Meta pulled ads recruiting plaintiffs

Meta just cut off one of the easiest ways lawyers were using its own apps to find people to sue it. On April 9, Meta said it was removing Facebook and Instagram ads from attorneys seeking clients who say they were harmed by social media before age 18. (reuters.com) The ads were not random brand campaigns. They were plaintiff-recruitment ads, the legal equivalent of putting up a sign that says “if this happened to you, call us,” except the sign was being sold inside Meta’s own ad system. (axios.com) Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the company is “actively defending” the cases and would not let trial lawyers “profit from our platforms” while arguing those platforms are harmful. That means the same company fighting the lawsuits in court also controls the ad inventory lawyers were using to build those lawsuits. (reuters.com) These cases are already huge. Reuters reported more than 3,300 addiction-related lawsuits are pending in California state court, and another 2,400 cases from individuals, school districts, municipalities, and states have been centralized in federal court in California. (reuters.com) That federal bundle has a formal name: multidistrict litigation, which is court shorthand for moving many similar lawsuits in front of one judge so pretrial fights happen in one place instead of 50. The social media addiction multidistrict litigation has been in the Northern District of California since October 6, 2022, under Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. (courtlistener.com) The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation said the cases share the same core allegation: the platforms were designed to maximize screen time in ways that can encourage addictive behavior in adolescents. That is why claims against Meta, Google, ByteDance, and Snap have been grouped together instead of fought one by one around the country. (jpml.uscourts.gov) Meta made this move after two courtroom losses landed almost back to back. Reuters reported that a Los Angeles jury at the end of March found Meta and Google liable in a case involving a young woman’s depression and suicidal thoughts, and ordered a combined $6 million in damages. (reuters.com) A day earlier, jurors in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million after finding it misled users about product safety for young users and enabled child sexual exploitation on its platforms. When verdicts like that arrive, ads looking for new plaintiffs stop looking like routine legal marketing and start looking like a pipeline. (reuters.com) The recruitment matters because mass-tort law firms usually work on contingency, which means they get paid only if a case wins or settles. In practice, that gives firms a strong reason to sign up as many eligible clients as possible, because a giant case is expensive to run and only works at scale. (reuters.com) So this was not a change to a button color or an ad policy footnote. It was a platform rule change that reached straight into the machinery of a live court fight involving thousands of claims and one of the largest advertising systems in the world. (reuters.com)