Meta and TikTok tried to end thousands of youth addiction suits before trial; the 9th Circuit told them to wait

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday, Aug. 10, that thousands of lawsuits accusing Meta Platforms, ByteDance's TikTok and other social media companies of building products that addict and harm young people can go forward. The panel did not decide whether the claims are any good. It held that Meta and TikTok appealed too early, before the trial court had entered the kind of final judgment an appeals court is allowed to review. The plaintiffs are teenagers and their parents, hundreds of school districts, and state attorneys general. They argue the platforms engineered feeds, notifications and sign-up screens to maximize the hours minors spend on them, and buried internal research on the harm. The cases now go back to Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in U.S. District Court in Oakland, where the companies can raise every one of the same defenses again — just later, and after discovery (the pretrial stage where each side must hand over its internal documents).