By Diana Novak Jones
CHICAGO, April 9 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms said on Thursday it is pulling ads from Facebook and Instagram aimed at recruiting new plaintiffs for ongoing litigation accusing it and other social media companies of designing their platforms to be addictive to young users.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the company is actively defending itself against the lawsuits, which include thousands of cases in both state and federal courts in California, and is removing the ads.
“We will
not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful,” Stone said in a statement.
The move follows Meta's loss in two key trials over the allegations.
At the end of March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Alphabet's Google liable for a young woman’s depression and suicidal thoughts after she said she became addicted to Instagram and Google's YouTube at a young age, ordering them to pay a combined $6 million in damages.
In a separate New Mexico case that wrapped up just a day earlier, jurors ordered Meta to pay $375 million after finding the company misled users about the safety of its products for young users and enabled the sexual exploitation of children on its platforms.
More than 3,300 lawsuits involving addiction claims are pending in California state court against Meta, Google, Snapchat parent Snap Inc and ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. Another 2,400 lawsuits brought by individuals, municipalities, states and school districts have been centralized in California federal court, according to court records.
The companies have denied the allegations and say they take extensive steps to keep teens and young users safe on their platforms.
The state court cases largely involve individuals suing the companies over claims that addiction to social media caused mental health harms. The federal litigation includes more lawsuits filed by public entities such as school districts, states and municipalities, which claim the platforms harmed the mental health of young people, forcing the government entities to spend money to address the fallout.
FINDING PLAINTIFFS
Law firms representing plaintiffs in these types of cases typically work on contingency, so they are only paid if a plaintiff wins damages or receives a settlement. Often firms in mass cases are seeking to represent as many plaintiffs as possible to make the cases financially viable. Ads on television, radio and online are aimed at recruiting individual plaintiffs, who may not know about the litigation otherwise.
Law firms such as Morgan & Morgan, which represents plaintiffs in the litigation and was part of the trial team that won the Los Angeles case, are among the firms that placed ads on Facebook.
A spokesperson for the firm didn’t respond to a request for comment about the ads being pulled.
Companies that seek to connect potential clients with law firms, such as Tennessee-based White Heart Legal, are also advertising the litigation on social media, according to X Ante, a company that tracks mass tort advertising.
White Heart Legal did not respond to a request for comment.
X Ante founder Rustin Silverstein said social media has become an increasingly popular place for advertisers seeking potential law clients in mass tort litigation, but accounts for only a portion of the ads that have been airing this year for the social media cases.
A total of 671 television ads promoting social media claims aired nationwide in March — more than in any month since July 2024, Silverstein said. The number of radio ads in March nearly tripled to 20,000 after the verdicts, he said.
There are also ads on Google’s platforms for the litigation. Social Media Victims Law Center, one of the law firms leading the wave of lawsuits, advertises on Google, according to Google records.
Google didn’t respond to a question about whether it would also be pulling the ads related to the cases.
(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones in Chicago, additional reporting by Katie Paul in New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Lincoln Feast.)
