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Social Media MDL (Osborne AI citation tool)

Defendants argued that a school-district expert relied on articles that do not exist and that other citations were AI-generated miscites. The court declined to exclude the opinions and left the issue to cross-examination.

Primary document readMotion to exclude denied; issue left to cross-examination February 17, 2026

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What happened

The social media adolescent addiction multidistrict litigation consolidates claims against Meta, Google, ByteDance and Snap. A group of school-district plaintiffs offered six experts. The defendants moved under Rule 702 to exclude all six.

As to one of them, an expert identified in the order as Osborne, the defendants contended that he admitted at deposition that articles he purportedly relied on do not exist, and that other incorrect citations were miscites generated by AI. The plaintiffs responded that none of the academic articles were false, that the citations were incorrectly formatted because of an AI citation tool, and that they had subsequently been corrected.

What the court did

The court denied the Rule 702 motion as to all six school-district experts. On the citation question it wrote: "Defendants contend that Osborne admitted at deposition that articles upon which he purportedly relied do not exist, and that other incorrect citations were miscites generated by AI. Plaintiffs respond that none of the academic articles were actually false, but rather that citations were merely incorrectly formatted based on use of an AI citation tool, which was subsequently corrected. The Court declines to exclude Osborne's opinions on this basis. Defendants may, however, raise the issue on cross-examination."

The order does not resolve the factual dispute about whether the articles exist. It holds only that the dispute is not a reason to keep the opinions out.

Where it stands

The order was entered February 17, 2026, ahead of a school-district bellwether trial. It states that the general-causation and Section 230 motions would be decided in forthcoming orders. No later ruling revisiting the citation question was located as of September 17, 2026.

The obligation it engaged

The conduct engaged Clause 3 of the Standard, independent authority. A citation is an assertion that a source exists and says what the report says it says. Running a reference list through a formatting tool does not confirm either. The dispute here is precisely whether the underlying articles existed at all, and the record left that open.

Clause 5, reproducible analysis, is engaged by the correction itself. A citation table that had to be corrected after a deposition is a table whose original state nobody preserved a method for reproducing. Compare the treatment in LeDoux v. Outliers, where an AI-generated citation table supplied to two experts produced a different result. The two orders together mark the range: a formatting tool whose errors were corrected drew cross-examination, and a citation table whose errors were not caught drew sanctions and exclusion.

Sources

What could not be confirmed

The order identifies the expert by surname only. The AI citation tool is not named. The order does not resolve whether the articles at issue exist, and no later ruling on the point was located.

About this entry

This entry was checked against the primary document listed in the sources. The entry for Social Media MDL records conduct and what the tribunal did. It does not characterize a holding and it is not legal advice. Last checked September 17, 2026. More matters like this one are collected under expert witnesses and AI. If something here is out of date, write to [email protected].

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