Ryan Knudson

It did not in this case.

That's because the cases playing out right now are trying a different strategy.

Rather than suing over the content, they're suing over the way the platforms operate.

They're arguing it's a product liability issue.

Now, what these new lawsuits take aim at is the way the apps are designed, which is Meta's responsibility, and you can sue them directly for.

— The plaintiffs allege that features like push notifications, endless scrolling, videos that autoplay, algorithms that are tailored to each user are all designed to keep people hooked, and that teens in particular are especially vulnerable.

The idea for this approach gained traction in 2020, after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas suggested publicly that Section 230 might not cover design choices.

In the years that followed, thousands of product liability cases started being filed against social media platforms, including this one in LA.

In this case, the plaintiffs sued Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat.

Snap and TikTok settled shortly before the trial began, but are still defendants in many of the other cases.

All right, let's talk about the case that's now being tried in Los Angeles.

Can you tell me about the plaintiff?

So the plaintiff is a woman who goes by the initials KGM.

She is currently 20 years old.

She was 17 years old when this lawsuit got filed.

She lives in California, and the lawsuit talks about how she started using social media when she was just about 10 years old, which she's not supposed to do, but many people get around it.

KGM says her parents didn't know that she started using social media apps and that it was easy to get around the platform safety features, which mostly prohibit kids under the age of 13 from using them.

And...

As she did this, it coincided with a decline in her mental health.

She would get push notifications all day to use these apps, and she developed a compulsion to engage with those products nonstop.