Google’s YouTube has settled a social media addiction case brought by a 15-year-old in Florida, a new legal blow for the online platform accused of fueling a mental health crisis among children.
The teenager, who used the initials RKC in court documents, alleged that YouTube and other social media firms had designed their platforms to be addictive.
“This matter has been resolved amicably and our focus remains on delivering age-appropriate products and parental controls that deliver on that promise,” Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said in a statement to the BBC.
RKC is also currently suing Instagram-parent Meta, TikTok and Snap Inc. in a trial scheduled to begin in Los Angeles on July 27.
The RKC trial will be the second in a series of charges overseen by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl, among more than 1,000 similar cases in California.
The first trial took place earlier this year, in which a 20-year-old California woman, known only as KGM, accused Meta and YouTube of deliberately designing the platforms to be addictive for young users.
She also sued Snap and TikTok, but both platforms settled for an undisclosed amount before trial.
A jury ultimately awarded KGM $6 million (£4.5 million), the first time a court has found that Meta and YouTube were liable for the mental health effects of their platforms on some users.
That same week, a jury in New Mexico asked Meta to pay $375 million for misleading users on the safety of its platforms for children.
According to court documents, RKC’s claims are similar to KGM’s.
They claim that features such as infinite scroll and autoplay, which continuously and automatically show users new content on a platform, promoted compulsive use that became a type of addiction. This caused him to suffer from anxiety and lack of sleep, among other problems.
“As jurors saw in the first bellwether trial, the leadership of these social media companies have been pursuing strategies for years to attract children early and maximize their use,” RKC attorneys John Morgan and Emily Jephcott said in a statement.
Google told the BBC that it has built YouTube “responsibly – working with families to give young people a safer, more useful online experience” for more than a decade. The platform launched YouTube Kids in 2015, a version designed and curated for children.
The company also settled another case last month, which was pending trial, in which a Kentucky school district accused YouTube, Meta, Snap and TikTok of causing a mental health crisis for its students.
Ultimately all the companies decided to compromise rather than go to trial.
The school district wanted the companies to change their allegedly addictive features, but also pay for the costs the schools incurred in helping kids deal with things like anxiety, depression and even allegedly self-harm because of their social media use.
The lawsuit was scheduled to begin in mid-June in federal court in Oakland, California, as part of multi-district litigation (MDL), which involves thousands of similar cases and claims.
Another lawsuit in the MDL brought by US states against Meta is scheduled to begin in the same court in August.
