They have to make this determination before discovery, but that's life.

If they win this case, even if they don't get the full penalty, you can be sure the other companies will be paying attention and will do something about it. Of course that "something" may not be "immediately stop engineering addiction into their products" and be more like "be sure to obfuscate it better, maybe crank the knob down a bit and prepare to claim in a future lawsuit that the problem was solved even though they haven't really changed anything". Suing the next company is easier with a precedent to go off of.

They are correct to concentrate their fire on what they believe is the most vulnerable part of the line, not to spread their limited resources out over attacking half-a-dozen of the largest and most well-resourced targets on Earth. Once they lose the first case, the resulting precedent weakens them in all of the others as well.

Per the article:

> Meta is one of several social media companies facing mounting legal pressure. Snap, Alphabet-owned YouTube and ByteDance-owned TikTok are also battling thousands of lawsuits alleging they intentionally designed their platforms to keep children and teenagers hooked, contributing to widespread mental health problems.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-reaches-settle...

> The 15-year-old boy, identified in court filings by his initials, R.K.C., accuses Meta (the parent of Instagram), YouTube, TikTok and Snap of designing their platforms to be addictive through features such as infinite scroll and autoplay.

Is your suggestion this case is somehow spurious because there aren't equal cases against everyone else clearly guilty of this manipulation?

In any case, as per TFA, the claim is:

> [intent to] addict young users

Why shouldn’t the Meta precedent also apply to them afterwards?

[0] https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...