LOS ANGELES (CN) — Lawyers for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube asked a judge Wednesday to strike most of a lawsuit filed against the companies by teenagers and their relatives who say they suffered harm and in some cases death from social media use or addiction.
The five tech giants have argued they should be immune from the suit under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability for what its users say on them. A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge said Wednesday she would likely throw out certain pieces of the lawsuit, but she ordered both sides to come back with different arguments.
The case comes from the consolidation of numerous lawsuits filed by more than 500 plaintiffs. In their 305-page consolidated master complaint, the plaintiffs charge the social media companies with fueling "an unprecedented mental health crisis" with "addictive and dangerous social media products."
"The resulting ubiquity of defendants’ products in the lives and palms of our kids, and the ensuing harm to them, is hard to overstate," the plaintiffs say in their complaint. "Today, over a third of 13-to-17-year-old kids report using one of defendants’ apps 'almost constantly' and admit this is 'too much.' Yet more than half of these kids report that they would struggle to cut back on their social media use. Instead of feeding coins into slot machines, kids are feeding defendants’ products with an endless supply of attention, time, and data."
The suit singles out TikTok, in particular, for its so-called viral "challenges" — "campaigns that compel users to create and post in TikTok certain types of videos, such as performing a dance routine or a dangerous prank."
"Numerous child users have injured or even killed themselves or others participating in viral pranks to obtain rewards and increase the number of 'likes,' views, and followers," the plaintiffs say in the complaint.
Such challenges include the Benadryl challenge (users taking large quantities of the allergy medication), the NyQuil challenge (large quantities of the cold medicine), the milk crate challenge (users jump off a tall stack of milk crates), and the blackout challenge, "where youth are encouraged to make themselves faint by holding their breath and constricting their chest muscles or restricting airflow with a ligature around their neck."
According the complaint, the blackout challenge has directly led to the death of at least 12 children in the United States alone, including two 12-year-old boys and a 10-year-old girl in Pennsylvania.
The complaint also claims that certain features on the apps — for example, Facebook's "People You May Know" feature — put kids at risk of "sexual exploitation" because it "helps predators connect with underage users."
The complaint has already been trimmed once last summer following a motion to strike. In another motion filed this year, the defendants argued that other parts of the suit should be thrown out because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. They also say that the viral "challenges" are protected speech under the First Amendment.
"Where the harm is the content, Section 230 applies," defendant attorney Brian Willis told the judge on Wednesday.
The plaintiffs' attorney Josh Autry said the tech companies were stretching "the definition of 230 beyond its breaking point." Autry said the plaintiffs were suing the apps not for allowing certain content to be "published," which is what Section 230 is meant to protect, but for creating certain tools that help facilitate harm done to underage users. For example, Snapchat has a geolocation feature.
"The defendants are publishing adolescents' geolocation so that predators can see it," said Autry, adding that the firms are also liable for not giving parents the power to monitor their kids' social media usage.
"Defendants can leave all the content up," said Autry. "We’re asking defendants to not create a scenario where children are addicted to their devices and parents are shut out."
LA County Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl was skeptical.
"Inadequate controls is the reason they put 230 into effect, so that social media companies wouldn’t be held responsible for trying to do something and not doing it well enough," the judge told the plaintiffs' attorneys.
Autry said that he didn't think the case law allowed for a "lawless no man's land," at which Judge Kuhl interrupted, "You don't think the case law allows a lawless no man's land on the internet? You're reading them a lot different than I am." A few of the dozens of lawyers in the court room laughed.
After a short break, Judge Kuhl came back and told both sides: "That was not a helpful argument for me." She said both sides were taking extreme, "maximalist" positions — that the defendants were arguing that Section 230 shielded them from anything that happened on their platforms, and that the plaintiffs were arguing that every single decision taken by the defendants had led to more harm. She told both sets of lawyers to file briefs and come back for further argument.
She also told the plaintiffs to flesh out their argument about geolocation "enhancing danger to minors. "That argument, I think, should not be overlooked, and I feel like it kind of has been," she said.
The defendants had also filed a demurrer to have certain smaller sections of the complaint stricken. Kuhl said she was likely to sustain that motion, meaning that the 305-page suit is likely to be trimmed again, and perhaps amended.
A number of lawsuits filed by school districts against the social media companies have also been consolidated into one complaint overseen by Kuhl. They accuse the social media companies of negligence and creating a public nuisance, saying they incurred extra costs disciplining and monitoring students for their phone usage.
The social media companies have argued that allowing the school districts' lawsuit to move forward would set a dangerous precedent and "create near-limitless liability. They cite an Oklahoma judge's 2021 ruling which asked “will a sugar manufacturer or the fast food industry be liable for obesity, will an alcohol manufacturer be liable for psychological harms, or will a car manufacturer be liable for health hazards from lung disease to dementia or for air pollution?"
Tech companies have used Section 230 to shield themselves from a number of lawsuits. But the tactic hasn't always been successful. In January, a judge ruled that Snapchat could not use Section 230 to shield itself from a lawsuit over fentanyl overdoses that stem from drug dealing over their platform.
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