"Social media addiction lawsuit against Meta is dropped", 22 July 2026

A day after Snap tentatively settled with the plaintiff in a social media addiction lawsuit, leaving Meta as the only remaining defendant, the case has been dropped. In a statement, Meta said the plaintiff chose to drop his case against Meta without receiving any payment.

TikTok and Google’s YouTube had previously reached settlement agreements with the plaintiff....

The plaintiff, a Florida teenager known by the initials “R.K.C.,” had sued the social media companies for creating addictive platforms. It was one of thousands of similar lawsuits from teens, schools, and state attorneys general that had accused the big tech companies of knowingly creating addictive platforms...

Meta had been prepared to argue that the plaintiff in this case had allegedly only used Facebook and Instagram accounts for minutes per day on average, and was planning to claim that most of his accounts had been created after hiring a lawyer.

In its statement, Meta said that, “this outcome makes clear that we will not back away from defending ourselves against baseless lawsuits.”