States and the families of children Meta’s products hook are using the same consumer-protection laws that held Big Tobacco accountable to hold Big Tech accountable. This week a trial begins in federal court in Oakland, where four states — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey — argue that Meta misled the public about the harms its platforms inflict on young minds. Nobody should be fooled by Meta’s contrition into believing the company can police itself into protecting children.
Meta now faces thousands of lawsuits in state and federal courts alleging it fueled an epidemic of youth mental illness. There is no question more young people are in trouble as smartphones and social media have become ubiquitous. Accountability litigation is one of the few tools that can reach a corporation this powerful.
What the state Attorneys General and the plaintiffs’ bar want is what the tobacco settlement once forced on the cigarette companies — the cost of designing products that hook children, and the cost of lying about it. As Meta seeks to compete in artificial intelligence with OpenAI, Anthropic and Chinese open-weight models, the reckoning for what it has already done should not have to wait. The litigation is the bill for the business it had no business running.
This spring a federal jury found Meta and YouTube liable for one young woman’s mental spiral and awarded $6 million in damages. Meta is appealing the verdict, but thousands of similar claims are coming. Meta in May settled a lawsuit by a small Kentucky school district for $9 million.
This month a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million to abate an alleged public nuisance caused by its platform. That followed a $375 million penalty by a New Mexico jury this spring for misleading users about the safety of its platforms. The accumulating verdicts are what the trillion-dollar ask in Oakland foretells. More than 40 other state AGs have filed lawsuits making similar claims.
In the bellwether trial that begins this week in Oakland, Calif., the four states are seeking $1.4 trillion — yes, trillion — in damages. That is nearly Meta’s market value of $1.5 trillion, a measure of how much value the company extracted while publicly claiming to prioritize youth safety. The states claim Meta designed Facebook and Instagram “to maximize profits” and deployed “harmful features” that “addict children and teens to their severe mental and physical detriment, all the while misleading the public regarding the existence and severity of these risks,” to quote California AG Rob Bonta. They have it right.
Because the states are making claims under their general laws for consumer protection and unfair business practices, they have a path that does not require children to testify in every individual case about the harm Meta inflicted. The AGs lean on public statements by Meta executives saying the company prioritized youth safety — statements demonstrably at odds with features designed to keep young people scrolling.
Meta argues it implemented measures to protect young users from predators, such as restricting direct messages from adults. It also added features that remind teens to take a break if they have been scrolling for long periods, and lets them impose daily time limits on their usage. These are the safety features Meta installed after the harm its platforms were causing became impossible to deny. The patina was its only answer.
The AGs claim these tools were a patina of safety that did not stop compulsive use. They are right. Meta could have done more to limit the time teens spend on its platform. The tragedy is not that teens would have switched to other apps; the tragedy is that Meta optimized for the screen time its platforms were designed to capture — and the apps waiting to capture them next were built on the same model.
States also claim Meta committed unfair business practices by letting users create multiple Instagram accounts, which lets kids circumvent parental controls and the rules barring children under 13 from creating accounts. Meta deactivates accounts it suspects are underage. But the AGs argue that if one account is blocked, an underage user simply opens another — a workaround Meta has had every opportunity to close.
The AGs also claim Meta violates the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act because it does not do enough to block underage users who misrepresent their age. That age-verification has stalled in Congress is the predictable result of the lobbying Meta has run for years. A company that does not want its age limits enforced has every reason to keep them unenforceable.
Some states in recent years have passed laws seeking to address problematic youth social-media use, including banning smartphones in schools and requiring parental consent for minors to create accounts.
These reforms will do real good. They will work alongside the legal accountability the AGs are pursuing. The trial lawyers are the only mechanism with the resources to take on a corporation with Meta’s war chest, in courts that are the only forum where a company this size can be made to answer.
Talk about exploiting children for profit — Meta’s product was built for it.
