Social media giants Meta, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube have agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to a Kentucky school district that blamed them for a mental health crisis among its students.
The settlements avoid a California trial next month that had been expected to set the tone for hundreds of similar cases.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, was the last of the four companies to settle, according to court documents filed in federal court in Oakland, near San Francisco.
The deals come as the legal environment for social media platforms grows increasingly hostile.
In March, a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay $6 million to a young woman, ruling that their platforms were harmfully addictive, a first-of-its-kind verdict.
The Oakland case was brought by the Breathitt County school district, a rural district in eastern Kentucky whose lawsuit had been chosen as a test case for more than 1,200 similar suits filed by school districts across the country.
None of the settlements include any admission of wrongdoing.
