A federal appeals court just cleared the path for thousands of families to keep fighting Big Tech over claims that social media platforms were built to keep kids hooked.
On August 10, 2026, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco dismissed early appeals by Meta and TikTok. The ruling leaves more than 3,000 federal lawsuits active against Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Google/YouTube, ByteDance/TikTok, Snap/Snapchat and other companies. Plaintiffs, including parents, school districts and states, allege the platforms used features that encouraged compulsive use among young people.
The court did not find the companies liable or prove addiction. It simply said the companies jumped the gun by appealing before the cases finished.
Meta and TikTok argued Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gave them immunity from being sued at all. A three-judge panel, in an opinion by Judge Jacqueline Nguyen, disagreed. Section 230 offers a defense against liability, the court held, not a free pass from facing a lawsuit. Early appeals of that kind are not allowed. Most challenges wait until a final judgment.
The same panel also denied the request made by Meta for delaying another suit filed against it by 29 state attorneys general. The lawsuit, due to begin sometime around mid-August 2026 in Oakland, under U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, revolves around children’s data, design of the platforms, and public safety announcements.
There are reports about more than 3,000 federal lawsuits in the multidistrict litigation in Northern California. In another estimate, the number of federal lawsuits is between 2,400 to 2,600. There are also approximately 3,300 suits in state court in California. The difference in figures is due to different accounting practices followed in different tracks.
Plaintiffs accused the companies of designing the platforms so as to encourage too much use by making them addictive through such features as infinite scrolling, recommendation algorithms, frequent notifications, autoplay and other engagement tactics, as well as inadequate age verification and parental controls, which are only allegations not proven facts.
A jury in Los Angeles, California, in March 2026, ruled that Meta and Google were negligent in the way the apps were designed in a bellwether trial after a young woman accused Instagram and YouTube of contributing to her mental health problems and awarded her about $6 million, with Meta and Google appealing the decision. Additionally, in New Mexico, proceedings resulted in significant penalties being imposed on Meta which the company is also challenging. The cases can have an impact on the settlements and trials of the remaining thousands of cases but are unlikely to result in a definitive ruling on the claims because courts around the country will hear similar cases.
