Two Lawsuits Against Big Tech (Meta, Snapchat, Google): How Parallel Lawsuits in the United States Destroyed the Defendants’ Defense Strategy - Kildeev Adel - 2025 (preprint prior to journal publication)

This paper examines lawsuits against Meta, Snapchat, Google, and other platforms alleging harm to minors’ mental health.

It argues that courts are increasingly treating addictive algorithms and platform design features as potentially defective products, creating new pathways for liability.

1. Multiple lawsuits are creating a cumulative legal threat to Big Tech

2. Addictive platform design—not content—is the focus of the lawsuits

3. Courts are increasingly rejecting traditional Big Tech defenses

4. Product liability and negligence are becoming the central legal framework

5. Mental health harms and concealed risks are central to the lawsuits

6. The legal reasoning may eventually apply to AI systems

🧠 Conclusion

The paper argues that American courts are beginning to rethink what social media companies are.

For years, platforms were primarily treated as publishers of content, meaning legal disputes focused on what users posted and whether companies could be held responsible for that content. Increasingly, courts are being asked to view these companies instead as designers of products, where the focus is on whether features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, and recommendation algorithms were negligently designed and created foreseeable harm. ⭐

This represents a broader shift toward traditional product liability and negligence law.

Rather than asking whether a platform published harmful content, courts are increasingly examining whether the algorithms themselves functioned like defective products that encouraged addiction and contributed to mental health harms. ⭐

If this legal reasoning continues to expand, future courts may face new questions: