UPDATE: Meta on Friday announced it had come to a confidential settlement agreement with plaintiff K.D.B., leaving Snap as the sole defendant in the case.
LOS ANGELES—As another landmark civil trial accusing social media companies of addicting and harming young users kicks off in California this week, parents involved in related cases will be watching closely.
The case in Los Angeles Superior Court, which considers claims by two teenage female plaintiffs, is the third bellwether selected to help determine how thousands of similar lawsuits—brought by parents, school districts, and attorneys general across the country—will be tried.
If it proceeds as expected, with opening arguments anticipated next week, it will also be the first time Snap Inc., which makes the popular app Snapchat, and CEO Evan Spiegel will face a jury trial.
Snap has avoided the spectacle, disclosures, and public scrutiny of high-profile trials by settling several recent cases out of court.
Parents are hoping this trial will answer the question “What did Snapchat leadership know, and when did they know it?”
“I lost my son almost seven years ago, and we’ve been waiting, waiting, waiting,” said Bridgette Norring.
Her son Devin died in 2020 from an accidental fentanyl poisoning after he was sold a counterfeit pill on Snapchat. In 2022, she joined dozens of other families in a wrongful death lawsuit against the company, which is currently in discovery.
“I would really like to see [Spiegel] be questioned under oath in a court of law,” Norring said. “And I’d like to see the documents.”
In March, a jury in the first bellwether trial found Meta and Google liable for psychological harms suffered by a 20-year-old plaintiff, “K.G.M.,” who described becoming addicted to the platforms as a young child. They awarded her a $6 million verdict, including compensatory and punitive damages.
The K.G.M. trial unveiled a cascade of internal documents and communications that plaintiffs say prove the companies knew the risks and designed their products to be maximally addictive to young users anyway.
Parents involved in related cases showed up every day of the nearly seven-week trial to witness these revelations—and to see top executives such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram’s Adam Mosseri take the stand.
Snapchat and TikTok settled with K.G.M. before trial. Just before a second bellwether was scheduled to go to trial over the summer, Snapchat, TikTok, and Google settled with the plaintiff, a teenage boy, who dropped his remaining claims against Meta.
With Snap, Norring said, “it’s very disheartening because when you have a settlement, those documents become sealed. And then we don’t get to see exactly the depths of what [the company] has done.”
Snapchat representatives did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times.
Plaintiffs in the current trial, identified in court documents as “S.J.,” a 16-year-old from Illinois, and “K.D.B.,” an 18-year-old from Mississippi, both settled with TikTok and Google before trial; only S.J. settled with Meta, leaving Snap and Meta as remaining defendants in the combined complaint.
That means, for the first time, the spotlight may be largely on Snapchat.
“I cannot wait for us to have our ‘Meta moment,’” Norring said, “except with Snap, where these documents come to light so parents have a good understanding of exactly what’s been going on behind closed doors.”
With Meta, she recalled, “we all knew the harms were happening, but it wasn’t until we got to actually see those files that it was validated. And now the whole world sees them.”
Whistleblowers also testified in the K.G.M. trial that Meta’s executive leadership were aware of significant harms to young users but chose to ignore them as the company pursued “power and growth” at all costs and targeted teens.
Both Meta and Google denied K.G.M.’s claims that their products are knowingly engineered to be addictive—and questioned the idea of social media addiction itself.
Plaintiffs in the current trial both claim they are “heavy user[s]” of defendants’ apps who quickly became addicted and suffered serious psychological harms as a result.
Their complaint, which accuses both Meta and Snap of “aggressively” engineering their products to entrap and addict young users, cites Meta’s own research, showing, among other things, that 66 percent of teen girls and 46 percent of teen boys experience negative social comparisons on Instagram, and that Facebook makes body-image issues worse for a third of girls.
The complaint lists 13 causes of action—including negligence, product liability, and unfair trade practices—and alleges Snap has engineered its products “in ways that made it more harmful for users yet resulted in increased engagement and profits.”
The lawsuit identifies the app’s ephemeral messaging, short video feeds, image filters, and other unique features as encouraging problematic or addictive use.
“Snapchat incorporates several product features that serve no purpose other than to create dependency on Snapchat’s social media product. These features, in turn, result in sleep deprivation, anxiety, depression, shame, interpersonal conflicts, and other serious mental and physical harms,” the lawsuit claims.
Laura Marquez-Garrett, a senior litigation attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center who oversees thousands of related cases, said the win for plaintiffs is the fact that these cases are going to trial in the first place.
“We can’t predict what’s going to happen. The point is that there’s transparency and accountability,” she said.
Spiegel testifying before a jury, Marquez-Garrett acknowledged, would be a critical moment.
“We would expect to see the media that are sitting in that courtroom seeing some of those documents in real time, and then seeing how Snap’s CEO responds when he’s questioned about them,” Marquez-Garrett said.
Amy Neville, whose son, Alex, died from accidental fentanyl poisoning after buying a counterfeit pill on Snapchat in 2020, said she has also been looking forward to the company’s moment in court.
“We saw [Spiegel] testify under oath in January 2024,” she said, referring to testimony the CEO gave during a congressional hearing on “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis.”
“I don’t feel like he was completely forthcoming. I didn’t feel like he was telling us the truth, especially given that the very next day, [Snap’s] ad campaign said, ‘Less Social Media, More Snapchat.’
“They keep making this claim that Snap’s not a social media company. I would think we’re going to hear more of that—trying to convince us that Snap is something they’re not. But what we’re going to see is the evidence.”
Before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2024, Spiegel defended ephemeral messaging as a design feature that positively distinguishes the platform from other social media apps. Critics say it’s at the heart of safety concerns over illicit drug sales and sexploitation of minors.
He built Snapchat, he told legislators, to open directly to the camera “instead of a constant feed, to encourage creativity instead of passive consumption.”
Earlier this year, responding to third-party reports showing young users are exposed to a wide range of negative and harmful content on the app, the company took the same approach, insisting that Snapchat is “built different,” opening to a camera instead of a feed.
The Epoch Times’ own recent investigation, in which we created a fictional 13-year-old avatar account, showed that young users may be exposed to unwanted sexual and violent content at alarming rates—including on one of the app’s relatively newer features, a TikTok-style feed that serves endless, algorithm-driven short videos.
In a statement to media outlets this week, a Snap representative offered a similar defense of the app’s unique design ahead of trial, and expressed confidence the evidence will show the allegations “fundamentally misrepresent the plaintiffs’ experiences on Snapchat.”
Norring said she’ll be watching closely.
“I want something so much to come of it,” she said. “I want to see the files. I want to see exactly what they’ve done.”
