Tom Petty sang that “the waiting is the hardest part.” It’s a take-it-to-the-heart maxim currently holding true for anyone anticipating the trial-court resolution of more than 2,000 lawsuits (as of October 1, 2025) targeting social media companies in a years-long multidistrict litigation (MDL) proceeding before US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Northern California.
Key events and rulings in the offing for 2026, however, might end the waiting in some cases. For now, this post briefly reviews what’s transpired and where some matters stand, with multiple background-related links embedded for the click inclined. A soon-forthcoming post will delve into details of a seemingly representative summary judgment motion the defendants filed against a school district plaintiff and the district’s opposition to it.
At bottom and for brevity’s sake, the federal MDL cases blame four defendants and five platforms—Google (YouTube), Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Snap (Snapchat), and ByteDance (TikTok)—for purportedly causing a youth mental health crisis by allegedly designing platforms to deliberately addict minors and foster compulsively dangerous usage. Collectively, the lawsuits pivot on theories including negligence (design defects and failure-to-warn claims), products liability (also design defects and failure-to-warn claims), public nuisance, and state consumer-protection and deception statutes.
The plaintiffs are individuals and government entities. Some plaintiffs are minors suing over alleged personal injuries while, in other instances, parents and guardians are suing over a child’s alleged wrongful death. Others seeking redress include myriad local governments and public school districts from across the US. They seek relief by claiming they “are on the front lines of redressing the damage caused by Defendants’ deliberate choice to design, develop, operate, promote, distribute, and market their social media platforms to attract and addict youth.” Additionally, attorneys general of more than 30 states have sued Meta as part of the MDL, claiming the company behind the popular Facebook and Instagram platforms violated state consumer-protection and unfair-and-deceptive business practices statutes and “repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers” of those platforms.
For those who want to get up to speed, I’ve written about the proceedings for AEIdeas for more than two years. I first addressed the federal MDL, as well as a related (and ongoing) consolidated proceeding involving similar claims in state court in Southern California, back in October 2023. I followed up with an explainer column in mid-November 2023 and then another post later that month. In July 2024, I examined the potential viability of public nuisance claims filed by school districts and local governments against the social media companies for what might be considered downstream harms (as compared to alleged injuries directly sustained by minors). This year, I’ve written twice about the cases—once in mid-January and then about a week later.
During roughly the same period I’ve been writing about the federal MDL, Judge Rogers issued five key decisions that narrowed and whittled away at some of the plaintiffs’ claims but didn’t fully dismiss them. Those motion-to-dismiss rulings were handed down in November 2023, October 2024 (one involving claims filed by state attorneys general, the other involving claims brought by local governments and public school districts), November 2024, and February 2025. First Amendment-based free-speech arguments, as well as the general immunity from civil liability for third-party content that’s afforded by the federal statute known as Section 230, knocked out some—but not all—of the plaintiffs’ theories.
Now, about 38 months after some of the earliest cases from across the nation were centralized in Oakland, California, and Rogers was assigned as transferee judge to the matter known as In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, the MDL continues. Several things, however, might expedite the outcome of some lawsuits next year.
That’s because the defendants on September 30 filed a summary judgment motion against the Breathitt County [Kentucky] Board of Education, one of six school-district plaintiffs from across the US that Rogers has scheduled for bellwether trials in the summer of 2026. A law journal article explains that bellwether trials in MDL proceedings provide an opportunity “for testing various theories and defenses in a trial setting” and “putting litigation theories into practice.” Bellwether trials also can “precipitate and inform settlement negotiations by indicating future trends . . . by providing guidance on how similar claims may fare before subsequent juries.”
The same day the defendants filed their summary judgment motion against Breathitt County, they filed similar motions against the other five school-district plaintiffs scheduled for bellwether trials next summer: (1) Charleston County [South Carolina] School District; (2) DeKalb County [Georgia] School District; (3) Harford County’s [Maryland] board of education; (4) Irvington [New Jersey] Public Schools; and (5) Tucson [Arizona] Unified School District.
In sum, a combination of summary judgment motions and bellwether trials should bring trial-court closure to some school-district cases next year and perhaps spur settlements in others.
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