In the wake of successful litigation against tobacco companies and the opioid industry, the phrase “you may be entitled to compensation” became ubiquitous, to the point of being a meme.
But in light of recent blockbuster awards for plaintiffs who sued social media companies, many parents and young adults are seriously wondering if they, too, are entitled to compensation for harm done by algorithms that some say are addictive.
There are plenty of lawyers who would like to help them, and they’re trying to recruit them with advertisements and websites.
As one website being promoted in radio ads says, “Have you lost your child to social media? Landmark verdicts in Los Angeles and Santa Fe have proven what parents have known all along: these companies knowingly designed their apps to harm children. If your child battled an eating disorder, self-harm, or severe depression, you may be owed significant compensation.”
The website invites parents to fill out a form for a “free case evaluation” and says a “legal specialist” will get back to them within 24 hours. That legal specialist, however, may or may not be a lawyer. The website is run by The Sentinel Group, a marketing firm that screens potential clients for attorneys.
It’s a common practice in the legal industry; as the legal software company Clio says on its blog: “Mass tort marketing often involves screening thousands of leads to identify qualified claimants.”
“They’re looking for the person in the haystack who suffered a really serious medical or psychological harm,” said Elizabeth Tippett, a professor of law at the University of Oregon who has testified before Congress about attorney advertising. That makes sense, she said, because attorneys who specialize in litigation wouldn’t want to spend their time on marketing.
For parents, however, the ads can be confusing and the legal process cumbersome. How can they know if they have a legitimate case, or if they are being strung along by an unscrupulous marketer or attorney hoping to get in on a legal gold rush?
The questions are front and center as Meta appeals recent verdicts against the company, and 29 states, including Utah, prepare for multi-district litigation still scheduled to begin next month in California, although Meta has requested a stay.
Rulings and settlements
In March, a jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico, held Meta liable for endangering children and misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and ordered it to pay $375 million in civil penalties for violating the state’s consumer protection laws.
Days later, a Los Angeles jury awarded $6 million to a 20-year-old who had sued Meta and YouTube, saying that the addictive nature of their platforms had caused her to have serious mental health issues, including anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia.
The decisions were the first to come out of a cascade of similar lawsuits, which are being likened to a long-overdue reckoning for companies that whistleblowers have said knew about the harm that their algorithms were doing, especially to children. Meta and other companies have denied the accusations and are appealing the awards, even as Meta rolls out new protections, including a change made to Instagram this month that will alert parents if their child is discussing suicide or self-harm on the platform.
And Meta had a victory of its own this week, when a Florida teenager dropped a lawsuit against the company, one of nine cases due to go to trial in a Superior Court in California next week. The 15-year-old, identified only by his initials, previously received settlements from TikTok, Snap and YouTube, The New York Times reported.
In a statement provided to the Deseret News, Meta said of that case, “The claims never held up, and this outcome makes clear that we will not back away from defending ourselves against baseless lawsuits.”
The statement went on to say, “We recognize this young man has faced real challenges in his life, but the facts simply didn’t support the claim that our apps caused them. The record shows that he used Facebook and Instagram for just minutes a day on average and that he created most accounts only after hiring a lawyer to bring this lawsuit.”
A tipping point?
Aside from the financial awards — which in the LA case were both punitive and compensatory — change is an important byproduct of tort litigation, said Melissa McKay, a mother of five and president of the Digital Childhood Institute, a nonprofit that works to protect families from online harm.
“The thing I love about lawsuits is that there’s only so much you can do to fix the problem with all the other tools. ... Once you start getting lawsuits through, they’re going to fix a whole lot of things on their own because (the social media companies) are in a defensive posture,” McKay said. “The lawsuit angle is what is going to effect change in these companies.”
The lawsuits that are currently underway are a combination of actions that involve consumer protection and allege unfair trade practices and deceptive design, she said. This strategy sidesteps the debate over Section 230, the portion of the Federal Communications Act that has shielded social media companies from liability since 1996.
Calling the recent verdicts “huge,” McKay said this moment could be a “tipping point” that forces social media companies to design their products with safety in mind as default. And she has no sympathy for the companies in terms of any financial problems the verdicts might pose, saying that for years, they have been blaming parents for harm their children suffered from social media addiction. “I would love it if (the lawsuits) bankrupted the social media companies,” she said.
But McKay also acknowledged the possibility that lawsuit fever could go too far. “Is it going to go too far and everyone’s going to look for money? Probably. But sometimes when you’ve been undercompensating for so long, you have to overcompensate.”
Meta’s response to lawsuits
Liza Crenshaw, a spokeswoman for Meta, said in an interview that the company will continue to stand up to “baseless lawsuits that bring allegations that don’t add up to what the facts say.”
She also noted that the jury in the Los Angeles trial, which resulted in a $6 million award that Meta is appealing, deliberated for more than eight days and the decision was not unanimous. After that verdict was widely publicized, there was a spike in advertising on Facebook and Instagram for clients to sue social media companies, which Meta has been working to take down, Crenshaw said.
“After these verdicts were reached, we saw a lot of trial lawyers swap out their billboards to focus on social media lawsuits,” she said.
That’s happened before.
“When you look back at the tobacco and opioid lawsuits, a good outcome was not guaranteed. There was a lot of uncertainty about whether they would win. But when you win one case, you get a lot more traction, a lot more interest from attorneys,” Tippett, at the University of Oregon, said.
She stipulates, though, that it’s important that legal advertising be clearly recognizable as advertising, as “someone who wants my business as an attorney, for better or for worse.”
But she believes that legal advertising can be helpful to the general public if it causes people to think seriously about the risks of a product. “In the case of social media, it might be somewhat beneficial for people to have to think hard about what choices their family is making about social media,” Tippett said.
Mass torts v. class action
The clients that websites like Stopsocialharm.com are eliciting are most likely for legal action that is called a mass tort, which is different from a class-action lawsuit.
As Tippett explained, “Mass torts are often thousands of individuals’ claims all brought together for efficiency into one case, but they’re all separate claims. You have attorneys trying to find clients because they get to keep their clients, whereas class-action lawsuits are often brought together as one giant lawsuit, and everyone’s case is treated exactly the same and tried together, with one settlement and one set of lawyers.”
An internet search for “compensation for social media addiction” yields dozens of websites that tell visitors they “may be entitled to compensation” for outcomes like wrongful death, medical expenses and lost wages, but also, more generically, for emotional trauma and psychological injuries.
The Utah-based website socialmediaeatingdisorderclaim.com focuses on the role of social media in eating disorders. “If you or your child developed an eating disorder after using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or Snapchat, you may have legal options,” the website says.
Run by attorney Joel Wright of the Wright Law Group, the website offers a free consultation for anyone 30 or younger who used social media before turning 18, and was diagnosed with, and treated for, an eating disorder.
In an interview, Wright said he does not believe that social media companies, under the law, should be liable for the content posted on their platforms. “But they are liable for their algorithms,” he said. And, he said, “The last four months have changed things dramatically” because of Santa Fe and Los Angeles awards.
“For years, we’ve argued whether (social media companies) should be liable; now with these lawsuits, we’re arguing about when and how they should be held liable,” Wright said. “And that really is a big deal.”
He added that “most people are terrified by the legal system,” but that most attorneys pursuing these cases offer free consultations, and if a person decides to pursue a lawsuit, it’s on a contingency basis, meaning that the plaintiff won’t owe legal fees unless the attorney wins the case.
Wright estimates that for most people, filing suit involves “probably no more than 10 hours” of paperwork, and he recommends that any social media user under 30 who has had mental health issues and/or an eating disorder get their case evaluated by an attorney. If they were hospitalized and had other medical care, it would be a stronger claim, he said.
He estimates that there are about 5,000 cases that have been filed, or are in the process of being filed, nationwide; with about 300 originating in Utah.
“If or when there is a global settlement, then you can’t file any more cases in this lawsuit, and everybody who has filed would potentially get a portion of that settlement amount,” he said.
“I do think there is a real chance that sometime — I don’t know when — the companies could decide to settle," he said, noting that Snap (the parent company of Snapchat) and TikTok settled with the young woman in the Los Angeles case before it went to trial.
Google, he said, has the resources to keep losing and settling cases “until you and I die,” he said, pointing to social media companies’ stock prices as evidence that investors don’t believe they are seriously in danger of going bankrupt, even though Meta’s stock fell the day after the LA verdict.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the stock of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, “has soared more than 80% in the past year, enough to make it the world’s third most valuable public company behind Nvidia and Apple.” And Meta’s second-quarter earnings, to be reported July 29, are expected to top $60 billion.
“It’s an extraordinary moment in time where you have substantial harm and a company has substantial resources to pay,” Wright said. “Now, they’re not 100% responsible for anyone’s mental health. But they are responsible for a portion.”
Red flags in legal ads
Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, a law professor at the University of Georgia and the author of “The Pain Brokers‚” said, “One thing that (legal) advertisements do well is alert people to their legal right of action. But it’s really incumbent upon people to really do their homework about who it is that they’re hiring.”
Burch cautioned, “It’s a big red flag if you can’t actually speak with a lawyer” when you call. “If you can’t speak with a lawyer when you’re deciding whether to bring a lawsuit, then you’re certainly not going to be able to speak with a lawyer after you sue. A lot of these legal firms are run by case managers, and the lawyers are really, really difficult to get a hold of.
“It’s always best to be able to talk with someone in person,” she added. “If you really have a serious harm, then you want to sit down in someone’s office and explain how you’ve been harmed, and it’s a lot easier to do that if you are talking with someone local, even if that attorney co-counsels with someone on a national scale.”
Burch said it’s unclear as to where social media litigation is going in terms of scale and effect, and how significant the harm has to be before juries will award damages.
“Part of what is unique about the social media litigation is that they’re alleging that the addiction itself is the harm, and they’re alleging that there are these side effects in terms of being depressed, being suicidal, being X, Y and Z. Whether they will ultimately be able to establish the causation for that — the link between the social media usage and the harm — is still up in the air. The legal theories are still being tested."
The litigation basically represents “the next frontier” in tort law. “It’s up to the states to ultimately decide whether there’s causation under that particular state’s laws, and I think each state is grappling with the new harm we’re seeing through AI, through social media. It’s a little early to say if this is going to be the next big thing, although it’s certainly a big topic of discussion right now.”
Tippett, meanwhile, says that tort lawyers, for all their bad press, provide a public service.
“The American system likes to hate on the tort lawyer and tort industry, but they are often the last line of defense for protecting consumers in areas where there aren’t enough congressional statutes to fix a problem,” she said. “Even though there were aspects of drug injury litigation I had questions about, I do have a lot of respect for the sophistication of these tort lawyers. And the fact that the attorneys general are going after (social media companies) suggests that that this is a real public concern. It’s not just a profit motive. The same thing with school districts.”
People should look into the litigation more, especially if they have children, Tippett said, adding that she read the Utah attorney general’s complaint about Snap and immediately sent it to her teenage son, saying “You need to read this.”