Snap Settles Teen Addiction Lawsuit Days Before Trial, Averting CEO's Court Debut

Snap Inc. reached a confidential settlement on Nov. 2 with two teenagers who had accused the company of designing Snapchat to be addictive, calling off what would have been only the second jury trial to emerge from a sprawling coordinated docket of lawsuits over social media's effects on young users' mental health.

The agreement came as jury selection was already underway in Los Angeles County Superior Court, days before opening statements were scheduled to begin. The two teenagers, identified in court papers as S.J., a 16-year-old from Illinois, and K.D.B., an 18-year-old from Mississippi, had already reached confidential settlements earlier this year with Meta Platforms, TikTok and Google's YouTube, leaving Snap as the sole defendant still facing a jury when the case was called for trial. Terms of the new settlement were not disclosed. A Snap spokesperson said, according to Engadget, that "the parties are pleased to have been able to resolve this matter in an amicable manner."

A Trial Called Off at the Last Minute

The case was one of a small number of bellwether trials selected from thousands of lawsuits filed by young social media users and their families, intended to give both sides, and the broader pool of plaintiffs, a sense of how juries might weigh the claims. According to TechCrunch, S.J. and K.D.B. said they began using YouTube as early as age 3 and moved on to other platforms, including Snapchat, by about age 9, developing what their lawsuit called compulsive usage habits tied to design features such as autoplay video and infinite-scrolling feeds. The suits alleged the companies built those features knowing they would keep children and teenagers on the apps longer, contributing to depression, anxiety, eating disorders and, in some plaintiffs' cases, self-harm.

Snap chief executive Evan Spiegel had been expected to testify had the case gone forward, which would have marked his first appearance in court in connection with the litigation; the settlement means he will not. Emily Jeffcott, an attorney representing K.D.B., said in comments carried by Engadget that "we are proud to have achieved justice for our bellwether clients so far, including K.D.B. and S.J." Mark Lanier, the plaintiffs' lead trial counsel in the coordinated proceeding, whose firm has represented dozens of families in the social media addiction litigation, had been preparing to lay out internal company records at trial before Snap settled.

"In opening statement, I plan on displaying a large number of these documents and I think that the public will be appalled," Lanier had said of the evidence he intended to present before the case was called off.

Thousands of Cases, One Coordinated Docket

The settlement is the latest development in a coordinated proceeding that the Judicial Council of California opened in 2022, when it consolidated dozens of lawsuits against Meta and TikTok and later folded in claims against Snap and YouTube, forming Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding No. 5255, formally titled "Social Media Cases and Instagram Cases." The council's own coordination log shows the matter was routed to Los Angeles County, where the civil courts handle complex, multi-plaintiff litigation under a statewide case-coordination process meant to let a single judge manage discovery and pick representative cases for trial ahead of thousands of others. A related wave of lawsuits brought by public school districts has been consolidated separately in a federal multidistrict proceeding based in Oakland; in May, Snap paid $8 million of a $27 million settlement in that case's first school-district bellwether.

The first bellwether trial to reach a verdict in the state court proceeding concluded in March, when a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube had been negligent in the design and operation of their platforms and had failed to adequately warn that heavy use could harm young people, awarding $6 million in damages to a then-20-year-old plaintiff. Snap and TikTok had settled with that plaintiff before her trial began, a pattern that repeated itself in the case resolved this week.

Who Is Affected, and What the Companies Say

The litigation touches a large population of families: attorneys involved in the coordinated proceeding have described thousands of individual and family plaintiffs nationwide, in addition to the school-district claims pending separately in federal court. Snap, like the other defendants, has denied the core allegations while pointing to safety features it has rolled out in recent years, including Family Center, which lets parents see who their teenagers are messaging and adjust content controls, along with in-app safety tutorials and partnerships with outside safety experts. Meta, TikTok and YouTube have made similar arguments in their own statements, saying they have introduced parental controls and other resources for teenage users even as they continue to contest liability in the remaining cases.

What's Next

With Snap's settlement, no defendant now faces an imminent jury in the Los Angeles coordination, but the litigation is far from over. Legal trade press covering the proceeding has reported that the presiding judge has already set the next round of bellwether trials for March 2027, drawing from the large pool of remaining cases. Meta and YouTube have said they plan to appeal the March verdict against them, a process that could take years to resolve. Plaintiffs' attorneys have signaled they intend to keep pushing cases toward trial rather than treat settlements as a final resolution, arguing that only a verdict against a company that does not settle will test, on a larger scale, the underlying legal theory that platforms can be held liable for how they are designed rather than for the content users post on them.