Meta Snap Social Media Addiction Trial Opens Oct. 28 as Both Seek Illinois and Mississippi Injury Rules

The Meta Snap social media addiction trial, the second bellwether in California's coordinated Social Media Cases (JCCP 5255), is set to open in Los Angeles County Superior Court on October 28, 2026, with two teenagers, S.J. of Illinois and K.D.B. of Mississippi, trying their claims together before Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl and a single jury. Days before trial, Meta Platforms and Snap Inc. asked the court to measure the plaintiffs' psychological injuries and causation under Illinois and Mississippi law rather than the California law that produced a $6 million verdict against Meta and YouTube in March, a request that could change both what the plaintiffs must prove and what a jury award is worth.

The trial is the first full test of the litigation since that K.G.M. verdict, and it arrives after a run of pretrial exits. TikTok settled with both plaintiffs in August and YouTube followed on September 25, leaving Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, and Snap, the maker of Snapchat, as the only defendants. For Snap it is the first JCCP case that has not settled before a jury was sworn. The outcome will feed directly into settlement values for the roughly 3,300 cases coordinated before Judge Kuhl and the 3,800-plus actions in the parallel federal Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) in Oakland.

When does the second social media addiction trial start?

The consolidated S.J. and K.D.B. trial is scheduled to begin on October 28, 2026, in Los Angeles County Superior Court, and the parties have told the court they expect it to end before the December holidays. It is labeled the second bellwether because the case originally slotted second, brought by a Florida teenager identified as R.K.C. and set for July 27, never reached a jury: YouTube, TikTok and Snap settled with him in June and July, and he then dismissed his remaining claims against Meta days before trial rather than try the case against Meta alone.

On August 28, 2026, Judge Kuhl granted the plaintiffs' motion to try S.J. and K.D.B. together. Meta had opposed the joint trial, arguing that putting two plaintiffs with different histories in front of one panel would be "hopelessly confusing" to jurors. A third plaintiff slated for the October window, P.M.Y., a 15-year-old from New Jersey, dismissed her remaining claims after settling with TikTok. On September 10, Judge Kuhl set two more California bellwether trials for March and August 2027, so the October trial is one step in a sequence, not a final referendum.

Who are the plaintiffs and defendants in the Meta Snap social media addiction trial?

The plaintiffs are S.J., a 15-year-old from Illinois, and K.D.B., an 18-year-old from Mississippi, both identified by initials because their claims concern conduct while they were minors. Each alleges that design features of the platforms, such as infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendations and notification systems, were built to maximize engagement by young users and caused addiction-like use and resulting mental health harms.

The defendants at trial are Meta Platforms Inc. (Instagram and Facebook) and Snap Inc. (Snapchat). The platform companies were selected as bellwether defendants from a pool of cases that, by August 2026, numbered about 3,300 lawsuits coordinated before Judge Kuhl. The claims sound primarily in negligence, the theory that survived the defendants' demurrers in 2023 and carried the first trial.

Why do Meta and Snap want Illinois and Mississippi law to apply?

Meta and Snap argue that because neither plaintiff lives in California, the law of the plaintiff's home state should govern the elements of injury and causation, and that Illinois and Mississippi impose requirements that differ from the California standards applied in the K.G.M. trial, according to an October 23 Daily Journal report on the filing. The first bellwether plaintiff was a Californian, so the choice-of-law question did not arise there. The reported filing frames the issue around proof of psychological injury and causation; whether Judge Kuhl had ruled on it had not been reported by October 27.

California courts resolve these disputes with the governmental interest test. A California court applies California law by default unless a party timely invokes another state's law (Hurtado v. Superior Court, 1974). It then asks whether the laws actually differ, whether each state has a genuine interest in applying its own rule to these facts, and, if both do, which state's interest would be more impaired if its law were not applied, the comparative impairment step described in Kearney v. Salomon Smith Barney (2006) and McCann v. Foster Wheeler (2010). Defendants headquartered in California face an uphill argument when California has an interest in regulating conduct designed and directed from within the state, but the plaintiffs' home states have a recognized interest in how injuries to their residents are proved and compensated.

What turns on the choice of law

The motion as reported concerns injury and causation. The damages rules of the three states show why the question matters even beyond those elements. The table compares the governing frameworks; it describes statutes and leading cases, not the content of the defendants' filing.

Issue	California (K.G.M. trial)	Illinois (S.J.)	Mississippi (K.D.B.)
Choice-of-law method	Governmental interest test (Kearney; McCann)	Not applied; forum law governs method	Not applied; forum law governs method
Cap on noneconomic damages	None outside medical malpractice	None; general cap struck in Best v. Taylor Machine Works (1997)	$1 million in most civil actions, Miss. Code § 11-1-60(2)(b)
Punitive damages standard	Clear and convincing evidence of malice, oppression or fraud, Cal. Civ. Code § 3294	Willful and wanton conduct; no general statutory cap	Clear and convincing evidence of actual malice, gross negligence showing willful, wanton or reckless disregard, or actual fraud, § 11-1-65
Punitive damages cap	None	None	Tiered by defendant net worth, up to $20 million for a defendant worth more than $1 billion, § 11-1-65(3)
Effect in a joint trial	Single rule set	Instructions may diverge by plaintiff	Caps applied by the court after verdict

Two practical consequences follow. First, if Mississippi law governs K.D.B.'s claims, any noneconomic award above $1 million would be reduced by the court after the verdict. Jurors are not told about the cap, which matters because the K.G.M. compensatory award was $3 million. Second, a consolidated trial in which different substantive rules govern each plaintiff gives Meta a ready-made argument on appeal that the jury could not keep the instructions apart, the same concern it raised against consolidation in August.

Did YouTube and TikTok settle the social media addiction cases?

Yes. TikTok settled with S.J., K.D.B. and P.M.Y. in August 2026, and YouTube settled with S.J. and K.D.B. on September 25, 2026, both on confidential terms. Joseph VanZandt, a lawyer for the claimants, said when the TikTok deals were announced that they were confidential and still required final written agreements. Neither company has admitted liability.

The pattern holds across every California bellwether so far. Most defendants have settled before a jury was sworn, and only Meta has gone to verdict.

Bellwether	Plaintiff	Trial date	Settled before trial	Outcome
1	K.G.M. (California, now 20)	Opened early 2026	TikTok, Snap	Verdict March 25, 2026: Meta and YouTube negligent; $6M total; on appeal
2 (original)	R.K.C. (Florida, 15)	July 27, 2026	YouTube (June 23), TikTok (early July), Snap (tentative, July 20)	Claims against Meta dismissed by plaintiff days before trial
2 (current)	S.J. (Illinois, 15) and K.D.B. (Mississippi, 18)	October 28, 2026	TikTok (August), YouTube (September 25)	Trial against Meta and Snap
—	P.M.Y. (New Jersey, 15)	October 2026 window	TikTok (August)	Remaining claims dismissed
3 and 4	To be designated	March and August 2027	—	Set by order of September 10, 2026

Snap's position is the notable change. Its Form 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026 states that it reached a confidential settlement resolving the first and second JCCP bellwether trials as to Snap. Going to trial this time means Snap will, for the first time in the California proceeding, face a jury on whether features such as its streaks and disappearing messages were negligently designed.

Will Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Spiegel testify?

Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri are expected to testify, because Judge Kuhl denied Meta's motion to quash their trial subpoenas in a ruling reported on September 29, 2026. Snap chief executive Evan Spiegel is also expected to take the stand. Reported tentative scheduling puts Zuckerberg's testimony around November 10 and Mosseri's around November 19, though trial calendars routinely shift.

The ruling tracks Judge Kuhl's October 2025 order requiring all three executives to testify in the first trial. There she reasoned that a chief executive's testimony is uniquely relevant because knowledge of harms and a failure to act on that knowledge can bear on negligence, rejecting the companies' argument that earlier deposition and congressional testimony was enough. Zuckerberg and Mosseri both testified in the K.G.M. trial in February. Spiegel was dropped from that witness list when Snap settled, so the October trial could produce his first live trial testimony in the social media addiction litigation.

What happened in the first social media addiction trial against Meta and YouTube?

On March 25, 2026, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in the case of K.G.M., a 20-year-old California woman, and awarded $3 million in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive damages, for a total of $6 million. The jury allocated 70% of the fault to Meta and 30% to YouTube and applied the same split to punitive damages. That made Meta responsible for about $4.2 million and YouTube for about $1.8 million. Plaintiffs' counsel reported a 10-2 vote, which satisfies California's three-quarters rule for civil verdicts.

On June 9, 2026, Judge Kuhl denied Meta's and Google's motions for judgment notwithstanding the verdict and for a new trial in full. She explained that the claims addressed the companies' design choices and that the jury had been repeatedly instructed not to consider third-party content. Both companies have appealed. Meta has said it expects the verdict to be overturned.

For the October trial, K.G.M. sets the benchmark in both directions. Plaintiffs will point to a jury that found negligence and malice-level conduct sufficient for Punitive Damages. Defendants will point to a modest compensatory figure relative to the scale of the litigation, and to a damages record that, if Mississippi's caps apply, would have been reduced.

Does Section 230 protect Meta and Snap from social media addiction claims?

Not at the trial-court level so far. Judge Kuhl has held repeatedly that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and the First Amendment do not bar negligence claims that target platform design rather than the content users see. In her October 13, 2023 ruling on the defendants' demurrers, she dismissed most of the plaintiffs' causes of action but allowed the negligence claim to proceed. She reasoned that the alleged harms flowed from design features of the platforms, not from specific third-party posts. Commentary on that ruling reported that she also held the platforms are not "products" for purposes of strict product liability, which is why the California cases proceed in negligence rather than on Design Defect or Failure to Warn theories.

She reaffirmed the design-versus-content line when she denied summary judgment in November 2025 and again in the June 2026 post-trial ruling. Meta and Google's appeal of K.G.M. squarely presents the Section 230 and First Amendment arguments to the California Court of Appeal. A reversal there would affect every coordinated case, which is one reason the remaining defendants may prefer to try cases rather than settle them while the appeal is pending.

How many social media addiction lawsuits are pending?

About 3,300 individual cases were coordinated before Judge Kuhl in JCCP 5255 as of August 2026, and the federal MDL 3047 in the Northern District of California reported 3,824 pending actions as of October 2026. The federal docket, overseen by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, includes personal-injury claims, school district claims and the multistate attorney general action.

The two tracks have moved differently. In the federal case, the first school district bellwether, brought by Kentucky's Breathitt County School District, settled with Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube in May 2026, reportedly for about $27 million in total. The state attorneys general trial against Meta opened in Oakland in August and ended in a proposed settlement reported at roughly $16.8 billion to $17 billion. That deal includes conduct requirements such as daily usage limits for teen accounts and needs Judge Gonzalez Rogers's approval. It resolves state claims; it does not compensate individual children or families, so the personal-injury cases in both forums continue.

Timeline of the California proceeding

Date	Event
Oct. 13, 2023	Judge Kuhl dismisses most claims on demurrer, allows negligence claim to proceed
Oct. 2025	Court orders Zuckerberg, Mosseri and Spiegel to testify in the first trial
Nov. 2025	Summary judgment denied for Meta, Google, ByteDance and Snap
Mar. 25, 2026	K.G.M. verdict: $6M against Meta and YouTube
June 9, 2026	Post-trial motions denied; appeals follow
July 2026	R.K.C. trial collapses after settlements and dismissal
Aug. 2026	TikTok settles S.J., K.D.B. and P.M.Y.; consolidation granted Aug. 28
Sept. 25, 2026	YouTube settles S.J. and K.D.B.
Sept. 29, 2026	Meta's motion to quash Zuckerberg and Mosseri subpoenas reported denied
Oct. 23, 2026	Meta and Snap reported seeking Illinois and Mississippi standards
Oct. 28, 2026	Consolidated trial set to begin

What does the second trial mean for other social media addiction claimants?

A second plaintiffs' verdict would show that K.G.M. was not a one-off and would push up settlement values across both the JCCP and the federal MDL. A defense verdict would give Meta and Snap their first trial win and strengthen their hand in global negotiations. Because the October plaintiffs live in Illinois and Mississippi, the trial will also show for the first time how non-California claimants, who make up much of the inventory, fare in Los Angeles. That makes the choice-of-law ruling arguably as important to the docket as the verdict itself.

What it means for claimants' counsel

Firms carrying out-of-state social media addiction clients in the JCCP should expect the same choice-of-law motion in every future bellwether. Case evaluation should now model the client's home-state damages law, including caps like Mississippi's, alongside California's. Plaintiff Fact Sheet records on diagnosis, treatment and timing of use will matter more if a state with stricter causation proof governs. The TikTok and YouTube deals also suggest that defendants pay to exit individual bellwethers. Retainer and settlement-allocation terms should anticipate partial, defendant-by-defendant resolutions.

What it means for defendants

For Meta, a joint trial with divergent state law creates both risk and appellate leverage. For Snap, the trial tests whether a defendant that settled twice can win on the merits, and its result will shape how Snap prices the rest of its docket. Both companies can still settle before or during trial, as TikTok and YouTube did. Any outcome will be read alongside the pending K.G.M. appeal, which could reset the legal ground under all of the coordinated cases.

What it means for insurers and funders

Carriers litigating coverage for social media harm claims are watching for punitive damages findings, since many policies and state public-policy rules treat punitive awards differently from compensatory damages. Third-Party Litigation Funding providers backing portfolios of these claims face valuation swings tied to a single verdict and to whether damages caps in claimants' home states will be applied in a California forum.

FAQ

When does the second social media addiction trial start?

It is set to begin October 28, 2026, in Los Angeles County Superior Court before Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl, and the parties expect it to finish before the December holidays.

Who is being sued in the Meta Snap social media addiction trial?

Meta Platforms (Instagram and Facebook) and Snap Inc. (Snapchat). TikTok and YouTube settled with both plaintiffs before trial.

Why do Meta and Snap want Illinois and Mississippi law?

Both plaintiffs live outside California. The companies argue that their home states' standards for proving psychological injury and causation differ from the California rules used in the first trial. Mississippi law would also cap noneconomic damages at $1 million in most cases.

How much did the jury award in the first social media addiction trial?

$6 million: $3 million compensatory and $3 million punitive, split 70% to Meta (about $4.2 million) and 30% to YouTube (about $1.8 million). The verdict is on appeal.

Does the Meta state attorneys general settlement pay individual victims?

No. The proposed settlement of roughly $16.8 billion to $17 billion resolves the states' claims and imposes conduct requirements. Individual personal-injury lawsuits in the JCCP and MDL 3047 continue separately.

Is there a social media addiction settlement for individuals?

Not a global one. TikTok, YouTube and Snap have settled individual bellwether cases on confidential terms, but no claims program for individual social media addiction claimants has been announced as of October 27, 2026.