Meta removes advertisements seeking clients for future social media addiction cases

Meta has removed advertisements from law firms seeking more clients for future social media addiction cases from its platforms.

Meta has removed adverts by law firms seeking clients for future social media addiction cases from its social media platforms.

The tech giant – which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – has taken the action after recently losing two lawsuits relating to the issue, including a high-profile case in California where a young woman successfully sued both the firm and YouTube over her childhood addiction to social media.

Meta said in a statement: “We will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful.”

Emily Jeffcott, an attorney for Morgan and Morgan, one of the firms that had placed adverts, described the act as “another example of Meta trying to control the narrative and avoid accountability”.

She continued: “The resources Meta is devoting to blocking these ads would be better spent improving user safety through functional tools to reduce problematic use and to detect and remove users under age 13.

“Blocking the ads doesn’t make the harms go away. It just makes it harder on victims.”

According to reports in the US, firms such as Morgan and Morgan and Sokolove Law had “dozens” of their adverts on social media addiction lawsuits deactivated.

The advertisements ran on both Facebook and Instagram, while some also appeared on Threads and Meta’s Audience Network – an extension of Meta’s ad platform that allows companies to run advertising campaigns across third-party platforms such as mobile apps.

Meta’s advertising standards state that the company reserves the right to remove ads that “negatively affect our relationship with our users or that promote content, services or activities contrary to our competitive position, interests or advertising philosophy”.

The California case saw the woman awarded $6 million in damages, with Meta expected to pay 70 per cent and Google the remaining 30 per cent, and has illustrated the potential for similar lawsuits to be tabled in US courts.

Meta previously said that it plans to appeal the verdict as it disagrees with the punishment.