TikTok has reached a confidential settlement to exit a landmark trial billed as the first of thousands of related cases claiming top social media platforms knowingly engineered their products to be addictive to kids.
The case, which started Tuesday with jury selection in downtown Los Angeles, was filed by a now 20-year-old California woman known by the initials K.G.M. The woman alleges she became hopelessly addicted to social media platforms as a child and subsequently suffered from body dysmorphia, anxiety, major depressive disorder, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts.
“Plaintiff K.G.M. and defendant TikTok have reached an agreement in principle to settle her case,” Joseph VanZandt, an attorney for K.G.M., said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “TikTok remains a defendant in other personal injury cases.”
Snapchat’s parent company reached a settlement in the case last week, leaving Meta, the parent company of Instagram, and YouTube, owned by Google, as the final two defendants in K.G.M.’s negligence case. Lead plaintiff’s attorney Mark Lanier told Rolling Stone there was “no dialogue for settlement with Google or with Meta” that he knew of as of Tuesday afternoon. He declined to give specifics on the private TikTok deal, but he said the company likely figured “it was now or never.”
“They were able to get out right now without putting their witnesses on the stand, without having to have their documents made public, and I think it made sense for them to get out,” Lanier said as he left the courthouse. “I think one of the reasons YouTube and Meta are [different] in this case is they are huge. …They make so much money, it’s not fathomable. Perhaps, they’re not paying attention yet to this case because maybe we’re just too small.”
Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, is due to testify at the trial next month. Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, is due to testify a few days after Zuckerberg. The trial is expected to run into March. Google’s lead lawyer, Luis Li, previously represented Vanessa Bryant for her trial victory over the graphic death-scene photographs taken at the site of the helicopter crash that killed her NBA legend husband Kobe Bryant and their 13-year-old daughter, Gianna “Gigi” Bryant.
The so-called bellwether social media case is the first to reach trial out of thousands of claims brought by individual plaintiffs, school districts, and state officials around the country. For their part, the social media companies argue they’re immune from liability because they essentially act as neutral, digital town squares, not content creators. They claim Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act shields them so long as they make “good faith” efforts to moderate offensive material. They also cite a First Amendment right to curate user-generated content.
But in a November 2025 ruling, the judge on the Los Angeles case found that a valid legal dispute exists over whether platform design features were a “substantial factor” in causing purported injuries to users. K.G.M., like other plaintiffs, alleges the platforms were intentionally designed to be maximally addictive to minors. The lawsuits claim features such as “infinite scroll” are purposefully devoid of natural stopping cues. The plaintiffs further claim that highly tuned algorithms, auto-play videos, and push notifications are designed to trigger dopamine hits and compulsive habits.
TikTok didn’t respond to a request for comment on Tuesday morning. After the first batch of 75 prospective jurors entered the courtroom, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl let them know that if they were selected for the final panel, their internet activity would not be accessed by the defendants. She also said they shouldn’t change the settings on their accounts in an attempt to better understand the platforms.
In prior filings asking the judge to dismiss the case, lawyers for Meta argued that K.G.M. said during her deposition that “her claimed harms from Instagram resulted from user-generated content and messages.” They said K.G.M. stated that she “was bullied in direct messages” and that her mental health was negatively impacted by ”explicit photographs” she received from one or more other users. They said she also testified that seeing “content about cutting” contributed to her own self-harm, and they claimed her mental health issues could be traced to challenges she faced during her childhood and at home.
For her part, K.G.M. alleges the dangerous content was recommended to her, and that the “addictive design” of the platforms made her “severely dependent on these products to the point where she could not sleep at night, and often refused to go to school the next day.”
“Defendants deliberately tweaked the design and operation of their apps to exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of kids,” her lawsuit, which was first brought by her mom but is now being pursued by K.G.M. herself, said. “Because children’s and adolescents’ brains are not fully developed, they lack the same emotional maturity, impulse control, and psychological resiliency as adults. As a result, they are uniquely susceptible to addictive features in digital products and highly vulnerable to the consequent harms.”
Google denies the claims of negligence. “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” company spokesman Jose Castañeda said in a statement sent to Rolling Stone. “In collaboration with youth, mental health and parenting experts, we built services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls. The allegations in these complaints are simply not true.” (Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The settlement-related defections of TikTok and Snapchat could be related to the particular details of K.G.M.’s case. According to a filing last August, K.G.M. said she started using YouTube when she was six years old and Instagram when she was nine. By contrast, she started using Snapchat when she was 11 and TikTok when she was 14, her filing said. K.G.M. alleged that YouTube recommended or autoplayed depictions of cutting to her, and that she was the victim of a “sextortion attempt” on Instagram. She claimed that when her family reported the alleged sextortion, “Meta did nothing” and allegedly “allowed the predatory user to continue harming [her].”
“These settlements are an important step, but this is just one of thousands of personal injury and school district cases filed against Snap, TikTok, Meta, and Google. As the trials begin, more evidence will come to light of the widespread harm caused by social media platforms that put profit over adolescent safety,” Lexi Hazam and Previn Warren, the court-appointed lead plaintiffs’ counsel in parallel federal litigation playing out in the Northern District of California, said in a statement Tuesday. “The coming months will reveal the full scope of the defendants’ wrongdoing, and we will continue fighting to hold these tech companies accountable.”
As he left the courthouse Tuesday, Lanier said that while many have likened the social media addiction lawsuits to earlier legal battles against tobacco companies, it was not “realistic” to expect social media platforms to face government regulation akin to that imposed on the tobacco industry. “The power of these companies to get involved in legislation is huge,” he said. “I don’t think they’re going to be regulated the way tobacco is. I do believe that the regulation will come through court proceedings like this, in the sense that juries will hold them accountable if they don’t act like responsible citizens.”
