The long legal reckoning over social media and childhood is about to have its biggest day in court.
Meta goes on trial this week against a coalition of 29 US states that accuse it of deliberately engineering Facebook and Instagram to addict children, in what amounts to the most consequential test yet of a sprawling wave of youth-harm litigation.
The case opens in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California, before Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is also presiding over Elon Musk’s suit against OpenAI.
Jury selection began on Wednesday, opening arguments are due on 18 August, and the trial is expected to run for about seven weeks, with the judge’s own decision likely in October. An advisory jury will weigh in on specific questions, yet the final ruling rests with her.
They argue that Meta knowingly built features to keep young users scrolling, from bottomless feeds to relentless notifications, that it harvested data on children under 13 in breach of federal privacy law, and that it assured parents its apps were safe while its own research suggested otherwise.
It is essentially the same claim that has already produced a $567m order against Meta in New Mexico, only now brought by nearly 30 states at once.
What sets this trial apart is the sheer size of the number attached to it. Meta puts its potential exposure as high as $1.4 trillion, close to the company’s entire market value, and it has called that figure “outlandish,” with “no basis in fact or law” and “no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement.”
The states reach it by stacking statutory penalties for consumer-protection and privacy breaches, an approach Meta says absurdly counts the same teenagers many times over.
Yet the money may be the least of it. Alongside damages, the states want the court to order design changes that would reshape the products themselves, including age restrictions, strict time limits for young users, an end to infinite scroll and constant notifications, an algorithm retuned to prioritise wellbeing over engagement, and the deletion of AI models trained on children’s data.
For a company whose business is attention, that final set of demands is the sharper threat.
Meta disputes all of it, and not gently. The company says it has spent years building protections and consulting parents, experts and law enforcement, and it leans on a more technical argument too, that “social media addiction” is not a recognised psychiatric diagnosis, which it says undercuts the claim that it deceived anyone.
Executives including chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri are expected to take the stand.
The trial sits atop a mountain of related cases, with more than 3,000 lawsuits gathered before Gonzalez Rogers and thousands more moving through state courts.
Increasingly, Meta stands there alone, because Snap, YouTube and TikTok have settled the big school-districts case and an appeals court has already cleared thousands of addiction claims to proceed without disturbing the Section 230 shield the platforms have long relied on.
The momentum has been running against the company, too, since a separate California jury recently found Meta liable for one teenager’s mental distress, and the New Mexico order came with instructions to change how its apps work.
The backdrop is a public that has largely made up its mind. In Reuters/Ipsos polling, 85% of Americans said social media can be addictive for children and 61% wanted stricter oversight of the companies, sentiment that has only hardened since Frances Haugen’s 2021 disclosures.
Meta is pouring far more into artificial intelligence than any single verdict is likely to cost it, yet the outcome in Oakland could still dictate how its apps are allowed to work, and that is a bill which never shows up on a balance sheet.
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