Meta will face another trial starting this week over alleged harms to children, with the company already facing nearly $1 billion in damages from previous cases.
The federal trial, one of the most consequential among a myriad of legal proceedings targeting social networks in the United States, will begin Wednesday with jury selection at a federal court in Oakland, near San Francisco.
Opening statements are expected to start next week on August 18, with the trial lasting for roughly six weeks, followed by a verdict in early October. The attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are alleging that the largest social media network in the world deliberately made Instagram and Facebook addictive for children.
The states are demanding a long list of restrictions on how Instagram and Facebook operate for minors, as well as up to $1.4 trillion in penalties — nearly Meta’s entire market cap, which exceeded $1.5 trillion on Friday. The staggering amount was calculated by multiplying the estimated number of affected teens and young users in the four states by fine amounts set by state law.
Meta has dismissed the figure as unsupported by evidence. “A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement,” the company said in a filing, adding that “the plaintiffs’ outlandish calculations have no basis in fact or law”.
CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg is among the star witnesses the prosecution plans to call to the stand; he also testified six months ago in a separate case that took place in a Los Angeles court. While Zuckerberg has been known to spend an increasing amount of time living at his home in Hawaii, the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park is about an hour’s drive from the courthouse.
The Oakland trial is the culmination of a standoff that began in late 2021, when a former employee, Frances Haugen, leaked thousands of pages of internal research, dubbed the “Facebook Files,” which showed that Meta had internally measured the potential harm Instagram was causing to some teenage girls, while publicly downplaying the impact.
The revelations triggered a joint investigation by dozens of states, which two years later resulted in a complaint filed by around 30 state attorneys general. Twenty-nine states have sued Meta in federal court, most alleging the company violated the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting data from children without proper parental consent.
In a landmark trial that concluded in March, Meta and YouTube were convicted by a Los Angeles jury, which found both companies were responsible for a teenager’s social media addiction. That jury awarded the teenager $6 million. On Thursday, a judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to implement product changes and pay more than half a billion dollars in damages to the state to fund the treatment and prevention of harms caused by Facebook and Instagram.
Judge Bryan Biedscheid compared Meta to a factory, with advertising and content as its product and “the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated”. Meta has appealed, or intends to appeal, all of these decisions.
The four states in the Oakland trial accuse Meta of violating their consumer protection laws, in addition to the federal law that protects children’s data. They allege that multiple features were designed to keep minors hooked, particularly infinite scrolling, excessive notifications, and “like” counts. It’s a strategy that focuses on how apps are designed, not what is posted on them, essentially sidestepping the broad immunity internet sites enjoy in the US regarding content created by their users.
Meta intends to argue that mental health is an industry-wide issue, and that some of the states’ claims are protected by free speech laws. The jury will have only an advisory role, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers — who oversaw major trials between Apple and Epic Games, and Elon Musk and OpenAI — will decide on penalties, if Meta loses the case. The company faces thousands of similar lawsuits in federal and state court over claims they knowingly designed their platforms to have features that addict children and teens.
