Meta Fights States In Court Over Child Addiction Claims
Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, went before a federal jury in Oakland, California, on Tuesday to defend claims that it deliberately built Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to children and misled the public about the risks, in a trial legal observers describe as one of the most consequential tests yet of Big Tech’s accountability for the safety of its youngest users.
The case is being heard by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, who is also overseeing more than 3,000 related federal lawsuits against Meta and other social media firms consolidated into a single multidistrict proceeding. A coalition of 29 states originally sued Meta in 2023. Four of them, California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, were selected as bellwether plaintiffs for this trial, while the remaining 25 states await separate proceedings. Their claims are anchored on allegations that Meta breached state consumer protection laws and the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by knowingly permitting children under 13 onto its platforms and harvesting their data.
Court filings cited by the states allege that features such as infinite scroll, autoplay and algorithmic recommendation systems were engineered specifically to maximise the time young users spent on the platforms, regardless of the psychological cost. New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said the case strikes at Meta’s core business model, arguing that the company prioritised profit over the wellbeing of a generation of young people. Meta has firmly rejected the allegations, with a spokesperson describing the states’ position as one the company “strongly disagrees” with.
Days before opening statements, Meta suffered two setbacks. Judge Gonzalez Rogers dismissed the company’s attempt to bar former Meta engineer and whistleblower Arturo Bejar from testifying, calling the move a “Hail Mary” attempt to eliminate a strong witness for the plaintiffs. Bejar, who has testified against Meta in earlier litigation including the New Mexico case, is expected to be questioned on what the company knew internally about safety risks versus what it told the public. The judge also ruled that the states may present key documentary evidence to jurors during opening statements, rather than waiting for it to be formally introduced through witness testimony weeks later.
Separately, Meta has asked the court to limit the scope of testimony from another expert witness, Colin Gray, whom the states intend to question about so called “dark patterns”, design features alleged to manipulate users into choices that favour the company. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive, is expected to testify.
On damages, the two sides remain far apart. During a pretrial hearing, lawyers for the states said they are seeking roughly $200 billion, disputing Meta’s own court filing that framed the states’ exposure as exceeding $1 trillion, a figure the states’ lawyers argued Meta calculated “for shock value.” Beyond financial penalties, the states are demanding changes to how Meta’s applications are designed and operated. An eight member advisory jury has been empanelled, though Judge Gonzalez Rogers retains final authority over the verdict. The trial is expected to run about six weeks, with a decision anticipated by early October.
This is not Meta’s first courtroom loss on child safety this year. In March, a Santa Fe jury found Meta had wilfully violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, ordering the maximum civil penalty of $375 million for tens of thousands of violations tied to child sexual exploitation on its platforms. In August, following a second, judge only phase of that case, a New Mexico court ruled that Meta’s platforms constituted a public nuisance and ordered an additional $567 million into an abatement fund, bringing the state’s total recovery to $942 million and forcing Meta to adopt specific safety changes, including private by default settings for under 18 users on Instagram. Separately, in March, a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay $6 million in combined damages to a young woman it found had suffered mental health harm from compulsive platform use as a child, with Meta held responsible for 70 per cent of that award.
Legal analysts have drawn comparisons with the tobacco litigation of the 1990s, when dozens of American states sued cigarette manufacturers over concealed health risks, leading to a 1998 settlement under which tobacco firms have since paid out more than $176 billion, with roughly $9 billion still owed annually. Stanford law professor Nora Engstrom said the Meta case could mark the beginning of a broader reckoning for the company, with the outcome likely to hinge on the gap between what Meta knew privately and what it disclosed to the public and regulators.