Thirty US States Take Meta to Trial Over Child Safety, Seeking Up to $1 Trillion
A federal jury trial launched this week could force Facebook and Instagram to strip out some of their most addictive features, and cost Meta more money than most countries earn in a year.
Key points
- Thirty US states filed a lawsuit in 2023 claiming Meta broke federal and state laws designed to protect children's privacy online.
- The states are seeking damages of up to $1 trillion from Meta, described by one attorney general as "the largest consumer protection lawsuit in American history".
- A separate New Mexico judge already fined Meta $942 million in an earlier ruling and declared it a public nuisance.
- The states want Instagram and Facebook to remove like counts, endless scrolling, and video autoplay for users under 18.
- Meta denies the allegations and says the evidence will show its commitment to young users.
A jury trial that opened this week in a California federal court puts Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, in the dock over claims that it knowingly built features designed to hook children on its platforms and hid what its own research showed about the damage those features caused.
The case was brought by attorneys general (the top law-enforcement officers) from 30 US states, including California and New York. Together, those states represent close to two-thirds of the American population.
Who is suing, and what exactly do they want?
The coalition of 30 state attorneys general wants two things: money and change. On the money side, they are seeking up to $1 trillion from Meta. On the change side, they want the company to rip out features they say are engineered to keep young people glued to their screens.
The specific demands include:
- Ending the display of "like" counts, the running tally of approvals that users see on every post
- Removing infinite scroll, where new content loads automatically so users never hit a natural stopping point
- Stopping autoplay video, which rolls the next clip before a viewer decides to watch it
- Requiring parents to verify their child's age before the child can sign up
- Banning accounts from sending or receiving explicit images
- Prohibiting disappearing posts such as Instagram Stories
Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman drew an explicit comparison to past mass litigation. "We did it with the Tobacco Settlement in the 1990s. We did it with the companies behind the opioid crisis. We'll do it again with Meta," he said.
How bad could this get for Meta?
Very bad, potentially. The company is currently worth around $1.5 trillion on the stock market, so a $1 trillion penalty would be existential.
The trial is being heard by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, a chief federal judge in California known, after nearly two decades on the bench, for being direct and hard to impress. She also presided over the high-profile dispute between Elon Musk and Sam Altman.
A separate ruling in New Mexico earlier this year gives a sense of what defeat looks like. Judge Bryan Biedscheid fined Meta $942 million, ordered it to remove like counts for under-18 users in that state, and declared the company a "public nuisance", comparing it to a factory polluting the air. Meta said it would appeal.
| Proceeding | Outcome | Damages / Demands |
|---|---|---|
| New Mexico ruling (2025) | Meta lost; appealing | $942 million fine |
| 30-state federal trial (ongoing) | Jury deliberating | Up to $1 trillion sought |
| Earlier individual lawsuits | Mixed results | Varies by case |
What does Meta say?
The company denies all of it. "We strongly disagree with these allegations and are confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people," a Meta spokeswoman said. Meta has handed over more than two million internal documents as part of the case.
The states argue those documents work against Meta. Lawyers point to the company's own internal research, which reportedly linked Instagram's like-count feature to "social comparison", meaning the habit of measuring your own worth against other people's photos. That comparison, Meta's researchers wrote, was tied to "increased loneliness, worse body image, and negative mood", according to BBC News, which has reported extensively on the documents.
What should parents and young people do right now?
Whatever the verdict, the trial will take time. Parents worried about their children's use of Instagram or Facebook can act without waiting. Setting screen-time limits through the phone's built-in controls costs nothing. Many phones also let parents turn off notifications from specific apps during school hours and at night. Talking openly with children about how like counts work, and why they are designed to feel meaningful, is equally practical.
