The families of four teenagers who died by suicide are suing Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube over what they describe as “years of escalating harms” from using their platforms that eventually resulted in their deaths.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the Superior Court of Delaware, is the latest in a flurry of suits filed against the social media giants that alleges their platforms are addictive and dangerous.
The complaint was filed on behalf of four families from Texas, North Carolina, Minnesota and Tennessee whose children died over a 14-month period starting in July 2024 through September 2025.
The Social Media Victims Law Center is bringing the suit on behalf of the families, and its founding attorney, Matthew Bergman, said it's “particularly salient” that the children in this case died “long after” similar suits had been filed.
“These platforms continue to kill kids, despite the platitudes of their executives,” Bergman said in an interview. “This is a clear and present danger to the health and safety of children, not just in the United States but around the world.”
The four teens who died by suicide each experienced harms including social media addiction, severe sleep deprivation, depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation after years of using the social platforms, the complaint states. Livi Castro died at age 13, Riv Kelleher at 14, Nathaniel Chambers at age 17 and Dawson Holden at 18.
The complaint alleges the social media companies knew they were causing harm to young users. Representatives for Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project, said in a statement that parents, activists and whistleblowers have come forward and met with lawmakers for years and “while Congress has dragged its feet, more children have died."
Federal legislation of social media has moved at a glacial pace. The Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act — which had the support of parents’ groups and children’s advocacy organizations — exactly two years before this lawsuit was filed. The House of Representatives never voted on that version of the legislation, and the House and Senate are currently disagreeing on key provisions they think should be included.
“Livi, Nathaniel, Dawson, and Riv’s stories are proof that Big Tech companies continue to lie about the safety of their products, choosing instead to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into false advertising, deceptive paid partnerships with trusted education programs and political lobbying,” Haworth's statement continued.
Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap are facing numerous state and federal lawsuits over harms to minors. Meta is on trial in Tennessee this week for a lawsuit brought by the state attorney general claiming that the company deliberately designed its platforms, notably Instagram, to make them addictive to young people, and did not warn them of its dangers. And in August, Meta is heading to trial in federal court in Oakland, California to face four of dozens of states that sued the company in 2023. That lawsuit says the company is contributing to the youth mental health crisis by designing addictive features and violated federal law by collecting data on kids under 13 without parental consent.
Not all lawsuits are successful, and many are settled out of court. Last week, a Florida teenager dropped his case against Meta that was set to go to trial in state court in Los Angeles, without receiving any payment from the company. Meta had argued that the teen only used his Instagram and Facebook for just minutes a day, on average, and created most accounts only after hiring a lawyer in his case.
Still, the mounting court cases can get expensive, even for a company like Meta Platforms. Earlier this week Meta said it had $2.4 billion in legal expenses in the second quarter, which contributed to a relatively unusual 14% profit decline.
FILE - A group holds hands outside a landmark trial over whether social media platforms deliberately addict and harm children, Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2026, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Ryan Sun, File)
FILE - This combination of 2017-2022 photos shows the logos of Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat on mobile devices. On Friday, Jan. 6, 2023, Seattle Public Schools filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, suing the tech giants behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, seeking to hold them accountable for the mental health crisis among youth. (AP Photo, File)
The Big Ten and Southeastern Conferences agreed Friday night to support a Senate bill that seeks to regulate college sports, ending a breakneck week of negotiations and pulling the bipartisan measure out of what looked like a certain death spiral.
School presidents from both conferences voted to back the bill after receiving last-minute concessions over language regarding third-party name-image-likeness deals and the so-called “associated entities” that often broker those arrangements between players and schools.
More details need to be worked out, but the headline is that the bill still has a chance to earn the 60 votes it needs to halt debate and head to an up-or-down vote before the Senate heads for summer break next Friday.
The summer recess is increasingly looking like an intractable deadline for the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan effort headed by Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.
After the conferences, which had balked at large sections of the bill, put out a short release announcing they supported the act “as currently drafted,” Cantwell went on social media and said: “Good. Now progress can be made in protecting women and Olympic athletes and moving the legislation closer to the President’s desk.”
President Donald Trump, who has also been seeking fixes for an industry that now pays its players millions, got involved late Thursday, which helped push the parties back to the negotiating table.
Cody Campbell, the Texas Tech regent who has played a big role in shaping this policy, called the SEC and Big Ten support “ a major breakthrough that moves us closer to a Senate vote — and a better future” for college sports.
The most groundbreaking part of the reworked deal is the $27.5 million that schools would be allotted to retain players, in addition to the $21.3 million cap that already exists.
It could represent a major reworking of the House settlement — the groundbreaking agreement that governs paying players. The idea is that the extra money will take the place of payments from “associated entities” that were allowed above and beyond the $21.3 million cap. It was those payments that, many schools complained, obliterated any idea of a cap or controlled cost.
The SEC and Big Ten sought stronger language in the bill to guarantee that any third-party deals are truly outside deals and not coming from the schools’ multimedia-rights partners, which currently arrange the majority of those deals.
Among the questions still unanswered are whether the new cap will comport with the House settlement, which had very specific instructions about the hard cap (22% of a certain part of athletic department revenues, which equals $21.3 million this season).
Also, what would happen to the College Sports Commission, the main NIL enforcement arm that spends the bulk of its time analyzing third-party NIL deals that would be greatly reduced under this arrangement?
Even with Friday night’s victory, the bill has a long road ahead. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., has been a staunch opponent of the bill since the beginning. Before the latest compromise, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said that “as written today,” the act “creates chaos and eliminates opportunity for student-athletes.”
Whether the SEC’s approval is enough to get those senators and others from SEC states on board is one issue. If the bill clears the Senate, it would still then need to pass the narrowly divided House, which flailed on another college bill called the SCORE Act, for more than a year.
There’s also the matter of whether smaller conferences, long in favor of the bill, would remain so now that their bigger competition is being allowed to directly pay players more than double what was previously allowed.
Almost everyone involved in college sports agrees that the status quo isn’t working.
The news broke only hours after the NCAA lost a pair of key court cases involving its new rule that would give most Division I athletes five years to complete five seasons of eligibility.
Using those losses as another chance to urge for passage of the bill, NCAA President Charlie Baker said “It is long past time leaders across college sports call for the immediate passage of the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act.”
Two-time national champion hoops coach Dan Hurley of UConn used social media to outline the stakes in more colorful terms: “Somebody please come and fix College Sports. It’s a complete (expletive) show,” he said, using an emoji where the expletive would go.
AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports
FILE - Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee Chair Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, left, talks with ranking member Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., right, before the start a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh,File)
FILE - Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, left, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, speaks with Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., right, before a hearing Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson,File)
