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A federal courtroom in Oakland is now the stage for a case that could change how your child’s favorite apps are built. Four states are arguing that Meta engineered Instagram and Facebook to hook kids the way a slot machine hooks an adult, and that company leaders knew it and stayed quiet. The trial opened this week, and an internal Meta document read aloud in court put it plainly: the company’s own goal, in writing, was “teen time spent” on the platform.
What’s Actually Happening in Court
Attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are suing Meta Platforms in a trial that started August 18 in federal court in Oakland. The case is part of a larger group of lawsuits filed by 29 states against the company. Opening statements laid out the core argument: California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill told an eight-member advisory jury that Meta’s business model comes down to four steps, “hook” young users, “hold” their attention, “harvest” their data, and “hide” what the company knew about the harm.
The states point to specific design choices as evidence: infinite scroll, autoplay video, beauty filters, and algorithms built to maximize how long a user stays on the app. They’re asking the court to force Meta to remove or change those features for young users, not just pay a penalty. Court filings put the potential financial penalty as high as 1.4 trillion dollars, though California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the states haven’t fixed on a specific number and accused Meta of using that figure to make the case look extreme.
The states also allege Meta broke the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, by collecting data on users under 13 without parental consent.
Meta has denied the claims. A company spokesperson said the states are relying on cherry-picked internal documents taken out of context, and pointed to safety features already in place, including expanded teen privacy settings and a one-hour usage timer built into Instagram. In his opening statement, Meta attorney Paul Schmidt argued the company has openly discussed the challenge some teens have managing their time on social media and has worked to address it, casting the states’ case as a disagreement over how fast that work has moved rather than proof of concealment.
The trial is expected to run about six weeks. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg could be called to testify, though attorneys hadn’t confirmed that as of opening arguments.
What the Witnesses Are Saying
The first witness was Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineer who worked on product safety for eight years across two stints at the company. Béjar testified that he helped build internal surveys asking users, including teenagers, how often they encountered harmful content like bullying, self-harm material, and violence. He said Meta chose not to publicize those findings and instead reported different metrics that measured policy violations rather than actual harm experienced by users.
“I think that these numbers create a false impression of safety,” Béjar told the court. In one internal study covering more than 200,000 users, he said younger people reported higher rates of harmful encounters across nearly every category researchers tracked. He also testified that Meta internally used the term “problematic use” instead of “addiction,” a labeling choice he said understated what outside academic research would classify as addictive behavior.
Béjar’s account carries added credibility from who he is: a longtime trust-and-safety insider rather than an outside critic, and someone Meta itself tried to keep off the witness stand before the trial began. His testimony continued into Wednesday, and the states plan to call additional former employees and outside researchers over the coming weeks to build on the same core claim: that the company had clear internal evidence of harm and chose which parts of it to make public.
This isn’t Meta’s first courtroom loss on this subject. In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google responsible for a young woman’s depression and anxiety tied to compulsive social media use that began in childhood, awarding her 6 million dollars. Separately, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay 567 million dollars and put new safety measures in place after a jury found the company failed to protect young users from child sexual exploitation on its platforms. Legal observers have compared the current wave of litigation to the 1990s tobacco lawsuits that eventually forced sweeping changes to how cigarettes were marketed.
What This Means for Parents Right Now
Nothing about your child’s Instagram or Facebook account changes today. The trial is expected to run into the fall, and any court-ordered changes to app design would likely take more time after that to show up in the product you and your child actually use.
What’s useful for parents in the meantime is the specific list of features named in the case: it doubles as a checklist for what to watch on your own child’s phone: infinite scroll (a feed with no natural stopping point), autoplay (the next video starts before anyone decided to watch it), beauty filters (tied in the lawsuit to concerns about body image and eating disorders), and engagement-driven algorithms (a feed that learns what keeps a specific child watching and serves more of exactly that).
You don’t need a court ruling to act on any of these at home. Instagram’s built-in one-hour timer, mentioned by Meta as a safety measure, requires a manual setup step and is easy to miss unless a parent sets it up directly with a teen. Turning off autoplay in a platform’s settings, agreeing on set stopping points for scrolling, and talking through how filters work (and why a filtered photo isn’t a fair comparison for a body still growing) are steps that don’t require waiting on a verdict.
It’s also worth talking to older kids and teens directly about what came out in Béjar’s testimony: that the app’s design isn’t neutral, and that companies have studied, in detail, what keeps a young user scrolling. Kids who understand that the feed is built to hold their attention, on purpose, sometimes make different choices about how they use it than kids who assume the design is incidental.
How We Got Here
This trial didn’t come out of nowhere. Meta and other major platforms have faced years of pressure over youth mental health, starting with the 2021 disclosures from former Meta employee Frances Haugen, who leaked internal research showing the company’s own studies linked Instagram use to body image problems and depressive symptoms in some teen girls. That research became a reference point cited repeatedly in the states’ filings, evidence, the states argue, that Meta understood the risks years before this trial began.
State attorneys general first sued Meta collectively in 2023, with 33 states joining a federal complaint and dozens more filing in state courts. From that point, the cases moved at different speeds through different court systems, which is why a Los Angeles jury and a New Mexico judge issued rulings against Meta months before this Oakland trial even started. The federal case now underway groups California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey together, with the outcome likely to influence how the remaining state cases proceed.
Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to pass federal legislation directly addressing these design questions. The Kids Online Safety Act has been reintroduced multiple times without reaching a final vote, which is part of why state attorneys general and private litigation have become the main paths for pushing on the issue instead of new federal law.
Why This Case Feels Different
Most past efforts to hold social media companies accountable ran into a legal wall: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields platforms from liability for content posted by their users, and the First Amendment adds another layer of protection. This case sidesteps both by focusing on design rather than content. The states aren’t arguing that a specific post harmed a specific child. They’re arguing that the architecture of the product itself, the scroll, the autoplay, the algorithm, was built to be hard to put down, regardless of what’s in any individual post.
That distinction is why legal experts are watching this trial closely, and why a ruling against Meta could open the door to similar cases against other platforms built on the same engagement-driven model. For families, the outcome likely won’t change what’s on the screen tomorrow. It could shape what that screen looks like in a year or two, and it puts a public, detailed record on exactly what platforms have known about their own products all along.
Attorney General Bonta told NPR ahead of the trial that he believes Meta can redesign its products to be less harmful to kids without giving up its business. “We want Meta, in short, to stop hurting our kids, stop knowingly hurting our kids, stop using features that you know create mental health harms to kids,” he said. “I think it’s pretty simple. I think most parents, guardians, teachers know about these harms and want them to stop.” Whether the court agrees, and what it orders Meta to change if it does, won’t be known for weeks. In the meantime, the specific features named in this case, the endless feed, the autoplay, the filters, the algorithm learning what keeps a kid watching, are all sitting on your child’s phone right now, and every one of them can be adjusted or turned off tonight, whatever a jury eventually decides.