Meta's federal trial over allegations that it knowingly designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to children entered its second full week in Oakland, California, with testimony from a former company engineer describing a corporate culture that treated youth-safety fixes as an afterthought.
Arturo Béjar, who worked on safety and anti-bullying issues at Meta across two stints between 2009 and 2021, testified over two days that the company's leadership, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in particular, prioritized user growth and engagement metrics over addressing known risks to teenagers, according to NPR's coverage of the proceedings.
At the end of the day, it was the company culture that Mark had created that made it so that it was practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues.
Arturo Béjar, former Meta engineering director, in testimony
Four states leading a 29-state coalition
The case, being heard before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers with an eight-person jury serving in an advisory capacity, is being led by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey on behalf of a broader coalition of 29 state attorneys general who first sued Meta in 2023. The states allege the company violated consumer-protection and child-privacy laws, including the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, by designing features meant to keep minors engaged while publicly understating the risks.
Meta has disputed the severity of the claims. "The State AGs may call this a landmark case, but their limited claims are unsubstantiated and their financial demands are vastly disproportionate," the company said in a statement cited by Fortune. Meta itself has calculated that the states' damages theory could theoretically expose it to penalties as high as $1.4 trillion — roughly its entire market value — a figure legal scholar Eric Goldman described to Fortune as tantamount to asking the company to "turn in the keys and walk away."
The Oakland case follows two related verdicts against Meta this year: a New Mexico jury found in March that the company willfully violated consumer-protection law over harm to children's mental health, and a Los Angeles jury separately found Meta negligent for failing to warn users of mental-health risks, resulting in a combined roughly $942 million in penalties and a court-ordered abatement fund.
The Oakland trial, which opened August 18 and is expected to run for roughly six weeks, is expected to include testimony from Zuckerberg himself later in the proceedings — testimony both sides have signaled will be central to the states' case that the company's public statements about child safety diverged from internal decision-making.
