintiff roughly $6 million in damages.
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Had this case gone to trial, Meta was reportedly planning a defense built around two main points: that the plaintiff spent only a few minutes a day on Facebook and Instagram and that most of his accounts were actually created after he’d already hired a lawyer.
Instead, with the case dismissed, Meta simply welcomed the outcome. “This outcome makes clear that we will not back away from defending ourselves against baseless lawsuits,” the company said.
