In a case involving product liability lawsuits alleging adolescent addiction to social media websites, a judicial panel on Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) has found there aren’t enough differences to separate three of the defendant companies from Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook.
While MDL functions in some ways like mass tort class actions, the MDL panel names one judge to oversee all the pretrial proceedings, after which the separate cases might be sent back to the court where the suit was first filed.
“It's equally important to understand that historically, less than 3 percent of cases that are transferred into an MDL are ever remanded,” Andrew Bradt, professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law, told the Northern California Record. “And that’s because they are either resolved in the MDL Court by dispositive motion or the case is settled, either by a series of small settlement agreements or a large settlement agreement.”
The litigation is related to former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, who last year described in Capitol Hill hearings how the social media giant worked to increase profits at the expense of young users’ mental and physical health.
Following a plaintiff’s motion for an MDL, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube argued for separate cases, apart from Facebook, Reuters reported.
“I can understand why smaller players wouldn't want to be grouped with Meta,” Bradt said. “Meta is the 800-pound gorilla, and the fear of guilt by association is understandable. On the other hand, I didn’t find their argument [about] the individualized nature of the applications persuasive at all. There are obvious efficiencies to be gained through centralized pretrial proceedings here, and I think the panel did the right thing.”
At this early stage, Bradt noted, it’s difficult to gauge how complex the case could get, as more suits that may wind up in the MDL are still being filed.
“But I’ll say this, I think that most of the time, MDL causes these cases to get litigated and resolved more quickly than the alternative,” said Bradt, whose areas of expertise include civil procedure including MDL.
“The federal judges who ordered the transfer [of the cases to MDL] believe that this is going to be a litigation of significant size and complexity, national in scope,” Bradt said.
Federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California was named by the MDL panel to oversee pretrial proceedings.
“So unlike the typical circumstance where you often have the parties doing the best they can to try to get the case in front of their preferred judge, here you have effectively a panel of federal judges hand-selecting the person that they believe is most likely to shepherd this case to a just resolution,” Bradt said.