MDL 3047 Social Media Lawsuits: Eligibility, Deadlines, and Damages

MDL 3047 social media lawsuits are a federal consolidation of more than 2,400 cases alleging that Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube were deliberately designed to addict children and adolescents, causing anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self-harm, and in some cases death. The cases are pending before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California, and parents of a harmed minor can file an individual claim within the litigation if they act within their state’s filing deadline.1United States District Court Northern District of California. In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation

Who Can File a Claim

The MDL is built around personal injury claims brought on behalf of minors who used one or more of the defendant platforms and developed a documented psychological or physical injury connected to that use. The defendants are Meta Platforms (Facebook and Instagram), ByteDance and TikTok, Snap (Snapchat), and Google and Alphabet (YouTube).1United States District Court Northern District of California. In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation

The injuries most commonly cited in the litigation are clinical anxiety, major depression, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. Families who lost a child in circumstances linked to platform use can pursue wrongful death claims. What ties an eligible claim together is a minor who used the platforms during the period of alleged harm, a diagnosis from a licensed professional, and treatment records that document the connection.

The MDL is the track for individual and family claims. Separate but parallel tracks exist for roughly 800 school district lawsuits and cases filed by attorneys general from more than 40 states; those are not places where an individual family files.

What the Lawsuits Allege

The core theory is that these platforms are defective products, not neutral communication tools. Plaintiffs argue the companies engineered features borrowed from gambling psychology — infinite scrolling, autoplay, push notifications, algorithmic feeds — to maximize the time young users spend on-screen, while suppressing or ignoring internal research showing those features cause harm.2United States District Court Northern District of California. In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction – Master Complaint

The Master Complaint describes YouTube’s recommendation algorithm as an “addiction engine” built on deep-learning neural networks that push content to keep users watching. It alleges Meta designed account deletion to require navigating through seven separate pages and popups, with a 30-day waiting period during which any login resets the process. It alleges TikTok allowed users to browse without an account, bypassing age restrictions while the algorithm still collected behavioral data.2United States District Court Northern District of California. In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction – Master Complaint

A parallel theory holds that even if the platforms weren’t defective by design, the companies failed to warn parents and children about known risks and actively concealed internal safety research. Negligence claims add that the companies owed a duty of care to their youngest users and breached it by prioritizing engagement metrics over safety, with age verification that was trivially easy to circumvent and parental controls that were buried or ineffective.

Filing Deadlines for Your Claim

Personal injury claims are governed by state statutes of limitations. Most states set the deadline at two to three years from the date of injury or the date the plaintiff discovered, or reasonably should have discovered, the connection between social media use and the harm. A three-year window is common for product liability and negligence claims of this type.

The clock works differently for minors. In most states, the statute of limitations is tolled — paused — until the child turns 18, at which point the filing deadline begins to run. A child harmed at age 14 would generally have until several years after turning 18 to file, depending on the state. That tolling is why families are still able to bring claims for harm that began years ago. It doesn’t last forever, though, and some states have shorter tolling periods or other restrictions, so parents shouldn’t assume they have unlimited time.

No global settlement has been announced in the federal MDL. Cases that don’t resolve through bellwether trials or individual settlements will continue through pretrial and may eventually be remanded to their home courts for trial.

How to File a Claim in MDL 3047

Filing an individual case within MDL 3047 requires submitting a Short Form Complaint. This is an abbreviated document that identifies the plaintiff, the defendants being sued, the specific injuries, and the time period of platform use. Rather than drafting a full complaint from scratch, the Short Form Complaint adopts the relevant factual allegations from the Master Complaint already on file, and together they become the plaintiff’s operative complaint in the case.3United States District Court Northern District of California. In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation

Documentation to Gather

Before filing, plan to assemble evidence in four categories:

  • Proof of platform use. Account creation dates, screen time data, and data downloads from the platforms. Most platforms offer downloadable archives of user activity that show usage patterns during the relevant period.
  • Medical records. Documented diagnoses from licensed professionals are essential. Records should include both the diagnosis and the treatment history for conditions like anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self-harm, or suicidal ideation.
  • The minor’s date of birth. This establishes the plaintiff’s age during the period of alleged harm, which is central to every claim in the MDL.
  • Treatment and cost records. Bills for therapy, psychiatric care, medication, hospitalization, and any other intervention related to the diagnosed conditions. Retrieving these from healthcare providers involves per-page copying fees that vary by state and can add up for lengthy treatment histories.

The Filing Process and Fees

Attorneys file the Short Form Complaint through the federal judiciary’s Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system, the standard electronic filing platform for all federal courts.4United States Courts. Electronic Filing (CM/ECF) The filing fee for a new federal civil action is $405. After the court processes the filing, it assigns a case number and integrates the claim into the MDL docket, placing the case under Judge Gonzalez Rogers’s pretrial management.

Individuals without an attorney can file by mail using instructions from the clerk of the Northern District of California, but the same form requirements and deadlines apply. Most plaintiffs in this litigation are represented on a contingency fee basis, meaning the attorney is paid a percentage of any eventual recovery rather than charging hourly fees upfront. Contingency percentages in mass tort cases typically range from 25% to 40%, depending on the complexity and stage at which the case resolves.

Damages You Can Recover

Individual plaintiffs can pursue both economic and non-economic damages. Economic damages cover the tangible costs: therapy and counseling bills, psychiatric treatment, prescription medications, emergency medical care, and lost wages for parents who had to leave work to manage a child’s mental health crisis. For long-term conditions like severe depression or eating disorders, future treatment costs are also recoverable.

Non-economic damages compensate for harm that doesn’t come with a receipt: pain and suffering, emotional distress, diminished quality of life, and the developmental impact of addiction during formative years. In cases where social media use contributed to a child’s death, families can seek wrongful death damages.

Punitive damages are available when plaintiffs prove the companies acted with malice or conscious disregard for user safety. In the first bellwether verdict, a Los Angeles jury found exactly that, awarding $3 million in punitive damages on top of $3 million in compensatory damages. Discovery in the MDL has produced millions of pages of internal documents, and Meta alone produced over 2.4 million documents during fact discovery, with the court ruling that the crime-fraud exception pierced attorney-client privilege on some of the most sensitive internal communications.

Where the Litigation Stands Now

The first case to reach a jury was KGM v. Meta and YouTube, tried in Los Angeles Superior Court under the California coordinated proceeding (JCCP 5255) rather than the federal MDL. The trial began in February 2026 and concluded in late March with a plaintiff verdict. The jury found Meta (for Instagram) and Google (for YouTube) liable for negligently designing platform features that harmed the minor plaintiff, and found that both companies had acted with malice, oppression, or fraud. The final award totaled $6 million: Meta was ordered to pay $4.2 million in combined compensatory and punitive damages, and Google $1.8 million. Two other defendants settled before the verdict. Snap Inc. reached a confidential settlement roughly a week before trial was set to begin, and TikTok settled the day jury selection was scheduled to start. Neither settlement is an admission of liability, and both companies remain defendants in other cases.

Three more trial tracks are scheduled:

  • School district bellwether beginning June 15, 2026. Breathitt County School District in Kentucky goes first, with five additional districts from Maryland, Georgia, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Arizona selected for the initial wave.
  • State attorney general bellwether beginning August 6, 2026, bringing state consumer protection claims and potential injunctive relief into the mix.
  • Federal individual bellwether with jury selection on February 3, 2027, and trial beginning February 8, 2027, before Judge Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland.1United States District Court Northern District of California. In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation

Verdicts in any of these tracks will shape settlement dynamics across the entire MDL.

The Section 230 Question

The defendants’ central legal shield has been Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides that no internet platform “shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 47 U.S. Code 230 – Protection for Private Blocking and Screening of Offensive Material Platforms have historically not been held liable for content their users post, and the defendants argue this immunity extends to how they organize, recommend, and display that content.

Courts have been drawing a line in 2026. In the federal MDL, Judge Gonzalez Rogers initially dismissed certain design-based claims on Section 230 grounds, and the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments on plaintiffs’ appeal on January 6, 2026. A California Superior Court denied summary judgment before the KGM bellwether, ruling that neither Section 230 nor the First Amendment barred the plaintiffs’ design claims. In April 2026, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reached a similar conclusion, holding that claims about addictive design features and defective age-gating were about Meta’s own conduct, not third-party content. Section 230 may still shield platforms over what users post, but courts are increasingly treating platform design as a product question the statute doesn’t reach.