Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Snap have quietly paid millions of dollars to settle claims brought by teenagers who say the companies designed their apps to be addictive and damaged their mental health, Bloomberg Businessweek has reported.
The report, published on Thursday, puts figures for the first time on a dozen confidential settlements reached in recent months. Most were worth between $2 million and $2.5 million per young person, according to people familiar with the payments. In the past two weeks, Meta agreed to pay two teenage girls a combined $7 million to settle their claims before a Los Angeles jury could hear them.
The payments went to young people whose cases had been chosen as early test trials, known as bellwethers, in a coordinated proceeding in Los Angeles before Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl. TikTok paid $2.5 million each to three teenagers in August, Bloomberg reported, while YouTube paid $2.25 million each to two of the same young people in September, after paying just over $2 million to another teenager in June. Snap also settled with some of the plaintiffs, for sums Bloomberg was unable to establish.
The lawsuits, which began in 2022, allege that features such as endless scrolling, autoplay and personalised feeds were designed to encourage compulsive use, and that heavy use contributed to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self-harm and suicidal thoughts. The companies deny the claims. Bloomberg reported that none of the settlements whose terms it learned included an admission of wrongdoing.
The figures should be treated with care: the settlement amounts have not been confirmed by any of the companies, and rest solely on Bloomberg’s reporting, which cited people familiar with the confidential payments. A Meta spokeswoman told Bloomberg that “trials, dismissals and settlements are all common” in this kind of litigation, noted that plaintiffs had dropped more than a quarter of the cases selected for early trials, and said it was “impossible to extrapolate figures” from the first few cases. Google and Snap declined to comment, and TikTok did not respond.
The settlements come after the only case to reach a jury so far. In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent and awarded a 20-year-old woman $6 million. That verdict is on appeal. Roughly 9,800 personal injury cases remain pending against the four companies in state and federal courts, according to Bloomberg, and lawyers for the plaintiffs say the number has nearly doubled since the March verdict. Ten plaintiffs have been selected for test trials in 2027, with the next Los Angeles trial set for March.
The individual settlements are separate from the deals the companies have struck with governments. In August, Meta settled with the attorneys general of 47 states and the District of Columbia over alleged harm to minors, a deal reported to be worth about $18 billion, and agreed to limit under-18s to two hours a day on Facebook and Instagram. Those state settlements pay governments, not families, and the personal injury cases continue.
Sources: Bloomberg Businessweek, 12 November 2026 (as summarised by Net Litigation, https://netlitigation.com/social-media-addiction-settlement-amounts/); Clash Report, https://clashreport.com/world/articles/meta-tiktok-paid-teens-millions-over-mental-health-harm-m2wtvlj7u4a
