Jury selection in the child-safety case against Meta Platforms began Monday, August 12, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, in Oakland, before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers [1]. Opening statements are set for August 18. The trial is expected to run about seven weeks, with a decision expected in October [1].
The case gathers 29 states, with Colorado, Kentucky, California, and New Jersey leading the trial [1]. It is reportedly the first state attorney general case in this wave of youth social-media litigation to reach a jury [1][2]. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, and Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, are both expected to testify [1].
The states allege that Meta designed Facebook and Instagram to maximize the time minors spend on them, deployed features it knew were harmful, and misled the public about the risks, in violation of the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and state consumer-protection laws [2]. Virginia's suit, filed in 2023, adds a claim under the Virginia Consumer Protection Act [2].
Before any juror was seated, the court handed the states a ruling that shapes what the jury will hear. On July 8, Judge Gonzalez Rogers fully denied Meta's motion for summary judgment, and, according to the office of Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones, agreed with Virginia that Meta failed to obtain parental consent in compliance with COPPA [2]. A denied summary-judgment motion is not itself a finding of liability. It is a ruling that the plaintiffs' evidence is strong enough to require a trial, rather than be thrown out as a matter of law.
"Meta put profits over the health and safety of our children," Jones said in the release announcing the ruling. "For too long, Big Tech companies have been able to use their "excessively deep pockets and armies of lawyers to skirt accountability for their actions and harm to our communities" [2].
COPPA's parental-consent requirement is narrow and specific, which is part of why it anchors the case. Under the Federal Trade Commission's rule at 16 CFR 312.5, an operator "is required to obtain verifiable parental consent before any collection, use, or disclosure of personal information from children," meaning users under 13 [3]. The rule does not leave the word "verifiable" to the operator's judgment. It lists the methods that qualify: a signed consent form returned by mail, fax, or electronic scan; a monetary transaction tied to a credit card or online payment that notifies the account holder; a toll-free call or video conference staffed by trained personnel; a check against a government identification database; knowledge-based authentication; or facial-recognition matching against a government-issued photo [3]. Each method must be "reasonably calculated, in light of available technology, to ensure that the person providing consent is the child's parent" [3]. The states' theory is that Meta collected data from minors without clearing that bar.
Meta has said in filings that the states' damages theory could expose it to as much as $1.4 trillion, though the attorneys general have not publicly stated the figure they will ask a jury to award [1]. That gap matters: the headline number is Meta's characterization of its own worst case, not the states' demand.
The trial opens the same week Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday sued TikTok over a related child-safety theory, giving state enforcers a second front against a major platform. Pixel Politics earlier covered a parallel private route to the same kind of evidence, a wrongful-death suit four families filed in the Superior Court of Delaware that pleads negligent design rather than harmful content, aimed at the engineering that Section 230 does not shield. The Meta trial is the government-enforcement version of that bet, and it is the one reaching a jury first.
