Meta headed to a US court on August 18, 2026 to face accusations that they broke child safety laws and harmed underage users’ mental health.
It has even been highlighted that a loss could mathematically bankrupt Mark Zuckerberg’s company and force permanent changes to Facebook and Instagram.
California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are suing Meta in a federal court in Oakland, California. The four states are parties to a wider lawsuit involving a total of 29 states, filed in 2023. The remaining 25 states are expected to have their trials at later dates.
Attorneys general in all 29 states have consolidated thousands of individual complaints – a practice known as multi-district litigation – all alleging that Meta knowingly harmed their youngest and most vulnerable users.
All four states argue that the social media giant deliberately engineered their platforms to keep children and teenagers scrolling for as long as possible, while knowingly allowing under-13s to use these platforms without parental consent.
“Meta have harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Their motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize their financial gains”, the lawsuit states.
These addictive design features – including the infinite scroll feature and algorithms that encourage “compulsive use” – amount to unfair, fraudulent, or deceptive business practices in all four states, the plaintiffs allege.
Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges that Meta know their products are harming users’ mental health, but “prioritize engagement and profits to the detriment of young users’ well-being”, for example by recommending “content related to eating disorders” to young girls.
On top of these ‘addiction’ allegations, the four plaintiffs claim that Meta violated federal law, namely the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), by collecting personal information from under-13s without obtaining parental consent, and instead fall back on their nominal ban on the said users to skirt their COPPA obligations.
But Meta’s own records reveal that they have actual knowledge that Instagram and Facebook target and successfully enroll children as users, according to internal documents detailing the company’s efforts to increase “penetration” in the 11- to 13-year-old demographic.
The Oakland case comes after Meta suffered back-to-back legal losses this year.
In early March, a state court in New Mexico found the company liable for 75,000 violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act, fining the social media giant $375 million, before branding their platforms a “public nuisance” to teens’ mental health and imposing an additional fine of $567 million.
Later in March, Los Angeles County Superior Court ordered Meta to pay $3 million in compensation to a 20-year-old California woman identified as ‘Kaley’, who developed anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia after becoming addicted to Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms as a pre-teen. Meta were also ordered to pay $2.1 million in punitive damages.
The Los Angeles case was a bellwether, in that the jury accepted the plaintiff’s argument that the design features of Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms – and not the content that Kaley was exposed to – caused her harm.
Kaley’s lawyers presented some of the same internal documents included in the latest case, which show Meta employees discussing plans to bring in more under-13 users and maximize their screen time, and that the company are very much aware that heavy use of their platforms is linked to depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation among teens.
The Oakland trial marks the first time that these arguments will be heard in a federal courtroom, and the first time that Meta are being tried for breaches of state and federal law in the same case. Should Meta lose, the case could be brought to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and potentially to the US Supreme Court, where any ruling would set a legal precedent.
The four states are seeking damages of up to $1.4 trillion, a figure that would almost equal Meta’s entire market capitalization and therefore, potentially wipe out the company. However, this figure assumes individual payouts for hundreds of thousands of users affected by Meta’s practices, rather than a single payout for every deceptive practice committed by the company.
The plaintiffs also want Meta to implement a process of parental verification for teenage users, change their “dopamine-manipulating recommendation algorithms”, remove image filters “designed around beautification”, end the autoplay of video content, and end “ephemeral” video content such as stories.
Meta have long argued that mental health issues are triggered by far more factors than social media.
“Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app”, a company spokesperson said after losing the Los Angeles lawsuit in March. “We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online”.
Ahead of Tuesday's trial, Meta maintained: “These lawsuits misportray our company and the work we do every day to provide young people with safe, valuable experiences online. We have listened to parents, researched the issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teens online”.
Meta also pointed to their introduction of restricted teen accounts on Instagram last year, and their use of AI to detect teens attempting to use adult accounts as examples of these changes.
However, during his testimony in Los Angeles in March, Zuckerberg (left) admitted that it is “very difficult” to prevent under-13s from lying about their age to set up accounts.
Regarding the potential of a $1.4 trillion fine, Meta wrote in a court filing last month that “a sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement”.
