A Florida teenager who sued Meta and other social media companies over platform addiction dropped his case without receiving any payment, Meta said, ending a closely watched bellwether trial set to begin next week in Los Angeles.
A bellwether social media addiction lawsuit against Meta Platforms ended abruptly on Tuesday when the Florida teenager at the center of the case chose to withdraw his claims, leaving the tech giant without a courtroom defeat in the proceeding.
Meta said in a statement that the plaintiff dropped his case without receiving any payment, a notable outcome given the legal pressure the company has faced from similar litigation in recent months.
The plaintiff, a Florida teenager identified in court documents by the initials "R.K.C.," had sued Meta and several other social media companies, alleging they knowingly built addictive platforms that caused harm to young users.
The case had been one of thousands of similar lawsuits filed by teens, schools, and state attorneys general accusing major technology companies of engineering features — including infinite scroll and persistent notifications — designed to maximize engagement at the expense of user well-being.
The other defendants resolved the matter before trial. TikTok and Google's YouTube had previously reached settlement agreements with the plaintiff. Snap confirmed a tentative agreement on Tuesday, one day before the plaintiff dropped his remaining claims against Meta.
The bellwether jury trial had been scheduled to begin next week in the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles.
Meta had been preparing to argue that the plaintiff had used Facebook and Instagram accounts for only minutes per day on average, and planned to contend that most of his accounts were created after he retained legal counsel, according to the company's account of its planned defense.
"This outcome makes clear that we will not back away from defending ourselves against baseless lawsuits," Meta said in its statement.
The dismissal comes amid a broader string of legal setbacks for the company. Earlier this year, Meta suffered its first courtroom defeat over social media harms in a New Mexico case, where a court ordered the company to pay $375 million in penalties after finding it had misled consumers about platform safety and endangered children.
In March, a Los Angeles jury awarded damages of approximately $6 million in a separate case involving both Meta and Google.
The precedent a verdict in the R.K.C. case could have set loomed large over the technology industry, as outcomes in bellwether trials typically influence the trajectory of thousands of related claims. With the case now dropped, Meta avoids that risk — at least in this instance — even as the broader wave of youth-harm litigation continues to work its way through courts across the country.
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