TikTok has reached a confidential settlement to exit a landmark trial in Los Angeles billed as the first of thousands of similar cases brought by plaintiffs alleging social media platforms knowingly engineered their products to be addictive to young users.
The case, starting with jury selection Tuesday in downtown Los Angeles, was brought by a now 20-year-old woman known by the initials K.G.M. The woman alleges she became hopelessly addicted to social media platforms as a child and subsequently suffered body dysmorphia, anxiety, major depressive disorder, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts.
“Plaintiff K.G.M. and defendant TikTok have reached an agreement in principle to settle her case,” Joseph VanZandt, one of the attorneys for K.G.M., says in a statement to Rolling Stone. “TikTok remains a defendant in other personal injury cases.”
Meta, the parent company of Instagram, remains a defendant in the case along with YouTube, which is owned by Google. Snapchat’s parent company reached a settlement in the case last week.
Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, is due to testify in person during the second week of February. Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, is due to testify after that.
The so-called bellwether case is the first to reach trial out of thousands of cases brought by individual plaintiffs, school districts, and state officials. For their part, social media companies have long argued they’re immune from liability because they essentially act as digital town squares, not content creators. They claim Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act casts them as hosts, not publishers, and shields them so long as they make “good faith” efforts to moderate offensive material. They also cite a First Amendment right to curate user-generated content.
But in a November 2025 ruling, the judge on the Los Angeles case found that a valid legal dispute exists as to whether platform design features were a “substantial factor” in causing purported injuries. K.G.M., like other plaintiffs, alleges the platforms were designed to be maximally addictive. The lawsuits claim features, including infinite scroll, are intentionally devoid of natural stopping queues. The plaintiffs further claim that highly tuned algorithms, auto-play videos, and push notifications are designed to trigger dopamine hits and compulsive habits.
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TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. After the first batch of 75 prospective jurors entered the trial courtroom Tuesday morning, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl let them know that if they were selected for the final panel, their internet activity would not be accessed by the defendants.
In filings last year asking the judge to dismiss the case, lawyers for Meta argued that K.G.M. admitted during her deposition that “all her claimed harms from Instagram resulted from user-generated content and messages.” They said K.G.M. said she “was bullied in direct messages” and that her mental health was negatively impacted by ”explicit photographs” she received from other Instagram users. They said she also testified that seeing “content about cutting” contributed to her own self-harm.
For her part, K.G.M. alleges the dangerous content was recommended to her, and that the “addictive design” of the platforms made her “severely dependent on these products to the point where she could not sleep at night, and often refused to go to school the next day.”
“Defendants deliberately tweaked the design and operation of their apps to exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of kids,” her lawsuit, which was first brought by her mom but which she now pursues on her own behalf, said. “Because children’s and adolescents’ brains are not fully developed, they lack the same emotional maturity, impulse control, and psychological resiliency as adults. As a result, they are uniquely susceptible to addictive features in digital products and highly vulnerable to the consequent harms.”
From Rolling Stone US
