Meta on Trial Over Alleged Child Endangerment

One of the most consequential trials to date over the responsibility of social networks to protect minors has begun for Meta Platforms in California. A bipartisan coalition of U.S. states accuses the parent company of Facebook and Instagram of deliberately designing its platforms to keep children and teenagers online for as long as possible. According to the plaintiffs, Meta knew of risks to the mental and physical health of young users but played them down to the public and parents.

The trial before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland began with opening statements on August 18 after the jury was selected. At the center are lawsuits by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey as the leading states in a much larger legal offensive launched in 2023. At the time, dozens of attorneys general sued Meta over its business practices toward minors.

The case is of considerable significance for the American technology industry. Unlike many earlier disputes over harmful content, this case is largely about the design of the products themselves: features such as infinite scrolling, likes, notifications, recommendation systems and other mechanisms intended to prompt users to return repeatedly. The states argue that Meta deliberately used such features even though minors are particularly susceptible to corresponding reward and feedback mechanisms.

Meta rejects the allegations. The company denies having developed Facebook and Instagram with the aim of making children addicted and points to years of investment in youth protection, parental controls and special teen accounts. The defense also argues that the plaintiffs present the state of scientific research on the connection between social media and mental health problems among teenagers too definitively. According to Meta, a correlation between intensive use and mental health problems does not automatically establish direct causation by Instagram or Facebook.

Bonta: Meta put profit before child safety

Politically, the case is being driven above all by California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Before the trial began, the Democrat had already said that the lawsuit was not merely directed at individual problematic content, but at fundamental business and product decisions by the company.

“Meta is prioritizing profits over the safety of children,” Bonta said at the end of June after Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected an attempt by Meta to end significant parts of the case before trial. Bonta announced that he intended to hold the company “fully accountable” in court.

The wording illustrates the plaintiffs’ strategy. They do not merely want to prove that teenagers can encounter problematic content on Instagram or Facebook. The decisive allegation goes further: Meta created economic incentives that encourage intensive use by minors and in some cases failed to implement protective measures or implemented them only after delays.

The complaint relies, among other things, on internal documents, product decisions and statements by former employees. One of the witnesses is former Meta engineer and whistleblower Arturo Béjar, who had already testified before the U.S. Congress about his experiences with safety problems on Instagram. According to Reuters, Béjar said in the current proceedings that children’s safety concerns had not been sufficiently taken into account in product decisions.

For Meta, this line of evidence is particularly sensitive. The plaintiffs do not have to prove that every mental illness of a young Instagram user was directly caused by the platform. Rather, they are trying to show that certain design decisions created or intensified foreseeable risks and that Meta simultaneously presented consumers with a misleading picture of the safety of its products.

A case involving 29 states

The current trial stems from a broader initiative by U.S. attorneys general. The dispute now encompasses claims by a total of 29 states, with California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey taking leading roles in the current proceedings. The political distinction is that criticism of Meta does not follow the usual party lines. Republican- and Democratic-led states have participated in cases against the company.

When the lawsuit was filed in 2023, Colorado’s then-Attorney General Phil Weiser compared Meta to the tobacco industry. The company had maximized its profits “at the expense of public health” and had harmed young people in particular, Weiser said.

This comparison with “Big Tobacco” has since become a recurring political theme in Washington. Supporters of stricter regulation argue that, much like tobacco companies, social networks marketed a profitable product for years while internal findings about possible risks were not sufficiently reflected in their public messaging.

Meta considers this analogy misleading. Social media is not a substance whose harmful health effects can be equated with tobacco. Millions of teenagers use Instagram for communication, creativity and social contact. The company also says it has continuously expanded its safety measures.

Dick Durbin: “Big Tech has become Big Tobacco”

Among the most prominent critics in Congress is Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. After Meta suffered legal defeats in March in a separate case in New Mexico and, together with YouTube, in a California case, Durbin explicitly stated the political consequence.

“These back-to-back decisions in New Mexico and California show that Big Tech has become Big Tobacco,” Durbin said. At the same time, the senator called on Congress to fundamentally restructure the legal protections for platform operators under Section 230.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 generally protects internet platforms from being held liable like traditional publishers for many types of content posted by users. Current cases, however, are increasingly trying to circumvent this protection by making not the content of an individual post, but the construction and functioning of the platform itself, the subject of liability.

Precisely this distinction could become decisive in the long term. If courts accept the view that recommendation systems, notification mechanisms or other engagement features can be treated as independent product decisions, this could significantly expand the legal scope for lawsuits against social networks.

Durbin explicitly sees this as a mandate for lawmakers. After the New Mexico case, he told the Judiciary Committee that the technology industry’s years of promises to make its products safer on its own had led to “failure after failure.” Congress therefore had to act.

Republicans are also increasing the pressure

Demands for stricter rules are not coming only from Democrats. The Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, launched a new investigation into Meta in July. It was prompted by whistleblower statements alleging that the company disadvantaged or fired employees after they raised safety problems with Congress.

Grassley’s office said it was investigating claims that Meta had pursued a longer-term strategy of discrediting internal critics as “leakers.” In a letter to the leadership of Meta, Facebook and Instagram, the senator demanded answers to the allegations.

The treatment of children on social networks is thus becoming one of the few areas of American technology policy where there remains substantial bipartisan overlap. Democrats often emphasize consumer protection, mental health and the responsibility of large corporations. Republicans sometimes place different emphasis, but they also support stronger parental rights, age checks and ways to hold platform operators liable for harm.

A current example is Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona. The Democrat introduced the Parental Approval for Youth Social Media Act in early August. Under the bill, children under the age of 16 would generally be allowed to open or maintain an account on a social network only with the consent of a parent.

“Big Tech is profiting off of that very screen time,” Gallego said. It was time for a nationwide rule to protect children.

The bill would also require platforms to verify the age of their users as well as parental consent. This addresses a question that also plays a central role in the Meta case: How much responsibility does the platform operator bear for knowing in the first place whether a child is behind an account?

COPPA becomes a central point of dispute

A second legal focus is therefore the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. The federal law contains special data protection rules for online services that collect personal data from children under the age of 13.

The plaintiff states accuse Meta of having known that many children under 13 were using its platforms. Nevertheless, data from those users were allegedly processed without obtaining sufficient parental consent.

Even before the trial began, the states achieved an important partial victory on this point. The court did not accept Meta’s argument that the consents obtained by the company were generally sufficient to meet COPPA requirements. The decision removed a major line of defense for the company, without prejudging the final question of liability.

Meta will therefore have to defend not only its product design at trial. The company must also defend itself against the allegation that, in dealing with particularly young users, it violated federal data protection requirements.

Dispute over possible trillion-dollar penalties

The case is drawing additional attention because of its potential financial dimension. In a court filing, Meta argued that the calculation method advocated by the four leading states could theoretically result in penalties of around $1.4 trillion. That figure is of a magnitude that would be extraordinary even for one of the world’s most valuable technology companies.

The figure, however, must not be confused with an established demand or even a likely judgment. It comes from Meta’s own calculation of possible statutory penalties. According to later reports, Judge Gonzalez Rogers described the presentation of such a potential level of damages as unconvincing or exaggerated. The actual financial burden will initially depend on which violations the plaintiffs can prove at all and what legal consequences the court then derives from them.

Nevertheless, the dispute shows why Meta treats the case as existentially important. Under consumer and data protection laws, statutory penalties can be multiplied by the number of individual violations. For platforms with millions of users, this can theoretically produce enormous sums.

In addition, the states are not only seeking money. They are also seeking changes to the platforms. A judgment could therefore directly influence how Instagram and Facebook recommend content to minors, which notifications they receive, which features are activated by default and how users’ ages are verified.

Meta has expanded its youth protection measures

Meta, for its part, points out that the platforms now function significantly differently from the years to which many of the plaintiffs’ internal documents refer. The company has introduced so-called Teen Accounts, in which protective mechanisms are activated by default. These include restrictions on contacts, content and messages, as well as additional control options for parents.

These changes, however, do not eliminate the political dispute. A bipartisan group of senators led by Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Republican Katie Britt of Alabama asked Zuckerberg earlier this year why certain protective measures had not been introduced much earlier.

The senators pointed to court documents according to which Meta had allegedly discussed risks to young users years earlier. Particularly problematic, they said, was the suspicion that protective measures may have been delayed because they would have reduced usage and therefore engagement. The senators described the allegations as “alarming” and demanded additional information from Zuckerberg.

This question is also likely to play a role in court: not only which safety features Meta offers today, but when the company knew about which risks and how it responded to them.

Zuckerberg is expected to testify himself

The trial in Oakland is scheduled to last several weeks. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is among the executives expected to testify. The company’s founder could therefore be personally questioned about internal decisions concerning growth, engagement and youth protection.

For the plaintiffs, such testimony would be of particular importance. They are trying to show that decisions about safety features were not made merely at lower levels of the company, but that senior management was informed about the possible consequences of the platforms.

Meta, in turn, is likely to try to place the internal documents in their respective historical and scientific context. Under this line of argument, individual studies or employee warnings are not proof that the company knew its products caused mental illness. At a company of this size, internal debates about risks and different product options inevitably exist.

Several legal defeats already in 2026

The Oakland trial is also not taking place in isolation. Meta has already suffered significant defeats in other cases this year. In New Mexico, the company was held responsible over its treatment of minors and the safety of its platforms. Another California case ended with a jury verdict against Meta and YouTube in connection with a plaintiff who alleged problematic social media use since childhood.

Meta continues to dispute key allegations and is legally challenging decisions. Nevertheless, the cases are significantly increasing the pressure because different plaintiffs are increasingly relying on similar patterns of argument: platforms are not merely neutral intermediaries of third-party content, but products whose operators themselves decide which mechanisms generate attention and which content is algorithmically amplified.

Further cases brought by individuals, families and school districts are proceeding in parallel. Legal developments in California could therefore have effects far beyond the states directly involved.

At the same time, the old antitrust dispute continues

Meta’s legal problems are not limited to youth protection. In parallel, the Federal Trade Commission is continuing its long-running antitrust dispute with the company.

The FTC accuses Meta of having secured its dominant position in personal social networking through the acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. A federal court ruled in Meta’s favor in November 2025. The FTC appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in January 2026.

Daniel Guarnera, head of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, said Meta had defended its dominant position not through normal competition but “by buying its most significant competitive threats.” The agency would continue to pursue the case.

Meta is therefore being confronted simultaneously on several legal fronts with fundamental questions about its business model: the antitrust case concerns how the company built and maintained its market power. The youth protection case concerns whether the mechanisms Facebook and Instagram use to bind users were deployed unlawfully toward minors.

Lobby battle in Washington

The court dispute now also has direct effects on legislation in Washington. Reuters reported in June that Meta had lobbied Congress for a legal provision that could protect technology companies from certain lawsuits over harm to children. According to critics, a corresponding provision in the context of the Kids Online Safety Act could make ongoing cases against platform operators more difficult.

For politicians who have demanded tougher liability rules for years, this is a central conflict. While courts examine whether existing consumer protection, data protection and product liability laws can be applied to social networks, Congress is struggling to create new nationwide standards.

Section 230 in particular remains controversial. Durbin and Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, together with other lawmakers, have pushed for changes intended to give victims of child sexual exploitation better opportunities to hold platform companies accountable in court. In April, Durbin and Hawley appeared together with New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez and called on Congress to take further steps.

The fact that Democrats and Republicans are appearing together on this issue does not, however, mean that comprehensive reform is imminent. Previous attempts at nationwide youth protection laws repeatedly failed because of differences over freedom of expression, privacy, age verification, the role of parents and the scope of government regulation.

The trial could change the rules for social networks

The Oakland proceedings are therefore more than a dispute over possible penalties. At its core, the court must decide where the boundary lies between a successful digital product designed for high user activity and unlawfully manipulative design toward minors.

A victory for the states could establish new legal standards for how social networks may develop their products for children and teenagers. Meta, but also TikTok, Snap, YouTube and other platforms, would then face the question of whether engagement features for minors must fundamentally be designed differently.

A Meta victory, conversely, would have considerable significance for the defense strategy of the entire industry. It could confirm that the states have difficulty proving a direct legal connection between individual design features, duration of use and specific health harms.

The judgment will therefore be watched far beyond Facebook and Instagram. The American debate has already shifted: the focus is no longer solely on the question of what content children see on the internet. Increasingly, the issue is why platforms show them certain content, how long they keep them there and what economic interests lie behind these mechanisms.

For Meta, the trial is therefore a test of its business model. For the states, it is a test of whether existing consumer and data protection law is sufficient to limit how global social media platforms operate. And for Congress, the case increases the pressure, after years of bipartisan hearings, to decide whether the rules for protecting minors in the digital space need to be fundamentally rewritten.