https://www.lezdotechmed.com/blog/product-liability/social-media-lawsuits/
The Seattle public school district launched social media lawsuits against social media companies at the start of the year, accusing them of ruining the mental health of the teenagers. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat are just a few of the social media behemoths named as defendants in the legal case against social media addiction.
Each time you use one of your favorite social media platforms, dopamine signals in your brain increase. The concerned neurotransmitters are related to pleasure. When a user receives a like, retweet, or emoticon remark, the brain floods with dopamine and releases it via reward pathways.
The public school district in Seattle filed a lawsuit against social media, marking the country's first case of its kind. Similar complaints, however, were made in 2022 by a large number of families, blaming social media for the suicides.
The important truth is that there are over 100 schools with around 50,000 students in Seattle's public school system. The complaint asserts that social media addiction and its repercussions prevent schools from providing students with a comprehensive education.
The case brought against Snap Inc., Alphabet Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, alleged that these companies intentionally created their products to draw young people to their platforms and so cause a mental health crisis.
Experts in the medical and legal fields compare social media litigation to cases involving defective products, the fight against opioids, and cases involving vaping. We can see how pervasive media addiction is among American youth when social media addiction is contrasted with the opioid issue.
A motion to consolidate all additional Instagram addiction harm claims in federal courts into a new class action was submitted to the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) in August 2022 by one of the claimants suing Meta for Instagram addiction harm. MDL
All claims were consolidated into a new “class action” MDL in October 2022 by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Prod. Liab. Lit. – MDL No. 304). The Northern District of California received the MDL since it is home to the majority of the defendants. 28 pending cases from 17 different judicial districts were combined by the JMPL.
The JPML decided on January 2, 2022, to consolidate all cases in the social media lawsuits into a class action MDL in the Northern District of California. Currently, there are roughly 80 lawsuits pending in federal courts. Though all social media networks will be involved in the new class action MDL's social media addiction cases, Meta is the target of 70% of them.
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