A guide, with live counts from the courts' own feeds
Your social media addiction case was filed in the MDL: what happens now
Suits claiming that Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube were designed to hook children, and that the harm followed, are coordinated as MDL No. 3047, In re Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, in the Northern District of California before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. New cases are filed directly into that court in a steady stream: by young people or their parents, and by school districts and other public bodies suing over what the harm costs them. Meta Platforms is the first-named defendant in nearly every caption, which is what the count on this page is made of. This page explains what a case in that MDL is, why yours will be quiet for long stretches, and which docket entries are the ones that concern you.
73 new suits naming Meta Platforms as first defendant filed in federal court between September 21, 2026 and September 26, 2026, across 2 districts, counted from the district courts' own filing feeds.
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How the case runs
What an MDL is, and why your case is in California
When civil actions in different districts share questions of fact, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation may transfer them to one district for coordinated pretrial proceedings, and each is to be sent back for trial at or before the end of those proceedings (28 U.S.C. § 1407(a)). The Panel sent these cases to the Northern District of California in October 2022. The court’s case management orders let a new plaintiff file directly there with a short-form complaint that adopts the master complaint, rather than filing at home and waiting to be transferred, which is why the count on this page comes almost entirely from one district. A parallel set of cases proceeds in California state court as a coordinated proceeding in Los Angeles.
What the claims are, and what Section 230 does to them
The personal injury cases plead state-law product liability: that the platforms were defectively designed, that their makers failed to warn of risks they knew about, and negligence. School districts and local governments plead public nuisance and negligence for the cost of responding to the harm. The defendants’ first defence is 47 U.S.C. § 230, which shields a service from liability for content others posted. The court has held that claims aimed at the content itself are barred, while claims aimed at design choices that are not about any particular post, such as the absence of effective age verification and parental controls and the friction placed on deleting an account, may go forward. Which of your claims survive is decided on the master docket, not in your case.
What happens after your case is opened
Your short-form complaint takes the place of a full complaint, and the defendants normally answer the master complaint once rather than each case. The case management orders then require you to complete a plaintiff fact sheet, with records and signed authorisations, by a deadline measured from filing; a case that misses it draws a deficiency notice, then an order to show cause, and can be dismissed for failure to prosecute or to comply with a court order (Rule 41(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure). General discovery on the platforms’ design, research and internal documents runs on the master docket for all cases at once (Rule 26), and the court selects bellwether cases from the personal injury and school district tracks to be tried first. A minor’s case is brought by a parent or guardian on the minor’s behalf, under initials rather than a full name (Rule 5.2(a)(3); Rule 17(c)).
How these cases end
Most individual cases in an MDL end in one of four ways. A global or inventory settlement, negotiated by lead counsel and the defendants and paid out under a matrix, in which each plaintiff decides whether to take part; a settled case is then closed by a stipulation of dismissal (Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(ii)). Dismissal by the court for a missed fact-sheet deadline or on summary judgment (Rule 41(b); Rule 56). Remand to the home district for trial once pretrial proceedings are done (28 U.S.C. § 1407(a)). Or, for a handful of cases, a bellwether trial in the MDL court. The deadline to have sued is the statute of limitations of the state whose law governs, usually two or three years for personal injury, and for a person who was a minor when the harm began most states do not start that clock until the eighteenth birthday. Whether your case was filed in time is the first thing the defendants look at.
Know the day your docket moves
A firm with thousands of clients in this MDL communicates by newsletter, and the master docket moves every day with filings that are not about you. Your own case’s docket is quiet for months and then carries exactly the entries that are: a deficiency notice on your fact sheet, an order to show cause, a bellwether selection, a remand, a settlement order, or the stipulation that dismisses your case. CaseMagic Watch reads your member docket every day and emails you when a new entry lands, with the deadline that follows from it, so an order with your child’s initials on it does not wait for the next newsletter.
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Where they were filed
| District | New cases | Free feed |
|---|---|---|
| N.D. Cal. | 72 | Wire |
| E.D. Tex. | 1 | Wire |
A case is counted once, on the date its opening filing was made, when the defendant the court typed into the caption is one this kind of case is brought against. Districts that publish no filing feed are not counted. No names are listed here on purpose.
Each district's wire is a free Atom feed of every new civil case filed there, released 48 hours after filing, for a feed reader or a Slack channel. Every district on the wire.
Questions people ask before they start
Who are the defendants in the social media addiction MDL?
Meta Platforms (Facebook and Instagram), Snap (Snapchat), ByteDance and TikTok, and Google and YouTube. Most captions name Meta first and the others after it, and a case can name fewer than all four.
Can a school district really sue over what students do on their phones?
That is the question the school district track exists to answer. The districts plead public nuisance and negligence for the cost of counselling, discipline and lost instruction they attribute to the platforms’ design. The court has allowed those claims to proceed past the pleadings, and they are being tested in bellwether cases; nothing on this page says how that ends.
Does Section 230 mean the case is hopeless?
No, but it narrows it. Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230) protects a platform from liability for what users posted, so a claim that a video or a message caused the harm is barred. A claim that the platform’s own design, such as the lack of age verification or the way an account is made hard to leave, caused it is not, on the court’s reading so far. The master docket is where that line is drawn.
How is the count on this page made?
It is the number of suits opened in the last 30 days that name Meta Platforms as the first defendant, read from the district courts’ own filing feeds and shown by district. Nearly all are direct filings into the MDL in the Northern District of California. It includes the occasional unrelated suit against Meta filed elsewhere, and it is not a count of anyone’s clients.
CaseMagic is an independent service, not a law firm, and nothing on this page is legal advice. The rules cited are the ones in force as this page was written; check your court's local rules and any order in your own case.
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