By Diana Novak Jones
Jan 26 (Reuters) – Attorneys for Meta Platforms and other social media companies asked a California federal judge on Monday to block several school districts from taking their lawsuits against the companies to trial, arguing that federal law protects them from claims they knowingly addicted young users.
At a hearing before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, lawyers for the companies clashed with counsel for six school districts from states across the country, who argue the platforms’ design has harmed students’ mental health and forced districts to spend money and staff time to address the fallout.
The companies urged the judge to rule that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally shields platforms like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram from liability over user-generated content, bars the cases from proceeding to the first trials in federal court over the claims.
Jonathan Blavin, an attorney for the social media companies, said the schools’ allegations rely on evidence that includes such content, placing the claims within the protections of Section 230.
“If that evidence is entirely excluded, I think the record here is incredibly thin,” Blavin said. “It’s just not there.”
Lawyers for the school districts countered that their claims are not based on user-content but on platform features they say are intentionally designed to keep young people on the social media sites as long as possible.
Andre Mura, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said their experts had examined broad studies of students who had used social media to support their findings that it had harmed them.
“The literature shows the increase in the risk of harm is not based on content,” he said.
THOUSANDS OF LAWSUITS IN STATE, FEDERAL COURT
Meta, Snapchat and parent Snap Inc., YouTube and parent Alphabet Inc., and TikTok and parent ByteDance are facing thousands of lawsuits in both federal and state court over claims they knowingly designed their platforms to have features that addict children and teens, fueling a mental health crisis.
The first trial testing the claims in state court is slated for this week in Los Angeles.
The federal cases have been consolidated into multidistrict litigation before Rogers and include lawsuits brought by families, school districts and state governments.
Monday’s hearing focused only on cases filed by school districts, which claim they have been hurt financially from having to manage student mental health issues and social problems like cyberbullying. Rogers is considering whether to enter judgment for the companies in six of those lawsuits, selected as so-called “bellwether” or test cases, ahead of the first trials in federal court, currently scheduled to begin in June.
Bellwether trials are used to gauge how juries may respond to similar claims and help establish settlement values for the other similar cases in the litigation.
In rulings on the companies’ motions to dismiss in 2023 and 2024, Rogers said the cases could go forward, but Section 230 limited many of their claims, including some about specific features of the platforms.
On Monday, Rogers agreed that the plaintiffs had a lot of evidence that seemed to be based on content and said that should the cases go forward, there would be a lengthy debate about what could be shown to the juries.
But even if the actual content played some role, Rogers said that juries were often asked to examine a problem with several causes and determine which were primarily to blame.
“It’s not like we have a white and a yolk, it’s all scrambled together,” Rogers said. “That’s a very common circumstance. Why should this be any different?”
The case is In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 4:22-md-03047.
For plaintiffs: Andre Mura of Gibbs Mura; Previn Warren of Motley Rice
For defendants: Jonathan Blavin of Munger Tolles & Olson; Ashley Hardin of Williams & Connolly; Christian Pistilli of Covington & Burling
(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones)
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