Meta and Other Tech Giants Must Face Thousands of Social Media Addiction Lawsuits, Court Declares

A U.S. Appeals court just dealt Meta a big blow in the company’s long fight against social media addiction lawsuits. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an appeals request from Meta, basically allowing the social media giant and its co-defendants TikTok-owner ByteDance, YouTube-owner Google and Snapchat-owner Snap to face more than 3,000 social media addiction lawsuits. Meta lost a key, bellwether social media trial earlier this year, in which a now 20-year-old claimed that deliberately addictive design features on social media platforms like Instagram got her addicted from a very young age. That addiction in turn exacerbated mental health problems like depression, body image issues, and anxiety, the suit alleged. The judge ruled in favor of the 20-year-old who goes by the initials K.G.M., creating a watershed moment that opened the floodgates to thousands more lawsuits in a similar vein. Until that verdict, Meta and other social media operators were seen as shielded from such litigation under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says that platform operators can’t be held liable for third-party content posted on said platforms. The March verdict basically