Snap Settles With S.J. Before Opening Statements in Los Angeles. Here Is What Is Known.

The Snap trial in Los Angeles will no longer go ahead. According to an update published on November 3, 2026, S.J. has settled with Snap, the remaining defendant in the case.

What the case was about

Jury selection had begun on October 28, 2026, in Los Angeles Superior Court with Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl presiding over this case. More than 3,000 of these lawsuits are coordinated as the Social Media Cases, JCCP 5255. This was the second trial brought by individual plaintiffs who allege that social media companies deliberately designed their apps to be addictive to young users.

The plaintiffs are identified in court papers as S.J., a 16-year-old from Illinois, and K.D.B., an 18-year-old from Mississippi. Both sued in 2023. According to the court papers, they allege that features such as autoplay, infinite scroll, push notifications, view counts and Snapchat’s Snapstreaks drove them into compulsive use, and that they developed depression, anxiety, eating disorders and self-harm as a result. They sought unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

The settlement

The terms are not public. No public release of the suit has been made, and the amount of any damages and any possible design changes are unknown.

Snap had been the last company expected to defend itself. Meta had settled with S.J. earlier, and Meta, TikTok and YouTube had settled with K.D.B. The terms of those settlements were also not disclosed. Snap had previously settled with the plaintiff in the first Los Angeles trial before it began.

Snap’s position

Before the settlement, a Snap spokesperson said that Snapchat opens to the camera, not to a feed or a ranking of what other people post. The spokesperson said Snap has built safeguards, safety tools and educational resources into the platform, and that the allegations misrepresent the plaintiffs’ experiences and how Snapchat was designed.

The first verdict

In March, a jury found Meta and YouTube liable in the first case, brought by a young California woman identified as K.G.M. She accused the companies of negligence and personal injury through the addictive design of their platforms, and the jury awarded her $6 million in damages.

Fairpatterns detects the design mechanics at issue in these cases, such as autoplay and infinite scroll, automatically across platforms and at scale.