The first federal trial over how Meta built Instagram and Facebook for young users opened with two very different stories about the same company. In opening statements on August 18, lawyers for four states told a jury in Oakland that Meta set out to "hook the users, hold them for as long as they can, harvest their data and hide the truth from the public" [1]. Meta's lawyer answered that the states had gone looking through years of records for a handful of outliers and found them.
California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are trying their claims first [1]. They are the leading edge of a coalition of 29 states that sued Meta in 2023, and the other 25 are set to try their cases later [1]. The trial before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is expected to run about six weeks, and Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify along with other Meta executives and expert witnesses, including congressional whistleblowers [1][2].
The states' case rests less on outside experts than on Meta's own files. Plaintiffs told the jury the company internally described young users as a target, pointing to materials with titles such as "The young ones are the best ones" and an internal characterization that "kids are the product" [1]. They argued that safety research inside the company "got whittled down to a little pebble that didn't make a difference" by the time it reached the people building the product [1]. That is the heart of the states' theory: not that engagement features exist, but that Meta had the safety findings in hand and chose growth anyway.
Meta's defense is that the record does not show that choice. Meta attorney Paul Schmidt argued the states had assembled "extreme cases," what he called "proverbial needles in the haystack of billions of user experiences across the globe and over the years" [2]. The company's framing to the jury was that the suit reduces to disagreements over product judgment, arguments that in hindsight Meta could have done some things "a little differently" [1].
The money in the case has been reported in a way worth keeping straight. Meta has told the court its potential liability under the states' theory could reach $1.4 trillion, but that figure is Meta's own worst-case assessment, not the amount the states are demanding [1]. The states are seeking damages that could run into the billions, along with court orders requiring Meta to redesign its platforms to reduce addictive features [1][2].
This is the stage we flagged on August 12, when jury selection began and the court had already denied Meta's motion to end the case before trial. Those were rulings about whether the states could get this far. What happens over the next six weeks is different: a jury reading internal engineering decisions as evidence and deciding what they mean.
