Jury selection begins in second Meta-Snap teen social media addiction trial

Jury selection got underway this week in a Los Angeles courtroom in the second case to reach a jury in a sprawling legal fight over whether Meta and Snap can be held liable for designing social media products that addicted teenagers and damaged their mental health. The case, before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl, pairs two plaintiffs identified in court papers only as S.J., a 16-year-old from Illinois, and K.D.B., an 18-year-old from Mississippi. Jury selection began Oct. 28, with opening statements expected in early November, according to CBS News.

The case is a bellwether in a coordinated proceeding that now includes thousands of lawsuits filed in California state court against Meta, Snap, TikTok, YouTube and Google, alongside a related federal multidistrict litigation overseen by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland. Both the state and federal dockets consolidate claims from individual families and school districts, alongside separate suits from dozens of state attorneys general, alleging that the companies built features such as infinite scroll, autoplay and algorithmic recommendation feeds that they knew were habit-forming for young users.

Who is still in the case

TikTok and YouTube have settled with both plaintiffs and are no longer defendants in this trial. Meta has settled separately with S.J., leaving it a defendant only as to K.D.B.'s claims, while Snap remains a defendant against both plaintiffs, according to CBS News's reporting. Lanier, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said the case against Snap carries particular significance: he said in an email cited by CBS News that "this will be the first case against Snapchat and the first time the public has a chance to see some of their documents."

What the first trial decided

The outcome of this case carries weight because of what happened in the first one to reach a verdict. In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable in the case of a plaintiff identified as K.G.M., finding the companies acted with malice, oppression or fraud and awarding $6 million in combined damages, $3 million compensatory and $3 million punitive, with fault split 70 percent to Meta and 30 percent to YouTube. Snap had already settled with that plaintiff before trial. Kuhl denied the companies' post-trial motions to overturn the verdict, and Meta has said it is appealing, arguing that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act should have barred the claims.

A second case never actually reached a jury: Snap reached a tentative settlement with a plaintiff identified as R.K.C. in mid-2026, and he dropped his remaining claim against Meta without payment rather than go to trial. Meta said in a statement that the outcome showed it would "not back away from defending ourselves against baseless lawsuits."

A consolidated case, a contested courtroom

Kuhl's decision to let the two plaintiffs' claims proceed before a single jury was itself contested. In an August order, she wrote that the differences between the plaintiffs' claims were "manageable" using appropriate jury-management techniques. Meta's attorney, William Geraghty of Wilkinson Stekloff, had argued that trying two plaintiffs' claims together would be "hopelessly confusing" for jurors and could let the cases unfairly reinforce each other, an argument the companies continued to press even after Kuhl's ruling.

Scale of the alleged harm

The litigation sits alongside public health data that both sides have cited, though neither fully controls. A U.S. Surgeon General's advisory on social media and youth mental health found that adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on the platforms face roughly double the risk of poor mental health outcomes such as depression and anxiety, and that as many as 95 percent of teenagers use at least one platform. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Survey has found that roughly two in five high school students report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, a rate markedly higher among girls than boys. Plaintiffs' lawyers have pointed to such figures as context for their claims, while the companies argue that correlation between broad usage trends and any individual plaintiff's diagnosis does not establish that a specific product feature caused a specific harm.

Meta has said in prior filings that the evidence in these cases shows plaintiffs faced significant challenges well before they used its products. Snap has separately maintained that Snapchat, built around messaging rather than a public feed, does not function the way plaintiffs describe mainstream "social media" platforms.

What's next

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel are expected to testify, with witness testimony expected to begin in mid-November, according to attorneys involved in the case. The trial itself is expected to run into mid-December. Beyond this case, additional bellwether trials are expected in the coordinated proceeding in 2027, while the federal MDL in Oakland proceeds on a separate track toward its own trial involving personal-injury and school-district claims.