Meta Faces Multi-State Trial Over Alleged Child Addiction and Privacy Violations
Four States Seek Billions and Product Overhauls in Federal Trial Against Meta
A pivotal trial for the parent company of Instagram and Facebook kicked off in a California federal court Tuesday, with four states seeking billions of dollars in damages as well as fundamental changes to how Meta runs its platforms.
The trial in Oakland, California, represents the first courtroom proceedings among 29 states that filed federal claims against Meta Platforms Inc. in October 2023. During opening statements before an eight-person jury, Megan O’Neill, a deputy attorney general for the California Department of Justice, stated that Meta designed its platforms to “hook the users, hold them for as long as they can, harvest their data and hide the truth from the public.”
The lawsuit accuses Meta of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features that addict children to its platforms and hides these harms from the public. It also argues that Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent, in violation of federal law.
Federal statutory standards under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act require operators of commercial services to obtain verifiable parental consent before gathering personal information from children under age 13. O’Neill presented internal documents to jurors showing Meta researched children’s neurological vulnerabilities, including their sensitivity to social feedback and developing impulse control. She cited an internal Meta research presentation titled ” ‘The young ones are the best ones’ ” and told jurors that when Meta detected users under 13 on Facebook and disabled their accounts, it routinely left their connected Instagram accounts active.
The states called former Meta engineering director Arturo Béjar as their opening witness. Béjar, who managed anti-cyberbullying engineering at Facebook from 2009 to 2015 and returned as an executive safety contractor from 2019 to 2021, testified that internal research into user safety was not deployed to alter core product features. Béjar testified that when engineers developed proposals to protect young users from eating disorder content, executive reviews reduced the plans until “it got whittled down to a little pebble that didn’t make a difference.”
Meta defense attorney Paul Schmidt told jurors that while children under 13 occasionally bypass age restrictions and teens struggle to manage screen time, the company maintains robust safety protocols. “Much of this lawsuit is about the government attorneys and their witnesses saying in trying to improve, we’d do it a little differently,” Schmidt told the court, arguing that evidence will show Meta’s continuous efforts to improve user safety and public transparency.
In September 2024, Meta implemented Instagram Teen Accounts, an initiative that automatically places users under 16 into built-in privacy settings that restrict messaging contacts and filter sensitive content, an operational change Meta cites as evidence of platform safety updates.
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is presiding over the expected six-week proceedings in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, with scheduled testimony from Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and other senior executives. Gonzalez Rogers previously presided over major technology trials, including Elon Musk’s suit against OpenAI and Epic Games’ antitrust case against Apple.
The proceedings involve four state litigants—California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey—spearheaded in part by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, while 25 additional states await trial dates in federal court and state actions remain underway in jurisdictions such as Tennessee. Meta disclosed in legal filings that losing the broader litigation could create a maximum potential statutory liability of $1.4 trillion, though legal experts characterize a penalty of that scale as unlikely.
Demonstrators and parents gathered outside the Oakland courthouse on Tuesday, holding a multi-foot banner listing young people who died from social media-related harms. Mary Rodee, whose 15-year-old son Riley Basford died by suicide after a sextortion incident on Facebook Messenger, said advocacy groups have added 39 new names to the memorial banner since March.
