Social Media Harm

Parents usually call us with a chronology rather than a theory: the year the phone arrived, the year the grades went, the appointment where somebody first used the word depression. Whether that chronology adds up to a claim against a platform turns on design decisions made in rooms your child was never in — and finding that out is our work, not yours.

What a social media harm claim actually alleges

This is a product case. It is not about what other people posted. It is about how the app itself was built. The claim is that the company built the app to keep a young person watching, long after that stopped being good for them. The claim is also that the company knew it. So the case looks at the parts the company chose: the feed that picks the next video, the alerts that buzz all day, the video that starts on its own, the streak that breaks if you skip a day, and the filter that changes a face.

That framing is also the fight. The platforms argue their design is inseparable from the speech it carries, so a claim about a feed is really a claim about content. Families argue that a recommendation engine is a manufactured thing, and that a manufacturer can be asked whether it built the thing carelessly. Most of that argument is being had in the federal cases coordinated as MDL No. 30471.

What a design claim has to establish

The design

A specific mechanism, not a general complaint about the internet. Which feature, what it was tuned to do, and what a safer version of it would have looked like.

Knowledge

What the company understood about that feature’s effect on young users, and when. Almost all of that evidence is internal, and it surfaces in discovery rather than from you.

Causation

That this use caused this harm to this person. It is the hardest element in the case, and the medical record is what carries it.

Damages

Treatment, hospitalization, the school year that did not happen, earning years a serious illness takes, and the losses that never come with a receipt.

The elements are named differently from theory to theory and from state to state. What has to be proved does not move much.

TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat in this litigation

Four apps come up in almost every call: TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. They are named together in the same two places — the federal cases coordinated as MDL No. 3047 in the Northern District of California1, and the California state cases coordinated in Los Angeles County Superior Court — but they are not in the same position, and the difference is worth knowing before you decide anything. What follows is where each one stands, what the claims say about its design, and what to save if it is part of your family’s chronology.

TikTok

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, and it is a defendant in both proceedings where these cases are gathered. The design the claims describe is the recommendation feed the company itself calls For You — TikTok publishes its own explanation of how it decides what to show next — together with the autoplay and the notification pattern built around it. The question a claim puts is not whether a particular video was allowed. It is whether the machine that chose the next one was built carelessly for a thirteen-year-old.

TikTok has not taken one of these personal-injury cases to a verdict. In the first California case to reach trial it settled the plaintiff’s claims on confidential terms before the jury was picked, as Snap did6.

The first liability ruling against the company came instead from a case brought by a state. In September 2026 a Texas court held that TikTok violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, finding that it had misled the public about its Community Guidelines and about what the app’s Restricted Mode actually filtered for young users; a hearing on penalties follows5. Read that for what it is: a consumer-protection finding in one state, not a finding that TikTok injured any particular young person, and not a decision of the claims in the coordinated cases.

If TikTok is in your chronology, start with the account data. The company publishes instructions for requesting a copy of your data; make the request, and save the file somewhere that is not the phone.

Facebook

Facebook is owned by Meta Platforms, which also owns Instagram, and the two apps are treated together almost everywhere in this litigation. In October 2023 a group of state attorneys general sued Meta in federal court over the way both were designed for young users4.

That case ended on August 26, 2026. Meta agreed to pay the states at least $12.1 billion over ten years, a figure that rises toward $17.1 billion only if TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat agree to comparable money and comparable safety terms48. Fifty-one attorneys general signed it, and a federal judge in the Northern District of California has to approve it8. The sentence that matters most to a parent is the plainest one: that money goes to the states, for mental-health services, school programs and crisis work. None of it compensates an individual young person for an individual injury8.

The settlement also rewrites parts of the product, and the terms read as a fair summary of what the states said the design had been doing — a two-hour daily cap across Facebook and Instagram for users under eighteen, no access between midnight and 6 a.m., notification curfews, breaks after fifteen minutes of continuous use, parental control over algorithmic feeds and autoplay, and limits on beauty filters and visible like counts48.

Meta keeps the account export in Accounts Center, under Your information and permissions, as Download your information. Request it for Facebook and Instagram both, and do not delete either account first.

Instagram

Instagram is the app parents name most often when they describe what changed — the feed that keeps refilling, the appearance filters, the count of likes attached to a photograph of a fourteen-year-old. It is a Meta product, so the settlement described above covers it, and so do that settlement’s design terms4.

It is also the platform in the one case in this litigation that has been tried to a jury. In March 2026 a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in the design or operation of their platforms, found that the negligence was a substantial factor in causing the plaintiff’s harm, and found that both companies had failed to warn adequately about the risks of Instagram and YouTube. It awarded $3 million in compensatory damages, apportioned 70 percent to Meta and 30 percent to YouTube, and a further $3 million in punitive damages. Both companies said they disagree with the verdict and intend to appeal6.

One jury, one plaintiff, one medical record. A verdict for somebody else’s child is not a valuation of yours, and the appeal has not been heard. What it establishes is narrower and still worth knowing: a claim of this kind can be put to twelve people and can win.

Snapchat

Snapchat is made by Snap Inc., a defendant in the same federal and California proceedings. Snap’s own quarterly report to the Securities and Exchange Commission is the plainest public account of where it stands. It describes claims that “the design and use of our platform, and those of our competitors, is addictive and harmful to users, with most of the cases focused on mental health harms and users under 18-years old”, states that Snap “reached a confidential settlement agreement resolving the first and second JCCP bellwether trials”, and reports that “the next two JCCP bellwether trials including Snap are scheduled to begin in October 2026”7.

Settling is not conceding. No court has found Snap liable in these cases, and the same filing says the company believes it has meritorious defenses7. What the disclosure does tell a family is that Snap has twice resolved a case rather than try it, and that two more are on a calendar this autumn.

Snapchat is also the platform where waiting costs the most, because deletion is the default there. Snap’s own support pages say its servers are built to delete a Snap once every recipient has viewed it, and to delete an unopened Snap after thirty-one days9. So the archive request goes first — Snapchat publishes instructions for downloading your data — and the account stays where it is.

Whether a social media harm claim fits your family

We screen these claims against a fairly narrow set of facts, because the coordinated litigation has settled on a narrow set of facts. It is here so you know what we are going to ask, not so you can rule your own family out — that part is our job, and we would rather do it on the phone than leave you guessing. When in doubt, call.

What we ask on the first call

Who is calling

A parent or legal guardian of the young person who was harmed — and nobody else already acting as their lawyer. If another firm is representing this claim, it is their case, and we will say so rather than work around them.

How old they were then

The app was being used somewhere between the ages of seven and seventeen. Use that began in adulthood is a different conversation, and not one this litigation is built for.

How old they are now

Between seven and twenty-five today. Where a family lost a child, the claim belongs to the people the wrongful death statute names, and we start there instead.

How heavy the use was

Hours a day, most days, sustained over weeks rather than a rough patch — and tell us about every app, not only the one you think counts. Most young people are on several: twelve hours on one platform one day and twelve on another the next, or a week split five ways. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube are the ones these cases keep coming back to. Working out which of them a claim names is our job, and we do it better with the whole picture in front of us.

A diagnosis made in childhood

The injury was diagnosed by a clinician and treated before the young person turned eighteen. What the chart says, and when it says it, is the part of this we cannot work around.

None of these are legal tests. They are the facts that let us tell you quickly and honestly whether there is something here.

The injuries this litigation is built around are these — diagnosed and treated while the young person was still a minor:

• An eating disorder
• Body dysmorphia
• Severe depression
• Severe anxiety
• A suicide attempt
• A death by suicide

Two other harms qualify on their own, without any of the above. If sexual images of the young person were created or passed around on a platform, or if somebody used the threat of releasing such images to coerce them into sending more — sextortion — that is a claim in its own right. In those cases the account evidence matters even more than usual, and deleting it costs more than in any other version of this case.

Meeting all of it does not mean you have a case, and nobody can honestly tell you that you do until someone has read the records. Missing one of them does not settle it either — the facts as a family remembers them and the facts as the chart records them are not always the same, and finding out which you have costs nothing. Call and let us do the sorting.

Before you hire a social media harm attorney, protect the record

None of the following needs a lawyer. All of it gets harder the longer it waits — and one of them, the account, can become impossible in an afternoon.

Five things worth doing now

1. Do not delete the account

   Deleting an app, a post or a chat log can remove the only contemporaneous record of what the platform showed and how long it held attention. Whatever else you decide about a claim, keep it.

2. Ask the platform for a copy of the account data

   Where a platform offers a way to download an archive of a user’s own account, request it and save the file somewhere that is not the phone. If it does not, say so — that material can still be obtained later through the court.

3. Write the chronology down

   When the account was opened, when use changed, when sleep or eating or grades changed, when someone first raised it with a clinician. Dates in the wrong order are the first thing the other side’s expert reaches for.

4. Keep the care going, and keep the paper

   Appointments, referrals, prescriptions, admissions, discharge instructions. In a case decided on causation, treatment that was sought is the evidence, and a gap in it is the argument against you.

5. Keep the school paperwork too

   Attendance, grade reports, discipline records, counselor referrals, any 504 plan or IEP. Schools document a decline in a way families rarely manage to at the time.

The product is on trial here. Your parenting is not.

How a social media harm lawsuit moves, from intake to resolution

These cases do not travel alone. When many federal lawsuits raise the same questions about the same products, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation can send them to a single judge for coordinated pretrial handling2 — which is how a claim filed in one state and a claim filed two thousand miles away end up on one schedule in front of one court. The claim stays yours. The pretrial work gets done once instead of thousands of times.

The usual shape of a social media harm case

1. Intake

   You tell us the chronology. We look at it for nothing and say plainly whether we think there is a claim in it.

2. Preservation

   Account data, device data, clinical records and school records — collected while they still exist, and put beyond the reach of an ordinary deletion schedule.

3. Medical review

   The case waits on medicine here. Our staff reads the medical records and confirms the diagnosis in them — what a family remembers and what the chart recorded are not always the same, and the chart is what the case runs on. Where a family lost a child to self-harm, we will need the death certificate as well, for the official cause of death.

4. Filing

   The complaint is filed. Where it belongs in a coordinated proceeding, it is transferred there and joins the schedule the court has already set.

5. Coordinated discovery

   Internal documents, custodial files and sworn testimony from the people who designed the features. This is the stage where a company’s own research does the heavy lifting.

6. Bellwether and expert work

   A coordinated docket tries a small number of representative cases first, and both sides fight hard over the science. What happens there shapes what every other case is worth.

7. Resolution or trial

   A settlement, an individual trial, or a remand to the court where the case began. Which one is not knowable at intake, and we will not pretend it is.

A shape, not a schedule. Coordinated litigation is measured in years, and the pace belongs to the court rather than to either side.

What evidence decides a social media harm case

Two records run in parallel. One is what the platform did — held on company servers, produced through the court, argued over by experts. The other is what happened to the person, and most of that one is already in your hands.

• The account itself — kept, not deleted
• Any account-data archive the platform will provide
• Screen-time or device-usage reports
• Every platform used, and roughly when
• Pediatric, therapy and psychiatric records
• Hospital or crisis-center admission paperwork
• Prescriptions and medication history
• School attendance, grades and discipline records
• Counselor referrals, 504 plans or IEPs
• A dated chronology in your own words

Plain English

Medical, Health & Insurance

A claim like this arrives wrapped in two vocabularies, neither of them yours: the clinical language in your child’s chart, and the coverage language in the letters from your health plan. Here is what the words mean, so the paperwork is readable before it becomes decisive.

Diagnoses and clinical language

Major depressive disorder (MDD)

A clinical diagnosis of depression, made on a pattern of symptoms over a period of time rather than on one bad stretch. A chart may grade it mild, moderate or severe, and may note whether it has recurred.

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)

Persistent worry that is hard to control, out of proportion to the situation, and interfering with ordinary functioning — sleep, school, eating, leaving the house.

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI)

Deliberate self-harm without intent to die. Charts record it separately from suicidality because clinicians treat the two as different risks.

Suicidal ideation

Thoughts about ending one’s own life. Records usually distinguish passive from active ideation, and note whether there was intent or a plan.

Eating disorder

A group of diagnoses — anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge-eating disorder and others — defined by patterns of restriction, purging or bingeing alongside distorted beliefs about weight and shape.

Body dysmorphic disorder

Preoccupation with a perceived flaw in appearance that others barely notice or do not see at all, severe enough to disrupt daily life.

Delayed sleep phase

A body clock shifted later than the day requires, so sleep ends up short rather than merely late. It appears in a chart as insomnia, fatigue or daytime sleepiness.

Treatment and levels of care

Diagnostic assessment

The first structured appointment, where a clinician takes a history and reaches a working diagnosis. It is often the earliest dated document in the whole case.

Outpatient therapy

Regular appointments while living at home — the ordinary starting point, usually weekly.

Intensive outpatient (IOP) and partial hospitalization (PHP)

Two steps up from weekly therapy: several hours of structured treatment a day, several days a week, still sleeping at home. PHP is the more intensive of the two.

Residential treatment

Living at a treatment facility for weeks or months. It is the level of care that tends to produce the largest bills and the longest absence from school.

Inpatient psychiatric admission

A hospital stay, usually short and usually prompted by immediate risk. The admission paperwork is often the clearest dated record of a crisis.

Safety plan

A written plan made with a clinician for what to do when risk rises — warning signs, who to call, what to remove from the house.

Behavioral-health records authorization

Mental-health records are generally released on their own signed authorization, separately from the rest of a medical file. Expect to sign more than one form.

Insurance, coverage and billing

Prior authorization

Your plan’s approval before it will pay for a level of care. A denial at this stage is appealable, and the appeal file matters later.

Medical necessity

The plan’s standard for whether treatment is covered. It is the plan’s standard rather than the clinician’s, and the two disagree often.

Utilization or level-of-care review

The plan reviewing, sometimes weekly, whether a stay should continue. It is how a residential admission can end earlier than the treatment team intended.

Mental health parity

Federal law does not require a health plan to cover mental-health or substance-use treatment at all. Where a plan does cover it, the financial requirements and treatment limits it applies generally cannot be more restrictive than the ones it applies to medical and surgical care3.

Single case agreement

A one-off arrangement between a plan and a facility outside its network, for one patient. Worth asking about when the right level of care is only available out of network.

Explanation of benefits (EOB)

Not a bill. It is your plan’s account of what was billed, what it allowed, what it paid and what it says you still owe. Keep every one of them.

Subrogation and liens

A health plan that paid for treatment may assert a right to be repaid out of any recovery. Finding those claims and negotiating them down is part of the case rather than an afterthought.

Educational only. These are plain-language summaries of words that turn up in charts, letters and bills — not clinical definitions, not medical advice, not a diagnosis of anyone, and not a description of what any particular policy covers. For what a diagnosis means for your child, ask the clinician who made it. For what your plan covers, read the plan, and bring it to us if it is not clear. If a young person is in immediate danger, call or text 988.

Questions

Frequently asked social media harm questions

The questions parents actually open with, answered the way we would answer them on the phone.

Who can bring a social media harm claim?

Usually a parent or legal guardian, on behalf of the young person who was harmed — that is who we ask for on the first call. A young adult can bring a claim in their own name, and the same records have to exist either way.

Where a family lost a child, a wrongful death claim belongs to the people the statute names, and that is not always who you would expect. It is one of the first things we check.

Isn’t this really about content? How is a platform a product?

That is the central dispute, and it is worth understanding before you decide anything. The claim we bring is about mechanisms — how a feed ranks, how notifications are timed, what autoplay does to a bedtime — rather than about any particular post.

The platforms argue their design cannot be separated from the speech it carries. That argument is being litigated right now, and no web page should tell you how it comes out.

My child deleted the account. Is the claim over?

Not necessarily. A deleted account is a problem, not the end of one: a great deal of what matters sits on company servers rather than on the phone, and it can be sought through the court.

Tell us what was deleted and roughly when, and stop deleting anything else — including messages, photographs and the device itself.

Where would our case actually be filed?

Federal claims about the major platforms have been coordinated before one judge in the Northern District of California as MDL No. 3047, so a case brought for your family may be handled there for pretrial purposes and can return to the court where it started afterwards.

We work these claims nationwide. Where a filing calls for a lawyer admitted somewhere we are not, we bring one in rather than turn the case away.

What does it cost to talk to a lawyer about this?

Nothing. Case reviews are free, and if we take the case we take it on contingency — no money up front, and no attorney’s fee unless we recover.

It also means we say no when the claim is not there, and tell you why. Taking a case we cannot prove does a family no favors.

We already have a lawyer on this. Can we talk to you anyway?

Not about this claim, no. If another firm is representing it, that is their case, and going around them would not be right. The questions on this page are fair ones to put to them.

If you have already ended that relationship, tell us that it is done and we can look at the file like any other.

How long do we have to bring a claim?

There is a window, and for a claim involving a minor there is more than one question about it. State law sets the period for an injury action, and states have a separate rule addressing the effect of being under eighteen when the claim arose.

Which of them governs your family depends on facts we would need to hear. Tell us roughly when this started and we can tell you whether time is a problem.

Will my child have to testify or be examined?

Possibly, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. In litigation the other side is generally entitled to test a claim, which can mean a deposition and an examination by a clinician the defense retains.

Both are bounded by rules, both are prepared for, and how far either goes depends on the stage the case reaches. It is a fair question to ask before anything is filed.

Does my child need a diagnosis before we call?

Call either way, and expect a straight answer: these claims turn on an injury a clinician diagnosed and treated while the young person was still under eighteen. Where that has not happened, there is usually no claim for us to bring, however real the harm has been.

What you do not need is the paperwork in hand. Roughly who diagnosed it and roughly when is enough to have the conversation — collecting the records is our job. And if treatment has not started, the honest first step is care rather than a lawsuit.

This page is general information about how social media harm claims work. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney-client relationship, and it is not medical advice about anyone’s diagnosis or treatment. If something here sounds like your family, the useful next step is a conversation about the facts.