Ads placed by law firms on Facebook $META and Instagram to solicit new plaintiffs in suits alleging that social media companies deliberately engineered addictive products for young users are being taken down by Meta.
“We will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement.
The decision follows two significant trial losses for the company. In the Los Angeles case, jurors determined that both Meta and Alphabet $GOOGL‘s Google bore responsibility for a young woman’s depression and suicidal ideation — she had alleged early-onset addiction to Instagram and YouTube — and awarded a combined $6 million in damages against the two companies. Just one day before that verdict, a separate jury in New Mexico handed down a $375 million judgment against Meta, concluding that the company had deceived users about how safe its platforms were for children and had allowed child sexual exploitation to occur.
Court records show the litigation has grown to enormous scale: California state court is currently hosting more than 3,300 addiction-related suits targeting Meta, Google, Snap $SNAP, and TikTok parent ByteDance, while a separate pool of roughly 2,400 cases — filed by a mix of private individuals, school districts, municipalities, and state governments — has been consolidated before a California federal court.
Facebook was among the platforms used for recruitment advertising by firms including Morgan & Morgan, which was part of the legal team that secured the Los Angeles verdict. Beyond law firms themselves, intermediary outfits that funnel prospective clients toward attorneys — including White Heart Legal, a Tennessee-based operation — have been running their own social media promotions tied to the lawsuits, according to X $TWTR Ante, which monitors advertising activity in mass tort litigation.
X Ante founder Rustin Silverstein said social media has grown as a venue for plaintiff-recruitment advertising in mass tort cases. Silverstein said 671 television spots tied to social media claims ran across the country in March, a monthly total that had not been reached since July 2024. Following the two trial verdicts, radio placements surged as well, reaching roughly 20,000 for the month — close to triple the prior pace, he added.
Google‘s platforms also carry ads related to the litigation. According to Google‘s own records, Social Media Victims Law Center — a firm at the forefront of the broader litigation wave — has been purchasing ads on Google‘s platforms. Whether Google intends to follow Meta‘s lead and remove such advertising is unclear; the company did not respond to a request for comment.
The financial structure underlying these suits depends heavily on contingency arrangements, under which attorneys receive no payment unless their clients obtain damages or a settlement. That model gives firms a strong incentive to sign up as many claimants as possible, since sheer volume is what makes large-scale litigation economically worthwhile.
The Los Angeles trial featured testimony from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who defended Instagram’s design choices as product trade-offs rather than tactics engineered to keep teens engaged. The companies have denied the addiction allegations broadly and say they take steps to protect young users on their platforms.
