Software company Meta, renamed from Facebook in late 2021, is navigating troubled waters in the courtroom. In March, the social media giant suffered a $375 million jury verdict in a case brought by the State of New Mexico; the state alleged that the company misled users about the addictive nature of their products and their effects on children. In the same month, a California jury found in favor of a plaintiff who brought a similar case against Meta and YouTube.
Earlier this month, five publishers brought a class action lawsuit against and its founder Mark Zuckerberg alleging that the company violated copyright laws in order to train Meta’s AI platform, Llama, on intellectual property belonging to the plaintiffs. The true consequences of both of these cases have yet to be seen but they could upend several core business avenues for the company.
Reports have revealed the Meta recently settled a lawsuit with a major school district, as a result of the jury verdicts. This could lead to more settlements in the future, and a change in litigation pattern going forward.
Since rebranding to Meta, the company has faced nearly nine thousand lawsuits in state and federal courts, according to Docket Alarm data.
The biggest battleground – in terms of case volume – is a multidistrict litigation captioned IN RE: SOCIAL MEDIA ADOLESCENT ADDICTION/PERSONAL INJURY PRODUCTS LIABILITY LITIGATION and hosted in Silicon Valley’s home turf, the Northern District of California. That multidistrict docket currently has over 3,000 docket entries, and many of the cases against Meta are associated with that case.
A disproportionate amount of the cases brought against Meta involve schools – of the nearly nine thousand cases found in Docket Alarm, over three thousand feature the word “school” in the party names. These cases are also participating in the multidistrct litigation.
Meta is represented by a wide variety of law firms, including Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, and Covington & Burling. There’s a wide variety of plaintiff’s firms as well – including the Frantz Law Group, Social Media Victims Law Center, and Wagstaff & Cartmell.