Lawyers representing 29 US states have accused Meta of covering up internal research showing Instagram was addictive for teenagers.
In a packed courtroom on the opening day of a landmark legal challenge, they said the company knew its products harmed children but hid that information from the public.
“I heard from many of you at jury selection that the health and wellbeing of kids is a shared responsibility,” said Megan O’Neill, a deputy attorney general for California, in her opening statements. “Meta didn’t do its share.”
O’Neill told jurors she would be giving them a preview of what they could expect to see over the course of the trial, which would include witness testimony and internal documents the attorneys general uncovered while investigating the social media company.
She referenced one document that said, “the young ones are the best ones”, along with another where Meta stated: “Teens are hooked despite how it makes them feel. Instagram is addictive.”
“They knew,” O’Neill said. “Time and again, profits won.”
The lawsuit against Meta accuses the parent company of Instagram and Facebook of deliberately designing addictive products that lure in young people and damage their mental health.
The jury trial is taking place in federal court in Oakland, California, and is expected to last between six and eight weeks.
The jury will hear from Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram chief executive Adam Mosseri, and employee turned whistleblower Arturo Béjar.
The 233-page lawsuit, first filed in October 2023, alleges Meta regularly collects data on children under the age of 13 without parental permission in violation of federal and state laws.
The lawmakers claim in court documents that Meta “refuses to abandon its use of known harmful features” and that its motives are based solely on profit to “maximise its financial gains”.
The suit was filed jointly by 29 state attorneys general in what is known as multidistrict litigation, though the trial proceedings will be led by attorneys for California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey.
The sweeping legal proceedings could have profound consequences for the social media company. The attorneys general say that if Meta is found liable, damages could be as high as $200 billion (€172.8 billion) – an amount equivalent to the company’s 2025 annual revenue.
The lawmakers are also asking that Meta be compelled to change the design of its products to make them safer for children, which may have longer-term effects than a fine.
Meta denies all allegations. In opening statements, Paul Schmidt, a lawyer for Meta, said the internal documents and emails the government lawyers showed the jury were taken out of context and cherry-picked from longer conversations.
He said Meta has done several studies on young users with the goal of asking: “What can we do to support teens in this space?”
Schmidt said Meta has disabled more than one million accounts of children under the age of 13 and is “acting in a meaningful way to remove” young users.
In a statement, a company spokesperson said: “Rather than sticking to the facts or the law, the states have instead decided to chase an outlandish payout.
“The state AGs may call this a landmark case, but their limited claims are unsubstantiated and their financial demands are vastly disproportionate.
“The AGs offer no proof anyone in their states was misled, claim benign features like having an additional Instagram account somehow harmed their residents, and attempt to penalise Meta for industry-wide challenges like age verification.”
The attorneys general disagree, saying Meta “developed and refined a set of psychologically manipulative” features designed to maximise people’s time on its apps.
Those include an infinite scrolling recommendation algorithm, constant notification alerts, thumbs-up “likes”, and visual filters for altering one’s image.
The lawmakers say young people are especially vulnerable to falling prey to such features and that excessive time online can lead to increased depression, anxiety, eating disorders and other mental health issues.
The federal trial comes just two weeks after a judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million to New Mexico in a similar case brought by the state’s attorney general.
This was the second court-ordered financial penalty for Meta in New Mexico, bringing the total it is responsible for paying the state to $942 million. A state trial in Tennessee is also now under way.
Families, school districts and other attorneys general have brought thousands of lawsuits against Meta and other social media companies in recent years. The plaintiffs hope a death-by-a-thousand-cuts legal strategy will induce Meta to change its social networks to be safer for children.
In California, thousands of co-ordinated cases have been filed in state court against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap.
Meta and YouTube lost the first of those cases to go to trial in February, being ordered to pay $6 million to the young woman who brought the suit. TikTok and Snap settled before the case went to trial.
Two more lawsuits slated to go to trial this summer, one federal and one in California state court, also settled for undisclosed sums.
The lawsuits have borrowed from the legal approach used against tobacco companies in the 1990s, which focused on cigarettes’ addictive qualities and the makers’ knowledge that their products caused harm.
Those thousands of suits resulted in a $200 billion payout by the four largest companies in 1998 and also enforced changes to to their marketing practices.
Russell Coleman, the attorney general of Kentucky, said he and his colleagues were using that blueprint and aimed to show the jury that Meta “concealed what it knew about the harm its products cause young people”.
“AGs are in the perfect position to get this done,” he added. “We did it with the tobacco settlement in the 1990s. We did it with the companies behind the opioid crisis. We’ll do it again with Meta.” – Guardian
