Will public school districts across the country hit the jackpot in their lawsuits targeting companies behind leading social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram (Meta), TikTok (ByteDance), Snapchat (Snap), and YouTube (Google)? Will the districts’ theories—premised on negligence and public nuisance principles and claiming damages for having to handle minors who are supposedly addicted to the defendants’ platforms—succeed this summer before a test-case jury?

Those questions now are center stage in the federal multi-district litigation (MDL) proceeding in Oakland, California, presided over by US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. The MDL proceeding, which I last addressed in December, is distinct from the state court personal injury lawsuit of K.G.M. in Los Angeles that I recently addressed. Jurors there ruled against Meta (Instagram) and Google (YouTube), awarding the now 20-year-old K.G.M. a total of $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

In February, Gonzalez Rogers denied the social media defendants’ motion for summary judgment against claims filed by Breathitt County (Kentucky) School District and other school-district plaintiffs. Breathitt’s case will be the first bellwether trial, with jury selection scheduled to start on June 12. Bellwether trials allow “the parties to put their theories to the test and dictate the future resolution of the MDL.”

Why are the school district cases so important? First, a series of jury verdicts in the plaintiffs’ favor, especially if the decisions involve massive dollar awards that are upheld on appeal, may compel social media platforms—if they want to survive—to significantly alter how they deliver content to minors. One study suggests “the compensation sought by more than 1,200 school districts from the social media companies totals nearly $500 billion.”

Importantly, the defendants’ platforms deliver First Amendment-protected speech to minors, while simultaneously allowing them to express themselves, meet friends, and connect with peers. Will these prosocial, educational, and self-expressive benefits be significantly reduced or diminished by potential redesign efforts that platforms may need to take to ward off future liability?

Second, the cases will test the limits of allowing recovery for what might be considered “downstream” harms—injuries to plaintiffs other than minors—and for extending the reach of failure-to-warn duties and liabilities beyond minors to school districts. Third, multiple plaintiffs’ victories would likely embolden lawmakers to draft additional statutes restricting minors’ access to social media platforms. 

Collectively, the school-district plaintiffs claim they:

are facing serious financial and resource disruptions, interfering with their educational mission, caused by Defendants’ design, development, production, operation, promotion, distribution, and marketing of addictive and dangerous social media platforms targeting minors. As a result of Defendants’ conduct, public school districts have been forced into a constant struggle for students’ attention, as well as a constant struggle to provide the social, emotional, mental health, and learning support they need.

In her February order denying the defendants’ summary judgment motion, Gonzalez Rogers explained that the plaintiffs’ theories of liability against the companies have three facets:

First, defendants deliberately designed their social media platforms to foster compulsive use and addiction in minors, whose mental and physical health deteriorated. Second, as a result, Breathitt and the other plaintiffs expended substantial financial resources to mitigate the consequent mental health and behavioral issues their students suffer as a result thereof. Third, defendants targeted schools.

A key issue at trial will be whether, in fact, design features caused the allegedly compulsive and problematic use by students or whether third-party content—the user-generated speech that students viewed—is to blame for their supposed addiction. If a jury determines that it’s the latter, that will raise First Amendment-based, free-speech defenses and the possibility of the platforms’ immunity from civil liability under the federal statute known as Section 230. Breathitt, however, claims “the design of defendants’ products causes compulsive and problematic use by students, which in turn causes [it] to incur costs.”

Allegedly defective design features jurors will consider include the platforms’ parental-control tools and user age-verification mechanisms, as well as the platforms’ alleged “failure to assist users in limiting in-app screen time” and supposedly “creating barriers to account deactivation and/or deletion.” Jurors must decide whether each of these claimed defects was a “substantial factor” in causing students’ allegedly compulsive use of platforms. One factor militating for the plaintiffs is that Gonzalez Rogers ruled they may use circumstantial evidence “to show the linkage between” alleged platform defects and harm.

Additional key causation questions will be whether forces and factors other than social media platforms caused the problems minors suffer at school districts such as Breathitt, and whether the districts can sufficiently demonstrate which specific platforms are responsible for how much, if any, of the harms. The latter question will force jurors to untangle evidence and allocate fault among the defendants—tasks that won’t be easy.

Ultimately, what the nine-person jury determines may significantly reshape today’s social media landscape.