By Diana Novak Jones
Nov 2 (Reuters) – Snapchat parent Snap Inc has reached a settlement during a trial over claims brought by two teenagers who say the company designed the platform to be addictive, causing their depression, anxiety and eating disorders, attorneys for the plaintiffs said on Monday.
Jury selection began last week for the trial, the second in Los Angeles state court over claims brought by young people who say they became addicted to social media after Snap, Meta Platforms, TikTok and Alphabet’s YouTube designed their platforms to encourage compulsive use.
The plaintiffs had previously settled with Meta, TikTok and YouTube.
“Our ultimate goal is to hold these social media companies accountable for how their actions have impacted millions of children across the country, and these settlements allow us to keep building toward that goal,” John Morgan and Emily Jeffcott, trial attorneys for plaintiff K.D.B., said in a statement.
The trial was set to be the first for Snap in the sweeping litigation over social media’s impact on teens, after the company settled the other cases that had been scheduled for trial. The company’s chief executive, Evan Spiegel, had been expected to testify.
The case had been selected from thousands of pending lawsuits as a bellwether intended to test the claims against Snap and the other companies and potentially influence how similar cases are resolved. The next bellwether trials are scheduled to begin in March, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
A Snap spokesperson said in a statement that the company has built safeguards, launched safety tutorials and partnered with experts, and remains committed to “continually strengthening the safety, privacy, and well-being of our community.”
Plaintiffs S.J., a 16-year-old girl from Illinois, and K.D.B., an 18-year-old from Mississippi, say they began using YouTube as early as age 3 and the other platforms around age 9, developing compulsive habits they blame on features such as autoplay and infinite scroll.
The companies have rejected claims their platforms were designed to addict young people, and say they have taken action to make the apps safe places for young people to express themselves.
Social media companies face thousands of lawsuits in federal and state courts brought by individuals, school districts, municipalities and other government entities alleging the companies knowingly sought to addict children to their platforms, contributing to a youth mental health crisis involving anxiety, depression and suicide.
In the first case to go to trial, which ended in March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube had been negligent and awarded a young woman $6 million in damages.
The next two teens whose cases were selected for trials either settled or dropped their claims against the companies.
The first school district chosen for trial settled with all of the companies.
In August, Meta struck settlements worth up to $18 billion with nearly every state and US territory to resolve lawsuits brought by attorneys general over claims its platforms harmed teens and agreed to make changes to how Instagram and Facebook work for teens. The deal conditioned $5 billion of the payout on the states reaching similar settlements with Snap, TikTok and YouTube.
(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones in Chicago, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis)
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