Meta has reached a settlement with a US school district which had sued the Instagram-owner over the costs of fighting a mental health crisis allegedly caused by the company’s social media platforms.

Breathitt School District, located in the US state of Kentucky, had been poised to litigate the first case attempting to make social media companies cover those costs.

The school district settled the same case last week with three other defendants: TikTok, Snap Inc, and Google’s YouTube.

“We’ve resolved this case amicably,” a Meta spokesperson said on Thursday of the agreement, which allows it to avoid mounting a defence at this trial, although similar cases remain set for trial in the near future.

Breathitt County School District’s case was chosen as a test case for more than a thousand US school districts which have pursued claims against social media companies.

The school district alleged the companies deliberately designed their platforms to be addictive, resulting in harms ranging from anxiety and depression to self-harm.

It was seeking $60m (£44.7m) in damages to pay for fighting social media’s impacts on students, as well as an abatement program.

The district also wanted the companies to change the alleged addictive nature of their platforms.

The trial was slated to begin in mid June in federal court in Oakland, California as part of a multi-district litigation.

A bellwether trial for cases brought against Meta by US states is set to proceed in the same court starting in August.

Terms of Thursday’s settlement with Meta were not disclosed.

“Our focus remains on pursuing justice for the remaining 1,200 school districts who have filed cases,” said plaintiffs’ attorneys Lexi Hazam, Previn Warren, Chris Seeger and Ronald Johnson in a statement.

Earlier this year, Meta and YouTube lost a high-profile case brought in Los Angeles by a woman who alleged the companies were responsible for her childhood addiction to social media.

The 20-year old woman, known as Kaley, was awarded $6m (£4.5m) in damages after jurors agreed with her claim that the companies intentionally built addictive social media platforms that harmed her mental health.

At the time, Meta and Google said they intended to appeal.

Snap and TikTok settled that case just prior to that trial, which was a bellwether case for similar lawsuits brought in state court.

On Thursday, a Meta spokesperson said the company remained “focused on our longstanding work to build protections like Teen Accounts that help teens stay safe online, while giving parents simple controls to support their families”.

Instagram Teen Accounts was launched two years ago as a tool designed to protect teenagers from harmful content.

But some researchers say the tool fails to stop young users from seeing suicide and self-harm posts.

“When you have products designed to maximize capture of your attention, some people are going to have a harmful relationship to it,” said Arturo Béjar, a Meta whistleblower who has testified against the company.

Earlier this week, the Tech Transparency Project, an advocacy group, said Meta has been paying Instagram influencers to positively shape the narrative around its Instagram Teen Accounts.

Stacy Boit,

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has postponed a launch of its massive Starship rocket and said it plans to make another attempt at the highly-anticipated test flight on Friday.

It comes just a day after the firm revealed plans for a record-breaking stock market debut, where the successful launch of the powerful new rocket could help entice investors into buying shares.

The initial public offering (IPO) on the tech-heavy Nasdaq stock market is set to be the largest in Wall Street history and could start next month under the ticker symbol SPCX.

Because of the shares he will own in SpaceX, the listing could make Musk, who is already the world’s richest person, the first-ever trillionaire.

Musk said on social media that the delay was caused by a malfunctioning hydraulic pin on part of the launch tower.

“If that can be fixed tonight, there will be another launch attempt tomorrow at 5:30 CT [22:30 GMT],” he added.

SpaceX makes rockets, offers a satellite internet service called Starlink, and also owns the controversial artificial intelligence (AI) firm xAI.

The uncrewed launch will mark the debut of the Starship V3 rocket after ​months of testing delays.

SpaceX described it as “the most powerful launch system ever developed” in its IPO filing.

“We expect that Starship V3 will be able to carry a payload of 100 metric tons, with future generations of Starship being designed to double this payload,” it added.

It features dozens of upgrades designed for rapid launches of the firm’s Starlink satellites and Nasa missions to the moon.

SpaceX has spent more than $15bn (£11.2bn) on the Starship programme, according to the filing.

SpaceX values itself at $1.25tn, and Musk’s majority ownership of the company means his share could be worth more than $600bn.

Last year, Musk, who is also the chief executive of electric vehicle (EV) maker Tesla, became the first person to achieve a net worth of more than $500bn.

Last year, Space Exploration Technologies – as it is officially known – brought in $18.6bn in revenue but had a net loss $4.9bn.

In the first three months of this year, it achieved $4.7bn in sales but made a net loss of $4.3bn.

Stacy Boit,

The US Department of Justice has announced that this week’s unprecedented settlement of President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the leaking of his tax returns blocks the IRS from reviewing tax filings that Trump, his family and his businesses made in the past.

Some lawmakers and legal experts say the department has violated federal law with its addendum to the settlement that shuts down current possible tax audits and investigations. The justice department, however, says the addendum is simply a customary waiver used in legal settlements.

In January, Trump and his two eldest sons sued the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] for $10bn over leaks of their business and personal tax returns. It was the first time a president had sued the US government.

On Monday, the justice department announced the suit was settled and the government had agreed to create an almost $1.8bn (£1.3bn) fund to compensate people who believe it unfairly investigated them. It has already inspired one lawsuit, as well as resistance from within Trump’s own Republican party.

On Tuesday, a day after announcing the settlement with Trump, the justice department released the addendum ending any possible pending audits.

The one-page addendum states that the United States is “FOREVER BARRED AND PRECLUDED” from a long list of actions that the IRS normally carries out to determine if a person or company has paid proper taxes and to seek recourse when they have not.

That list includes filing claims, conducting examinations or similar reviews, and seeking injunctive relief related to taxes filed by Trump, his family members, and their trusts, companies or subsidiaries.

Key in the addendum is that the taxes must have been filed before 19 May, 2026. The justice department issued a statement clarifying that the addendum “is only with respect to existing audits, not future”.

The IRS does not announce its investigations, and so we do not know what – if anything – it was reviewing related to the President, his family and their enterprises.

In its statement, the department describes the addendum as “customary”, and also a necessary part of settling lawsuits in a way that ends them for good.

“There would be little point in settling several significant claims if either party could simply turn around and seek to initiative more adverse claims that could have been pursued previously,” the department said.

As news of the addendum spread, though, lawmakers and legal experts raised alarms.

The top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden, said in a statement it is “clearly a violation of the law that prohibits interference by executive branch officials in IRS audits”.

“Democrats are going to fight every element of this self-dealing settlement, but regardless of the outcome of those efforts, future administrations and IRS leadership should consider this illegal directive completely invalid,” said Wyden, who graduated from University of Oregon’s law school.

Under US law, the president, vice-president and most other high-ranking members of the executive branch cannot directly or indirectly ask the IRS to terminate an investigation.

The major exception is the attorney general, and the addendum is signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. It can be argued, then, that the administration has followed the law.

Critics, such as the leaders of advocacy group Public Citizen, take the view that Trump has indirectly sought to end the audits.

Public Citizen co-presidents Robert Weissman and Lisa Gilbert said in a statement that Trump filed a “bad-faith lawsuit” and, with the settlement, “aims to escape from IRS audits”.

IRS officials who receive illegal requests to terminate audits must report them or face possible criminal prosecution, and experts warn that the agency’s employees could now be at legal risk.

But there are other ways that this agreement appears to diverge from US law, tax experts say.

The IRS closes individual cases by reaching agreements with the taxpayers involved or it refers them to the justice department. There is no record of the IRS taking either of those steps.

Instead, the addendum has been included in a lawsuit against the IRS, not a tax case. And it is a broad, blanket waiver blocking investigations, which is not standard and which was not reached by the IRS.

“It purports to put the President, his entities, and his family above the tax laws—even though DOJ alone doesn’t have authority to offer those extraordinary protections,” Tax Law Center Policy Director Brandon DeBot said in a statement where he called the entire settlement “a breathtaking abuse of the tax and legal system”.

Just as the US government has never been sued by its president, it has never settled a lawsuit involving the head of the executive branch.

Before the case was settled,a federal court set a 20 May deadline for both sides to address whether a legitimate legal dispute existed, given that Trump oversees the IRS.

In exchange for the president dropping his case, the justice department agreed to establish a $1.776bn “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that would pay claims from “those who suffered under weaponisation and lawfare”.

Most Democrats have called it a “slush fund” where Trump can hand out money to allies as well as rioters who breached the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Some Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, have expressed scepticism as well.

Fighting over the fund within the party on Thursday led the Republican-majority Senate to shelve a vote on a $70bn bill for immigration enforcement until after a week-long recess.

Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, Republican Brian Fitzpatrick teamed up with Democrat Tom Suozzi to introduce legislation that would ban using federal funds to pay any claims submitted to the fund.

At least one claim has been filed already.

Michael R Caputo, was a Trump campaign adviser and later served in the first Trump administration, is seeking $2.7m, saying in a letter posted on X that “the machinery of government was clearly weaponized against my family” during the investigation into possible Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

In a statement to the BBC, he said his family was “profoundly grateful” that Trump “will not let this political weaponization stand.”

At the same time, resistance is also already mounting.