New Jersey teen drops claims against Meta, Google, and Snap weeks before trial

A 15-year-old from New Jersey has dropped her case against Meta, Google, and Snap seven weeks before it was due to be heard in Los Angeles. Her lawyer said she wanted to get on with her life.

The case was one of three bellwethers set for trial in October in California state court, chosen to test claims that the companies designed their products to be addictive to minors. TikTok had already settled its part before the dismissal, which is how TikTok has handled every one of these so far.

All three remaining defendants confirmed that the plaintiff, identified in filings as P.M-Y., received no payment in connection with dropping her claims.

Her attorney said she had brought the case to hold the companies to account and then chose to dismiss the remainder of it out of a desire to resume her life. That is the entire stated reason, and none of the parties has offered another.

The defendants read it differently, as defendants do. Meta said the plaintiff had a significant mental health condition that predated her use of social media; YouTube said the outcome affirms its longstanding position that it provides safe and age-appropriate experiences, and Snap pointed to its work on safeguards, tools, and educational resources.

This is the second time a bellwether plaintiff has walked away shortly before trial. In July, a 15-year-old from Panama City withdrew his claims days before a Los Angeles jury was due to hear them, also without payment from Meta.

Two teenagers with similar claims against the same companies are still scheduled for October. Losing one of three test cases does not collapse the wider litigation, which involves thousands of individual claims consolidated in California and in federal court.

It does remove a data point the plaintiffs’ side wanted. Bellwethers exist to give both sides a price, and each one that ends without a verdict leaves the eventual settlement value less certain than it was.

What the plaintiffs already have is a win. In March, a California jury found Meta and Google liable in the first of these trials, awarding $4.2m against Meta and $1.8m against Google, figures small in themselves but significant as a finding of liability.

The companies have appealed the legal foundations of the litigation without success. The Ninth Circuit allowed roughly 2,400 addiction lawsuits to proceed without disturbing Section 230, which left the design-defect theory intact and the cases heading for juries.

Design defect is the pivot the whole thing turns on. The plaintiffs are not arguing about what users posted, which Section 230 protects, but about infinite scroll, autoplay, and notification systems, which they say are product features and therefore subject to ordinary product liability law.

Meta is simultaneously defending itself in Oakland against four state attorneys general on overlapping claims, in a trial that opened this week and is expected to run for about six weeks.

Nobody has explained why two bellwether plaintiffs in a row have chosen to stop. Litigation of this kind requires teenagers to give depositions about their own mental health and then be cross-examined on it, which is a considerable amount to ask of anyone, let alone at 15.

The consolidated litigation is unusually large. Thousands of individual claims sit in a California state court proceeding and a parallel federal multidistrict case, alongside suits brought by school districts and by more than 30 state attorneys general.

Settlement is where most of it will end, as it did for TikTok, which has never let one of these reach a jury. The price of that settlement is what the bellwethers were meant to establish, and two of them have now produced nothing to price against.

The October trial date holds for the remaining two, but the companies have not indicated whether they intend to settle those as well.