Of the thousands of lawsuits Meta faces over child safety on its platforms, none is as significant as the one being tried this week in California. The leaders of the tech group founded by Mark Zuckerberg will appear this Tuesday before a federal court in Oakland, where the company has been sued by several states seeking compensation exceeding $1.4 trillion and demanding changes in the way Facebook and Instagram operate.
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The lawsuit accuses the social media giant of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features that create addiction in children to its platforms. It also alleges that Meta routinely collects data from children under 13 without parental consent, violating federal law, details ABC News.
“Meta has used powerful and unprecedented technologies to attract, engage, and ultimately trap young people and teenagers. Their motivation is profit and they seek to maximize their financial gains,” the lawsuit states.
“In our lawsuit, we allege, and are prepared to prove at trial, that they are deceiving consumers about the dangers of Facebook and Instagram,” said New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport in an interview with NPR. “They are putting profits ahead of the health of a generation of young people.”
Dozens of states filed the lawsuit three years ago. The trial, which begins Tuesday in the federal court in Oakland, includes four states as plaintiffs: California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. Trials for the other 25 states are expected to follow.
Meta stated that it denies the allegations and that the evidence presented at trial will demonstrate its commitment to supporting young people. “We have listened to parents, collaborated with experts and law enforcement, and conducted thorough research to understand the most important issues,” the company said in a statement.
The states seek to deliver a heavy blow to Meta. For Zuckerberg’s tech group, which has already lost two crucial cases over harm to children and teenagers this year, much is at stake. The company reported an unusual drop in earnings last month, partly due to $2.4 billion in legal expenses. Between April and June, Meta earned $15.848 billion, 14% less despite billing $60.801 billion, 28% more.
The $1.4 trillion compensation is almost as high as the total market capitalization of the Menlo Park, California-based company; that is, the value of all its outstanding shares on the stock market. Paying this sum would inevitably lead Meta Platforms to bankruptcy and possibly make it state-owned.
However, legal experts believe judges would reduce the compensation amount to avoid the disappearance of one of the world’s largest companies, notes the Spanish newspaper El País. The company faces complaints worldwide for its aggressive behavior with its social platforms, lack of content moderation, misinformation, strategies to hook users, and data collection without consent, the newspaper details.
In fact, the trial takes place just 10 days after one of the biggest judicial setbacks suffered by the tech company. A New Mexico state court ordered Meta to pay $567 million to a youth mental health fund and required it to modify the operation of its social networks, considering them responsible for harming minors’ well-being and failing to protect them from sexual exploitation on its platforms.
Regarding the lawsuit starting this Tuesday, industry experts call it the social media equivalent of the “big tobacco case,” with Meta as the protagonist. In the 1990s, tobacco companies were forced to pay billions for deceiving the public about the safety and potential harms of their products, and subsequently saw their power and influence drastically reduced.
“California is more important than any other jurisdiction in the United States,” said Julia Powles, executive director of the Institute for Technology, Law and Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “It is where they are subject to the greatest legal reach, and it is a jurisdiction watched worldwide.”
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, after his recent judicial victory, told CNBC that the consequences could be “astronomical” for a company that earns 98% of its revenue from online advertising. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg relies on funds generated by the company’s dominant advertising business to finance its huge bet on artificial intelligence, which could cost up to $145 billion this year.
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Torrez called his victory a “pretty substantial ruling,” but quickly noted it pales compared to what could come. “This is a state with about two million inhabitants,” Torrez said. “If we apply that same argument to California, Florida, Texas, or New York, we are talking about a potentially enormous force capable of transforming the market.”
Earlier this month, the New Mexico ruling ordered Meta to implement new safety measures on its platforms, including time limits for minors, restrictions on AI chatbots, and mandatory warnings on the platforms, but its order only applied to users in the state.
In recent years, Meta has introduced numerous new features designed to protect minors. In 2024, it launched teen accounts on Instagram, which are private by default and include message and content restrictions, as well as parental controls. The company also uses artificial intelligence to determine if users under 13 are on Instagram or if teenagers lie about their age to access adult accounts.
But safety advocates have called on the company to do more. According to the BBC, this time the states suing Meta are also demanding many more changes in how Instagram and Facebook operate for young people.
They want Meta to: implement a parental verification process for teen users; change its “dopamine-manipulating recommendation algorithms”; remove many image filters that alter appearance in photos; stop autoplay of video content; ban the creation of multiple accounts; and remove ephemeral or disappearing posts, such as Instagram stories.
“All these features are fundamental to the current user experience on Meta’s platforms,” acknowledges the British broadcaster. “If Meta implemented such changes, it would represent a significant alteration in the experience of its platforms (…) Instagram and Facebook could change forever if Meta loses the child privacy trial,” it added.
According to the states, these features are also designed to keep users, including teenagers and children, on the platforms as frequently and for as long as possible. They claim Meta even makes it difficult for young people to reduce platform use, through actions like frequent notifications designed to entice them back to the apps.
Torrez stated that the plaintiffs’ focus on app design features and alleged false safety statements “really provides a model for other states to hold them accountable.” This approach allows states to bypass Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has generally protected tech companies from legal liability due to third-party content on their platforms.
Meta and YouTube, owned by Google, lost a case in March when a jury in Los Angeles found the companies negligent and failed to warn users of the dangers associated with using their platforms. On that occasion, the Los Angeles Superior Court decided to award $6 million in damages to a young woman identified as K.G.M. or Kaley, who claimed she got hooked and became addicted to apps like Instagram and YouTube as a child.
The jury ruled in favor of the plaintiff, who alleged that Meta and YouTube’s negligence was a determining factor in the damage to her mental health. Compensatory damages were set at $3 million, of which Meta would pay 70% and YouTube the remaining 30%. Punitive damages amount to another $3 million, of which Meta was to pay $2.1 million and YouTube $900,000.
The crusade against social media abuses is being fought in the United States from the states, because the federal government under Donald Trump is a strong supporter of tech companies, notes El País. It often praises their executives and frequently hosts them in private meetings at the White House. As proof, major tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk (Tesla), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), and Tim Cook (Apple), among others, were special guests at Trump’s inauguration ceremony for his second term.
