Snap settles with two teens mid-trial over claims its app is addictive

Snap didn't wait for the jury. The Snapchat parent settled Monday with two teens who claim the app was engineered to be addictive, their attorneys said, cutting the case short after jury selection started last week in Los Angeles state court. A Snap spokesperson didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, and no terms were announced.

The trial was supposed to be Snap's first real day in court over social media's toll on kids. It became the second such case to reach trial in LA state court, and the company's chief executive, Evan Spiegel, had been lined up to take the stand. Snap had already settled the other cases that had been penciled in for trial, making this one the one to finally face a jury.

The plaintiffs are S.J., a 16-year-old from Illinois, and K.D.B., an 18-year-old from Mississippi. They say they started on YouTube as early as age 3 and picked up the other platforms around age 9, building compulsive habits they blame on features like autoplay and infinite scroll. Both had previously settled with Meta, TikTok and Alphabet's YouTube.

Their lawyers framed the deal as a step, not a finish line. John Morgan and Emily Jeffcott, representing K.D.B. at trial, said their ultimate goal is holding social media companies accountable for how their actions have affected millions of children nationwide, and that the settlements let them keep building toward it.

The companies deny designing their platforms to addict young people and say they've taken steps to make the apps safer for self-expression. Still, they're drowning in litigation: thousands of suits from individuals, school districts, municipalities and other government entities allege they knowingly hooked kids, feeding a youth mental health crisis tied to anxiety, depression and suicide.

The track record so far is mixed. In the first case to reach trial, an LA jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in March and awarded a young woman $6 million. The next two teens picked for trial either settled or dropped their claims, and the first school district chosen for trial settled with everyone. In August, Meta struck settlements worth up to $18 billion with nearly every state and US territory, agreeing to change how Instagram and Facebook work for teens, with $5 billion of that payout conditioned on the states landing similar deals with Snap, TikTok and YouTube.