Zuckerberg Avoids Personal Liability in Meta Addiction Suits

A federal judge again rejected a bid to hold Mark Zuckerberg individually liable in two dozen lawsuits accusing Meta Platforms Inc. and other social media companies of addicting children to their products.

US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is overseeing the cases, sided with the Meta chief executive officer on Thursday, finding that a revised complaint still wasn’t legally sufficient to proceed. The decision dismisses Zuckerberg as an individual defendant without affecting claims against Meta as a company.

Lawsuits filed on behalf of young people have alleged that Zuckerberg was repeatedly warned by Meta employees that Instagram and Facebook weren’t safe for children but ignored the findings and chose not to share them publicly.

Holding CEOs of large companies personally responsible for wrongdoing is generally difficult because of a corporate law tradition of shielding executives from liability.

“While possible that discovery may reveal a more active participation and direction by Zuckerberg in Meta’s alleged fraudulent concealment, the allegations before the court are insufficient to meet the standard for corporate-officer liability,” Rogers said in her order.

The cases naming Zuckerberg are a small subset of a collection of more than 1,000 suits in state and federal courts in California by families and public school districts against Meta along with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, and Snap Inc., owner of the Snapchat platform. Rogers and a state judge in Los Angeles have allowed some claims to proceed against the companies while dismissing others.

The case is In Re Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, 22-md-03047, US District Court, Northern District of California (Oakland).

--With assistance from Isaiah Poritz (Bloomberg Law).

To contact the reporter on this story:
Madlin Mekelburg in Austin at mmekelburg@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou at megkolfopoul@bloomberg.net

Peter Blumberg, Steve Stroth

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