Two sovereign tribal nations have joined the growing list of governments suing several social media giants, alleging their platforms are fueling a mental health crisis among tribal youth and draining the tribes’ already strained resources.
Filed Sept. 16 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, the two lawsuits name four defendants:
- Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta Platforms;
- Snapchat’s Snap Inc.;
- TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance; and
- Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, as defendants.
The companies face a deadline of Oct. 7 to file their respective responses.
Legal precedent exists to allow the native nations’ lawsuits to advance. Several states filed their own lawsuits against Meta in 2023, and Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond brought a separate lawsuit against the social media giant the same year.
In the Oklahoma lawsuit, attorneys for Meta have denied wrongdoing and asked an Osage County District Court judge to dismiss the case.
“Meta sympathizes with the mental health struggles many adolescent Oklahomans face. But the state’s claims challenge Meta’s exercise of editorial discretion in presenting, organizing, and displaying third-party content to users — a core function of a ‘publisher’ that is immune from liability under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act and the First Amendment, as numerous courts across the country have recognized,” Meta’s attorneys wrote. “The state’s claims fail for these and other reasons.”
Osage County District Judge Stuart Tate denied the motion in November 2024, as well as an interlocutory appellate review in February 2025. A hearing on the state’s motion to compel discovery and an opposed motion to enter into a protective order is set for Nov. 25.
In California, meanwhile, a federal district court judge also ruled against Meta’s bid to dismiss state lawsuits in 2024. An amended complaint was filed in June 2025, and the case remains in the discovery phase.
YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat remain widely used among U.S. teenagers. Some teens report being on the sites almost constantly, according to the Pew Institute.
The Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations’ complaints accuse the companies of deliberately designing addictive platforms that target adolescents, knowingly exposing them to harmful content while concealing internal research about the risks. The nations argue that, despite a broad body of research suggesting social media use negatively impacts youth mental health, “this understanding comes too late” for the two tribal nations, which have already diverted limited resources to combat suicide and the long-term consequences of the teen mental health crisis.
“The defendants’ actions and omissions have significantly and unjustifiably disrupted the nation’s functions and operations, posing substantial harm to the public health, safety, and overall welfare of the nation’s community,” each suit states.
The law firms of DiCello Levitt LLP, Fields Han Cunniff PLLC and Whitten Burrage represent both tribal nations.
Suits: tribal mental health systems pushed to ‘breaking points’
On Friday, the Associated Press published an article detailing a new report from nonprofit groups titled Teen Accounts, Broken Promises that widely criticized Meta’s purported teen-safety features on Instagram.
“We hope this report serves as a wake-up call to parents who may think recent high-profile safety announcements from Meta mean that children are safe on Instagram. Our testing reveals that the claims are untrue and the purported safety features are substantially illusory,” wrote the report’s authors, who each lost children to suicide partially attributed to the impact of social media content. “But we also urge regulators and lawmakers to consider the substantial evidence that the majority of Meta’s safety initiatives have been little more than PR efforts. We cannot waste any more time, or allow more children to be harmed, by Meta’s self-regulation.”
Both new lawsuits from the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations claim the companies have contributed to the social media addiction epidemic and youth mental health crisis within each tribal nation.
“Defendants’ conduct is of a continuing nature and has produced permanent and long-lasting damage and is likely to continue to cause significant harm to the health and welfare,” the lawsuits state.
The tribal nations say they have already expended substantial resources to mitigate harm caused by social media addiction and will continue to do so.
The Choctaw Nation states in its suit that rising rates of depression, suicidal ideation and compulsive social media use among tribal youth have “pushed its health and social service programs to their breaking points” within the tribe’s reservation.
Similarly, the Chickasaw Nation has poured resources into combating youth suicide and mental illness within its reservation. Its mental health care system adopted an integrated behavioral health model in 2014 and launched the Zero Suicide initiative in 2015, but the lawsuit argues worsening rates of youth mental health have since overwhelmed the program.
Research on the specific impacts of social media on rural youth, particularly relevant in smaller communities that dot the Chickasaw and Choctaw Reservations, shows a mixed effect on mental health. Some data suggests rural adolescents rely more on social media than their urban peers to form communities and support circles beyond their immediate geography, while also acknowledging they are still at risk of cyberbullying and other general dangers of social media use.
Both tribal nations are asking the court to declare the social media companies’ practices a public nuisance, enjoin them from continuing harmful design and marketing strategies, and require them to fund prevention, education and treatment programs within both nations. The suits also seek treble damages under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, compensatory and punitive damages, restitution of unjust profits and attorney fees.
(Update: This article was updated at 9:20 a.m. Friday, Sept. 26, to include reference to the Teen Accounts, Broken Promises report.)
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