A US appeals court on Monday allowed thousands of lawsuits against major social media companies to move forward, rejecting the firms’ attempt to overturn a lower court’s ruling. The San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals declined to dismiss about 2,400 lawsuits filed in federal court against Meta Platforms, Alphabet’s Google, ByteDance’s TikTok, Snap Inc’s Snapchat, and other social media companies.
The lawsuits accuse the companies of deliberately making their platforms addictive to young users, leading to mental health harm. The tech firms had argued the claims were without merit, but the appeals court refused to reverse the earlier decision that forced them to face the litigation.
The ruling keeps the cases alive, meaning the companies now face a long legal battle. They will have to defend their product designs against allegations that they engineered their services to hook minors, rather than having the cases thrown out at an early stage.