A landmark trial over whether Meta Platforms deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children opened Tuesday in federal court in Oakland, California, with lawyers for a bipartisan coalition of states telling jurors the company built its business on hooking young users and then hid the harm.
The case is being led by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey on behalf of a wider group of roughly 29 states. In opening statements before an eight-member advisory jury, California Deputy Attorney General Megan O'Neill previewed the states' central theory.
Meta's business model can be summed up in four simple words: "hook" the users, "hold" them for as long as they can, "harvest" their data, and then "hide" the truth from the public when making public statements.
Megan O'Neill, California Deputy Attorney General, opening statement
What the States Allege
Prosecutors argue Meta engineered features including the "like" button, infinite scroll and recommendation algorithms specifically to prolong how long minors spend on its platforms, and that the company collected data on children under 13 without parental consent in violation of federal child privacy law. O'Neill told jurors they would see an internal Meta study titled "Long Term Retention: The Young Ones Are The Best Ones," and cited a 2016 internal email describing "teen time spent" as a company goal. Former Meta engineer Arturo Béjar is expected to testify that the company internally used the term "problematic use" rather than "addiction" to describe the harms it was tracking.
The states have tied their damages request to Meta's scale, pointing to the company's roughly $200 billion in annual revenue as a benchmark for penalties that could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars if the states prevail, according to court filings reviewed before trial.
Meta has rejected the allegations. The company says it takes "meaningful action" to address youth mental health concerns through tools such as privacy defaults and screen-time limits, and that internal research has been mischaracterized by plaintiffs. The trial, expected to last roughly six weeks, is being watched closely across the technology industry as a test of whether state governments can hold platform design itself legally responsible for harm to children, rather than individual pieces of content.
