The lead defendant in the case is Meta Platforms, Inc., formerly known as Facebook. But also targeted are Instagram (owned by Meta), TikTok, Snap, Google, Discord, YouTube and Roblox, among other defendants.
In suing the social media companies for negligence and public nuisance, Sonoma County adds to existing lawsuits filed by San Diego County, the San Mateo County Board of Education and a scattering of other local public entities around the nation. In October 2023, the California Attorney General’s Office joined 32 other states in suing Meta Platforms and its affiliates.
The county’s case outlines a number of incidents here that it claims social media interactions triggered or exacerbated: a 9-year-old girl who experienced suicidal thoughts after she was bullied on a YouTube “hate page;” a youth behavioral health client reporting that an adult male commented he would rape her; another youth client who, after expressing thoughts of suicide, was offered a gun for purchase on Snapchat.
Sonoma County’s Mobile Support Team, a crisis intervention service, responded in one instance when a 16-year-old girl kicked and hit her mother after the mom threatened to take away her cellphone and social media access, the suit alleges.
Since 2021, online threats of violence have been aimed at West County, Laguna, Petaluma and Casa Grande high schools, and at Altimira Middle School. A 2021 TikTok craze called “devious licks” led to vandalism at several county campuses.
As a result, county agencies have shifted resources to youth mental health services that include therapy, case management, crisis intervention and medication support.
“A whole array of experts” will testify that social media companies contributed to these local incidents, said Aelish Baig, an attorney for San Francisco-based Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, the law firm contracted to handle Sonoma County’s case. And the county wants reimbursement.
For Lynda Hopkins, chair of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors and mother of three children between the ages of 6 and 12, it was Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” that opened her eyes to the threats of the online world.
“We live in a society where we literally have neighbors who will call and report you for child abuse for letting your kids walk down the block by themselves, but they’re allowed to roam free in the dark corners of the Internet,” Hopkins said.
Some of the existing cases were filed in the U.S. District Court’s Northern District of California, as was Sonoma County’s suit. Each of those will be overseen by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. She has signaled the first set of jury trials are likely to begin in 2026, Baig told The Press Democrat.
That first round of trials will include a handful of “bellwether cases,” she said. Sonoma County’s is unlikely to be one of them, Baig noted, because others were filed earlier. Rogers’ opinions in the bellwether cases will establish precedent in the others. If a global resolution is proposed, the county would decide whether to opt in.
Robbins Geller filed the Sonoma County complaint on July 9 and is working under a contingency agreement. In the event of a judgment or settlement, the Sonoma County Counsel’s Office could claim as much as $150,000 for legal work done on the case. The county would receive 85 percent of whatever proceeds remain after that, with the law firm taking 15 percent.
Robbins Geller has emerged as something of a social media giant slayer. The firm secured a $650 million settlement with Facebook over use of facial recognition technology in 2020, an $800 million settlement with Twitter regarding securities fraud in 2021, and a $350 million settlement with Alphabet (the parent company of Google) in 2024 after a data breach compromised users’ personal data.
The county has partnered with outside counsel in other legal actions that involve big, well-funded adversaries, including opioid manufacturers, PG&E and the Trump administration.
“We have brilliant” county staff attorneys, Hopkins said. “But they’re very busy with their day-to-day jobs, and they don’t have the staff for litigation on this scale.”
The supervisor emphasized that it would have been difficult to fight this battle alone. Aligning with other public bodies gives the county “strength in numbers,” she said.
Sonoma County’s complaint, filed July 9, rests on familiar themes.
“Like virtually everywhere in the United States now, Sonoma County’s youth suffer from a high degree of distraction, depression, suicidality, and other mental disorders caused by or worsened by the overconsumption of social media on a daily basis,” the complaint states.
Social media companies lure young users and prime addictive behavior, the county contends, with machine learning technology that includes artificial intelligence tools. Meta, for example, recently unveiled an AI chatbot with 28 different personae.
“It’s one of those things where if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ... this looks a lot like the opioid settlement,” Hopkins said. “Where companies are willingly giving a product that’s addictive, and denying it. I’m not drawing an equivalency between the two products. But it feels like the same sort of cover-up.”
The harm is made worse by the corporations’ lack of accountability, according to Baig.
If the concerns are nearly universal, the lawsuit contends that Sonoma County’s estimated 94,000 minors have been “uniquely harmed” by social media.
A Youth Truth survey of nearly 15,000 county high school students conducted in January 2024 indicated 31 percent felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more that they ceased normal activities, and 10 percent reported having serious thoughts of suicide.
Defendants in the lawsuit include the most prominent social media companies, but the complaint shines particular focus on Discord and Roblox.
Roblox is an online gaming platform launched in 2006. The company’s website claims that “Roblox is free to play and safe for kids aged 4+.” More than half of all American children under 16 have used it, according to a Hindenburg Research report.
Roblox restricts certain games to users 13 and older — such as one called “Beat Up Homeless Outside 7/11 Simulator,” the Sonoma County lawsuit states. But Roblox makes no substantive effort to verify ages, the county alleges.
That has led to rampant child sexual abuse and grooming on Roblox, the complaint argues. Since 2018, police in the U.S. have arrested 24 predators for abusing victims on Roblox, as reported by Bloomberg in July 2024.
The messaging platform Discord, meanwhile, launched in 2015 and had 196 million active monthly users by January 2024. More than 60 percent are between the ages of 13 and 24, the company’s CEO told a Congressional committee in 2024.
Sonoma County alleges that Discord “has designed, developed, produced, operated, promoted, distributed, and marketed its platforms to attract, capture, and addict youth, with minimal parental oversight.” Like Roblox, the company performs no legitimate age verification, according to the suit, and allows adults to send friend requests to children.
In an email to The Press Democrat, a Discord spokesperson strongly disputed this, maintaining the company prohibits content or behavior that endangers younger users.
“Unlike platforms designed around algorithmic feeds and viral content, Discord is a fundamentally different service that helps people build meaningful connections around the joy of playing games,” the spokesperson wrote. “We use both automated systems and human moderation to enforce our policies and to proactively detect and remove content that violates them.”
Representatives of Meta and Roblox did not respond to requests for comment.
© 2025 The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
