Meta pulled ads tied to addiction lawsuits

Meta spent years selling ads to almost anyone with a credit card. On April 9, it started pulling ads from lawyers who were using Facebook and Instagram to find people under 18 when they say they were harmed by social media. (reuters.com) (axios.com) Meta’s public explanation was blunt. Spokesperson Andy Stone said the company is defending itself in these cases and “will not allow trial lawyers to profit” from Meta’s platforms while claiming those platforms are harmful. (reuters.com) The timing was not random. Two weeks earlier, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent in a case brought by a 20-year-old woman who said she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child, and the jury ordered the companies to pay a combined $6 million. (reuters.com) (axios.com) A day before that California verdict, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in a separate case over youth safety and child exploitation on its platforms. Those two losses landed back to back at the end of March. (reuters.com) That is the backdrop for the ad crackdown. Once one plaintiff wins a test case, law firms rush to find more people with similar claims, because mass litigation works a lot like assembling a very large mailing list, except the list is potential plaintiffs. (axios.com) (reuters.com) The pipeline is already huge. Reuters reported more than 3,300 addiction lawsuits are pending in California state court against Meta, Google, Snap, and ByteDance, and another 2,400 cases from individuals, states, school districts, and cities have been centralized in federal court in California. (reuters.com) (courtlistener.com) That federal case has been running since October 2022 in the Northern District of California before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Centralizing thousands of suits in one court lets judges handle shared evidence once instead of repeating the same fight in every courtroom. (courtlistener.com) Axios reported Meta removed more than a dozen ads, including campaigns from firms such as Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law, across Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger. The ads were aimed at people who say they were harmed by social media while they were minors. (axios.com) (shacknews.com) The strange part is not that lawyers were advertising. The strange part is that Meta let its own ad system become a customer-acquisition tool for lawsuits accusing Meta’s products of causing depression, withdrawal, self-harm, and other harms in children. (gizmodo.com) (reuters.com) Meta says the underlying allegations are wrong and says it takes extensive steps to protect teens. But April 9 showed how fast a platform can redraw the line on what ads are allowed when the legal risk moves from abstract criticism to jury verdicts with dollar signs attached. (reuters.com)