Law firms representing adolescents harmed by social media platforms can partner with Atraxia Media to acquire qualified clients whose cases align with the surviving legal theories in MDL 3047.
Families seeking legal action for their children's mental health injuries caused by addictive platform design need experienced representation. Our expert team has the necessary marketing experience to successfully match these cases with your personal injury law firm. Atraxia Media can help you develop your case inventory. We can assist you with onboarding, intake review, client communication, and marketing strategies. Ultimately, you will receive social media addiction cases meeting your eligibility requirements, and your law firm will benefit from significantly more visibility.
Current signed contract costs: ***subject to change
The reliable and experienced team of marketing professionals at Atraxia Media uses the most effective approach to find and onboard clients who are a good fit for your law firm based on your criteria. The marketing strategy that helps us find families affected by social media platform design can be divided into the following stages:
Adolescents may be eligible to file a claim for social media addiction if they:
From our first interaction with a potential client until the moment they sign the engagement letter, we handle everything, including ad development, social media buying, and screening. We only need to know the number of social media addiction cases your law firm would like to receive. Atraxia Media's marketing process is more than just securing potential clients - it is a whole process of attracting and signing new clients as per your needs.
Over the past decade and a half, platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube have become central to how teenagers spend their time. With user bases in the billions globally, adolescents make up a significant chunk of their audience. Evidence from internal documents and testimony from insiders reveals these platforms were deliberately engineered to maximize engagement and screen time, with younger users being prime targets since their still-maturing brains are easier to hook.
These platforms use smart algorithms that study how people behave and then feed them personalized content meant to keep them scrolling. Things like infinite scroll get rid of natural breaks that would normally let users stop. Autoplay starts the next video or story automatically without anyone asking for it, so people don't have to actively choose to keep watching. Pull-to-refresh actions replicate gambling mechanics with unpredictable payoffs, keeping users in a loop of compulsive checking since they never know what content will surface.
Apps send notifications all day and night, often strategically timed to pull users back to the platform. These alerts pop up during class, late at night, and at other moments when teens should be sleeping, studying, or doing things offline. The irregular timing and grouping of notifications breed anxiety about being left out socially and encourage obsessive checking habits.
The algorithms running these platforms boost content that sparks intense emotional responses, often pushing material about appearance, social comparison, and perfect body images. Research has shown that for teenage girls, especially, being fed algorithmically curated content featuring unrealistic beauty standards connects to body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, and depression. Meta's own internal research, which whistleblowers leaked, revealed the company understood Instagram was damaging teenage girls' mental health but kept promoting features that made things worse.
Most big platforms have pretty weak age verification, usually just asking for a birthdate that kids can lie about easily. This lets children under 13 make accounts on platforms supposedly for older users, exposing younger kids to features and content meant for teens and adults. Parental controls, if they're there at all, are often buried in settings, don't fully protect kids, or can be circumvented without much trouble by adolescents comfortable with technology.
These platforms gather tons of data on how users behave, tracking every click, pause, and engagement pattern. This information powers increasingly advanced algorithms that discover what content keeps specific users engaged the longest and what triggers them to come back. The business approach relies on maximizing the time people spend and how much they interact to increase ad revenue, creating financial pressure to design maximally captivating and potentially addictive features rather than making user welfare the priority.
Mental health experts and researchers have tracked increasing rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide among teens that line up with social media becoming widespread. Although showing direct causation in individual cases requires medical proof and expert testimony, the correlation in timing and growing research linking platform features to mental health harm underpin the MDL 3047 lawsuits.
SOCIAL MEDIA ADOLESCENT ADDICTION/PERSONAL INJURY PRODUCTS LIABILITY LITIGATION, MDL NO. 3047
Location: Northern District of California
Presiding Judge: Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers
Plaintiffs: Teenagers and their families claiming that social media platforms were built with flawed designs that predictably caused serious mental health problems like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, and thoughts of suicide.
Defendants:
Products: Social media applications and services, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube, specifically the design features, including algorithmic content recommendation, infinite scroll, autoplay, notification systems, and engagement optimization mechanisms.
Plaintiff Allegations: Those filing suit claim defendants designed their platforms with features built to exploit how teenagers' minds work and create habits of compulsive use. These design decisions include algorithms that use intermittent rewards like slot machines, no natural stopping points through endless scroll and autoplay, weak age verification that lets underage users easily sign up, and problematic notification systems that send disruptive alerts during important developmental times. The claims state that defendants were aware or should have been aware through their internal research that these design elements caused severe psychological harm to teen users, but prioritized making money and keeping people engaged over protecting them. Legal theories being pursued include strict liability for defective design, negligence in product engineering, failing to warn about documented risks, and violating duties to implement reasonable protections. The litigation emphasizes platform design and engineering choices rather than user content to circumvent Section 230 immunity protections.
History:
2026:
January: The discovery process continued as plaintiffs worked to obtain usage information, notification logs, and records of algorithmic engagement for each person to demonstrate compulsive use patterns caused by platform design. Plaintiffs were trying to prove their injuries stemmed from particular platform features rather than general internet activity or exposure to random content.
The court started narrowing down which claims and design theories would move forward to bellwether trials, telling plaintiffs to identify their best causation evidence and most solid legal arguments. This helped figure out which design defects had the strongest proof behind them and which mental health injuries showed the clearest links to platform features.
2025:
February: Over 2,200 individual cases were now part of the MDL, turning it into one of the largest product liability dockets for digital products. New cases continued to be filed and transferred as more families learned about the lawsuit and which legal theories had survived the dismissal stage.
May: The court issued case management orders establishing when fact discovery needed to be done, when expert witnesses had to be disclosed, and how bellwether trials would be chosen. The judge indicated trials of representative cases would probably begin in 2026, selecting ones that would test various design defect theories and different mental health injuries.
November: Additional case management conferences addressed expert testimony on causation, the psychological mechanisms of social media addiction, and the specific design features alleged to cause compulsive use. Both sides brought in experts from adolescent psychology, neuroscience, product design, and psychiatric medicine who would testify about how platform features connect to mental health problems.
2024:
March: Discovery moved forward with plaintiffs asking for internal documents about how platforms were designed, research into teenage psychology, testing of features meant to boost engagement, and emails between executives discussing mental health harms they knew about. The companies pushed back on these broad requests, creating fights over how many documents they had to hand over.
June: Case management conferences took place to figure out what discovery should happen first and which cases might serve as early test trials. Plaintiffs presented evidence about specific features and their psychological impact, while the companies continued insisting that Section 230 protected them from many claims despite what the court had already decided.
November: Judge Rogers issued additional orders denying motions to dismiss many personal injury negligence claims, allowing school district public nuisance theories to proceed in most states, and permitting state attorney general deceptive practices claims to continue. The court pointed out the difference between how platforms were designed and how they handle content, finding that claims about engineering defects could advance while immunity might block some content-focused arguments.
The court permitted failure to warn and misrepresentation arguments to continue when plaintiffs alleged the companies were aware of psychological risks but didn't disclose them to users and parents or deliberately misrepresented platform safety.
2023:
February: The JPML decided to consolidate the social media addiction cases into MDL No. 3047 in the Northern District of California under Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. The panel concluded that centralization made sense for the parties and witnesses and would lead to fairer, more efficient litigation, given the shared questions about platform design and psychological damage.
May: School districts started filing lawsuits of their own against social media platforms, claiming that addictive features were hurting students and costing schools money as they dealt with mental health problems, discipline issues from constant phone use, and declining grades. These cases from public schools got folded into MDL 3047 as well.
August: Multiple state attorneys general filed enforcement actions against social media companies for deceptive trade practices related to how platforms marketed their safety features while knowing about mental health harms. These actions provided additional documentary evidence of corporate knowledge that would inform discovery in the private litigation.
November: Judge Rogers made initial decisions on the motions to dismiss, looking at Section 230 immunity feature by feature instead of granting complete protection. The court said product design and safety claims could move forward because they focused on the platforms' engineering choices rather than content from users. This ruling determined that algorithmic recommendations, infinite scroll, autoplay, when notifications appeared, and age verification failures were the defendants' design choices that Section 230 didn't cover.
2022:
October: The first federal cases against major social media platforms were brought by families whose kids experienced severe mental health emergencies allegedly linked to addictive design. Early legal complaints detailed how adolescents developed depression, anxiety, and eating disorders following extended time with content curated by algorithms and features designed to maximize user engagement.
Whistleblower testimony, along with leaked documents, revealed that Meta's research had shown Instagram negatively affected teenage girls, particularly around mental health, body image, and self-worth. The company supposedly continued creating and marketing features known to cause these issues anyway.
December: The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation started looking at requests to combine all the social media addiction lawsuits piling up. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said that shared questions about how platforms were designed, what companies knew internally, and how addiction actually works made it sensible to put everything in front of one judge.
Atraxia Media brings 25 years of mass tort marketing experience to help your firm with advertising, screening, and qualifying potential clients. We take all these tools and integrate them into your firm's strategy so every marketing dollar you spend delivers real value. Our team follows your criteria and supports it with a marketing strategy that actually works. The opportunity to strategically enter MDL 3047 is getting smaller as discovery moves forward and bellwether trials get closer, so firms need to move fast to build their case inventory with solid claims based on the design defect theories that have survived.