A U.S. court has allowed thousands of lawsuits against Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat to proceed
A U.S. appeals court has allowed thousands of lawsuits against Meta Platforms, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat to proceed. The companies are accused of allegedly designing their platforms to be addictive to young users.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco rejected the appeals filed by Meta and TikTok, which had sought to overturn the lower court’s ruling.
The previous ruling required the companies to respond to more than 3,000 lawsuits filed in federal court.
The appeals court concluded that the companies had filed their appeal prematurely.
The plaintiffs allege that the social media platforms deliberately designed their products to keep young users engaged for as long as possible and to foster addictive behavior.
The companies, for their part, cited Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
This provision generally protects internet companies from liability for content posted by users.
Meta and TikTok argued that Section 230 should also bar lawsuits in which the companies are accused of failing to warn the public about potential addiction to their platforms.
Company representatives argued that they should not have to wait for the conclusion of the trial to challenge the decision denying their Section 230 defense.
However, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed with this position.
The court noted that Section 230 provides protection from liability, not immunity from the legal proceedings themselves.
Consequently, the companies were not granted the ability to prematurely terminate the proceedings, and thousands of lawsuits may continue to be heard in U.S. courts.
Appeals are typically filed after a trial has concluded with a final judgment or verdict.
This was reported by Reuters.
Earlier, a New Mexico state judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million in a case brought by the state, which alleged that the tech company caused “public harm” and harmed children. This was reported by France 24 English.
Meta has unveiled Muse Glimmer—an open-weight artificial intelligence model designed to run AI agents directly on consumer devices. The model, with 30 billion parameters, can run locally on a Mac or PC with a single consumer-grade graphics processing unit, according to TechCrunch.
