Meta pulls Facebook ads recruiting for social media addiction lawsuits

Meta says it has removed adverts by law firms on its social media platforms which seek clients for future lawsuits related to social media addiction.

The Facebook owner has recently lost two large-scale lawsuits, including a landmark trial in California in which a young woman successfully sued Meta and YouTube over her childhood addiction to social media.

In a statement, Meta said: "We will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful."

Emily Jeffcott, an attorney for Morgan & Morgan, one of the firms which has placed such adverts, called the move "another example of Meta trying to control the narrative and avoid accountability".

"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," she added.

"Blocking the ads doesn't make the harms go away. It just makes it harder on victims."

According to American news website Axios, companies such as Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law saw "dozens" of their adverts on social media addiction clients deactivated.

The ads ran on both Facebook and Instagram, with some also appearing on Threads and Meta's Audience Network - an extension of Meta's ad platform which allows advertisers to run campaigns across third-party platforms like mobile apps.

As of Friday, several adverts still appear to be active across the platforms on Meta's Ad Library.

For example, one from Morgan & Morgan lists potential negative effects of using social media and claims to be fighting on users' behalf.

Meta's advertising standards states it reserves the rights to remove ads which "negatively affect our relationship with our users or that promote content, services or activities contrary to our competitive position, interests or advertising philosophy".

The two recent cases in the US involving Meta have illustrated the potential for other similar lawsuits to now make their way through the US courts.

On March 2026, a court in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375m (£279m) for misleading users over the safety of its platforms for children.

A jury found Meta was liable for the way in which its platforms endangered children and exposed them to sexually explicit material and contact with sexual predators.

Meanwhile, in the California social media addiction case, a woman was awarded $6m (£4.5m) in damages over her childhood addiction to social media, with Meta expected to pay 70% and Google the remaining 30%.

Snap and TikTok were also initially defendants, but both companies reached undisclosed settlements prior to trial.

Meta has previously said it plans to appeal the verdicts of both cases, and it disagrees with both results.

Additional reporting by Osmond Chia

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