OAKLAND, Calif. — In a federal courtroom here, lawyers for dozens of states opened a trial Monday accusing Meta Platforms of engineering Facebook and Instagram to keep minors hooked, and of doing so knowingly for years. The states, led by a coalition of attorneys general, are seeking as much as $200 billion in penalties and an order forcing Meta to redesign its platforms. Meta denies the claims, and its lawyers told the judge the company has invested heavily in safety tools and parental controls.
The trial is the largest social-media harm case ever brought in the United States, and its outcome could reshape how the industry’s biggest companies design products for young users. The states’ case rests on internal Meta documents and testimony alleging that the company measured teen engagement obsessively, tuned recommendation algorithms to maximize time on the platforms, and resisted changes that would reduce usage among minors. In opening statements, plaintiffs’ lawyers described design choices — infinite scroll, notification streaks, algorithmic feeds — as deliberate mechanisms for prolonging addictive use. The BBC, reporting from the courtroom, said the states’ attorneys told the jury that Meta “got children hooked.”
Meta’s defense is expected to center on three arguments: that its platforms are not addictive in the legal sense, that it has introduced substantial safety features including age verification and parental supervision tools, and that the harms the states describe are the product of broader societal factors rather than any single design decision. The company has also argued that much of the conduct alleged predates recent reforms and that holding it liable would effectively require courts to dictate product design, a role the states’ lawsuit demands in the form of mandatory changes.
The stakes are enormous for Meta’s business model. The company makes the overwhelming majority of its revenue from advertising, and its ad engine depends on engagement — the more time users spend scrolling, the more ads they see. The states are asking the court to order changes that would directly constrain that engine, such as default privacy settings for minors, limits on recommendation feeds, and bans on features like streaks and infinite scroll for underage users. A verdict for the states, even partially, would force Meta to rebuild products that currently serve more than three billion people, and to do so under court supervision.
The trial also lands amid a broader reckoning for the platform economy. Regulators in Europe have passed the Digital Services Act with its own obligations for minors; the United States Congress has held years of hearings on child safety online; and states have filed a series of lawsuits against social platforms over youth mental health. Meta has been the primary target, in part because its platforms are the most widely used among teenagers, and in part because internal documents disclosed in earlier proceedings appeared to show executives discussing the trade-offs between engagement and well-being.
Wall Street has been watching the case with unease. Meta’s shares have held up through the pretrial phase, in part because settlements have resolved other youth-safety litigation, and investors appear to assume that a company with Meta’s resources will ultimately reach an accommodation rather than face an adverse verdict. But people familiar with the company’s thinking say a settlement at the scale the states seek would still be painful, and that a courtroom defeat would open the door to follow-on litigation from private plaintiffs.
The trial is expected to run for weeks, with testimony from former Meta employees, researchers, and teenagers and their families. The states must convince the jury not only that Meta’s designs were harmful but that the company knew it — a higher bar that turns on the internal documents. Whatever the verdict, the case has already accomplished something the industry spent years resisting: the design of social platforms for young users will now be argued in open court, with the companies’ own documents as the evidence.
The trial’s location is itself a statement. The states chose federal court in Oakland, in the Northern District of California, where many of the internal documents were first produced during earlier litigation over teen safety. The jury pool here is drawn from a region that has watched the technology industry transform the local economy, and both sides have spent the pretrial months surveying how those attitudes might shape a verdict. Meta sought to have the case dismissed on First Amendment grounds, arguing that algorithmic curation is protected speech; the judge allowed the suit to proceed, a ruling the states’ lawyers cited in their opening as evidence that the claims deserve a jury’s hearing.
Legal observers expect the case to turn on the documents. The states say internal emails and slide decks from 2019 through 2023 show Meta executives weighing “time well spent” against engagement metrics, and discussing how features like streaks and notification badges drove daily returns among young users. Meta has said the documents are being taken out of context and that its safety teams repeatedly raised the same concerns the states now raise. How the jury weighs those dueling characterizations of the same memos will likely decide the case.
The broader industry is watching with its own calculation. A verdict for the states would hand regulators a template for attacking the engagement designs used across the platform economy, from short-video apps to messaging services. A verdict for Meta would reassure the industry that design choices, however criticized, are not the same as deliberate harm. Either way, the trial forces a reckoning the industry has avoided: social platforms built their businesses on the attention of the young, and the question of whether that was a design decision or a business model is now being asked in a courtroom where the answer carries a $200 billion price tag.
