"TikTok settles second addiction case, leaving Meta and Snap to face a jury alone", 30 June 2026

TikTok has reached a confidential settlement with a Florida teenager who accused the platform of contributing to his mental health problems, removing itself from a jury trial scheduled to begin on July 27 in Los Angeles. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg on Tuesday, makes TikTok the second defendant to exit the case in recent weeks. YouTube settled with the same plaintiff last week.

The plaintiff, a 15-year-old boy identified in court filings by his initials, accuses Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap of designing their platforms to be addictive through features such as infinite scroll and autoplay. He has been using social media since he was eight years old, according to his attorneys. He has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder tied to his social media use, and began seeing therapists in 2023 for those conditions, including suicidal ideation.

With TikTok and YouTube now out, Meta and Snap are the only defendants still facing the jury…

The settlement follows a pattern TikTok has now repeated twice. The company also settled the first bellwether case before it went to trial earlier this year, alongside Snap. That first case ended in March with a jury finding Meta and Google liable and awarding six million dollars in damages, the first social media addiction case to reach a verdict…

The July 27 trial in Los Angeles will test whether a second jury reaches the same conclusion as the first, and whether two verdicts create enough pressure to change the calculus for the thousands of cases still waiting.