Meta began removing advertisements from law firms seeking clients for social media addiction lawsuits on Thursday, blocking legal advertising against itself on its own platforms. The company confirmed it is pulling ads from Facebook and Instagram that recruit plaintiffs for ongoing litigation accusing social media companies of designing addictive platforms for young users.
"We will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement.
More than a dozen ads from national firms like Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law were deactivated, according to an Axios report. Some advertisements also appeared on Threads, Messenger, and Meta's Audience Network, which distributes ads to thousands of third-party sites.
The move follows two major legal losses for Meta earlier this year. At the end of March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable for a young woman's depression and suicidal thoughts after she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child, ordering them to pay $6 million in damages.
Meta was instructed to pay 70% of that amount. Just one day earlier, jurors in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million for misleading users about platform safety for children and enabling sexual exploitation.
More than 3,300 lawsuits involving addiction claims are pending in California state court against Meta, Google, Snapchat parent Snap Inc., and TikTok's parent ByteDance. Another 2,400 lawsuits brought by individuals, municipalities, states and school districts have been centralized in California federal court.
Emily Jeffcott, an attorney for Morgan & Morgan which placed such ads, called Meta's decision "another example of Meta trying to control the narrative and avoid accountability." She added that "blocking the ads doesn't make the harms go away. It just makes it harder on victims."
Jeffcott suggested Meta's resources would be better spent improving user safety tools and detecting underage users.
Meta's advertising standards reserve 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 company appears to be relying on terms of service allowing removal of content "reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate misuse of our services or adverse legal or regulatory impacts."
Law firms representing plaintiffs typically work on contingency and seek as many clients as possible to make mass cases financially viable. Television ads promoting social media claims reached 671 airings nationwide in March, more than any month since July 2024, while radio ads nearly tripled to 20,000 after the recent verdicts.
Google also hosts advertisements for the litigation through its platforms but has not indicated whether it will follow Meta's lead in removing them. Social Media Victims Law Center, one of the firms leading the lawsuit wave, advertises on Google according to company records.
