Meta Platforms deliberately sought to addict children on Facebook and Instagram in pursuit of profit, a California state lawyer told a jury on Tuesday as a trial began that could force sweeping changes to two of the world's most popular apps.
Megan O'Neill, a deputy attorney general for California, told the eight-person jury that the tech giant's business model was to hook users, keep them on its platforms for as long as possible, collect their data and then hide the truth from the public. That approach, she said, worked especially well with children, because Meta needed them as users and needed to reassure the adults who cared for them that they were safe.
Meta's lawyer, Paul Schmidt, countered in his opening statement that the company and its co-founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, shared a desire to improve their services rather than make them dangerous. He told jurors that Meta does not believe it will succeed if people dislike its products.
29 states join the case
A bipartisan group of 29 US states is suing Meta, seeking tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in penalties along with changes to how the company operates. The four states leading the case, California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, accuse Meta of designing Facebook and Instagram to addict young users, fueling anxiety, depression and even suicide, and of misleading consumers about the platforms' safety.
Jurors will also hear claims from all 29 states that Meta violated federal law by collecting and misusing children's personal data while they used its platforms.
The biggest test yet
The trial is taking place in federal court in Oakland, California. Jurors are expected to deliver an advisory verdict, but it will fall to US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to determine Meta's liability. If she finds the company responsible, Rogers could impose civil penalties and order changes to Facebook and Instagram.
Meta has said it made no misleading statements about safety and argues the states have not shown that their residents were harmed. Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri are expected to testify. The trial is expected to last six weeks.
Experts say the case is the biggest legal test yet of social media's effects on young users, unfolding amid wider global scrutiny of those impacts. Meta has said penalties could reach as much as $1.4 trillion, a figure close to the market value of the Menlo Park, California-based company. State attorneys general have not yet specified the penalties they are seeking, but said at a hearing last week that the total could be close to $200 billion, roughly equivalent to three years of Meta's net profit.
California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey also want Meta to introduce age restrictions and eliminate infinite scroll, the feature that encourages users to keep consuming new posts.
"They exploited children"
O'Neill told jurors the states were not trying to shut Meta down or end social media, saying the case was not about whether social media has some benefits for some people, because it does. But she said Meta exploited children for its own benefit, researching how children's brains work and react to online stimuli, and tracking every interaction children had on its apps.
She showed jurors an internal email sent to Mosseri stating that "teen time spent" was a company goal, and said Meta employees referred to Instagram internally as a drug and to themselves as dealers. O'Neill said Meta found that the younger a child was when they started using the app, the better, because they were more likely to keep using it and more likely to generate money for Meta over the long term.
Schmidt acknowledged employees might use more casual language in private conversations, but said jurors would hear what the employee who called Instagram a drug did next to make the platform safer.
Protesters outside court
Several critics of Meta gathered outside the courthouse as the trial opened. Among them was Mary Rodee, who said her 15-year-old son, Riley Basford, was targeted by a predator on Facebook before he died by suicide in 2021. She rejected the term "spontaneous suicide," saying it was instead the predictable result of a system that protects corporations instead of children.
Background to the lawsuit
The lawsuit began in 2023, two years after whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before a US Senate committee that Meta knew its products were not safe for children and knew how to fix the problem, but failed to act in order to protect profits.
Meta and other social media companies, including Snap, ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, and Alphabet, the owner of YouTube, face thousands of lawsuits from states, municipalities, school districts and individuals over whether their products harm young users.
In March, a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and Google to pay $6 million to a 20-year-old woman who said she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child. Earlier this month, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million to address teenage mental health problems, after the state's attorney general described its platforms as a public nuisance.
