4 More School District Cases vs. Social Media Firms Added to Northern Calif. MDL

Four school district tagalong class actions were transferred to In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation Tuesday in conditional transfer order 31 (CTO-31), said a clerk’s notice (docket 3047) for the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. Twenty actions were transferred to U.S. District Court for Northern California in Oakland in October 2022 for coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings and assigned to U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Since then, 141 additional actions involving questions of fact that are common to the actions previously transferred have been transferred to the court, said the order. Two of the four cases in CTO-31 vs. Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snap and TikTok are from U.S. District Court for Middle Florida, one is from Maryland federal court and one from U.S. District Court for Eastern North Carolina. The lawsuits allege social media platforms are responsible for a rise in mental health disorders among U.S. youth.