Meta Goes on Trial in Oakland Over Claims It Designed Facebook and Instagram to Hook Children

Verified key facts

• Opening statements began on Tuesday 18 August in federal court in Oakland before US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, according to CNBC and ABC7 San Francisco.
• California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are co-leading the trial; 29 states sued Meta in 2023 and the remaining 25 are scheduled to go to trial later, per NBC News.
• California attorney general Rob Bonta said the case concerns civil penalties, restitution and distortion, and told reporters it is not a damages case, according to CNBC.
• The trial is expected to run six to seven weeks, with Mark Zuckerberg and other current and former executives expected to testify, per the Washington Times and NBC News.
• The states allege Meta collected data on children under 13 without parental consent in breach of federal law, according to NPR and Al Jazeera.
• A Los Angeles jury in March found Meta and Google to blame for a young woman's depression and anxiety and awarded her $6m, per Al Jazeera.

Opening statements in Oakland

Lawyers for four American states opened their case against Meta on Tuesday in federal court in Oakland, California, before US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. The claim, in its simplest form, is that the company understood how its products affected young users and built them that way regardless.

The proceedings are expected to run six to seven weeks, according to reporting by CNBC and the Washington Times, with Mark Zuckerberg and a roster of current and former executives and employees expected to give evidence. Bloomberg, previewing the trial, described the company as facing a threat measured against its trillion-dollar valuation.

Twenty-nine states, four in the front row

Twenty-nine states sued Meta in 2023 over child safety and privacy. Four of them, California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, are co-leading this trial, NBC News reported, with the remaining twenty-five scheduled to go to trial later. The structure is deliberate: this case is a bellwether within a multidistrict litigation that consolidates thousands of similar claims.

That is why the outcome carries weight beyond the four plaintiffs. Bellwether trials exist to give both sides a read on how juries respond to a shared body of evidence, and settlements across the remainder of a multidistrict litigation are frequently priced off the first verdicts to land.

NBC News reported separately that a court ruling this year confirmed Meta and other technology companies must face thousands of these claims rather than have them dismissed at the threshold. That decision is what turned a long-running procedural argument into a trial with a jury, an evidence list and a calendar.

The design features at the centre of the case

The states are not arguing that social media is harmful in the abstract. Their case, as summarised by NPR and Al Jazeera, names specific mechanisms: the like button, the infinite-scroll feed, and recommendation algorithms that the complaint says were deployed to capture young users' attention and prolong their time on the platforms.

Framing the claim around discrete design decisions rather than around content is a legal choice as much as a factual one. Content-based theories run into well-established protections for platforms; product-design theories ask instead whether a company built something it knew to be harmful, which is closer to ordinary consumer-protection and product-liability ground.

This is not a damages case

Speaking to reporters after opening arguments, California's attorney general Rob Bonta set out what his side is asking for. The case, he said, centres on civil penalties, restitution and distortion. This is not a damages case, he added, according to CNBC.

The distinction is important. Damages compensate identified individuals for identified harm and require proof of causation person by person. Civil penalties and restitution operate at the level of the company's conduct, and the states are also seeking changes to how Meta operates Facebook and Instagram, a remedy that would outlast any cheque.

It also lowers a bar. A damages case would require the states to show that particular children were harmed in particular ways by particular features. A penalties and restitution case asks instead whether the conduct itself broke consumer-protection law, which is a question about the company's own records rather than about any individual user's medical history.

The under-13 data claim

Running alongside the design allegations is a narrower and more technical claim: that Meta routinely collected data on children under thirteen without their parents' consent, in breach of federal law. NPR and Al Jazeera both report it as a central strand of the case rather than a secondary one.

Claims of that kind tend to turn on documents rather than on expert testimony. What internal analytics showed about the age of users, what the company did once it knew, and how age-assurance systems performed in practice are questions with paper answers, which is one reason both sides have fought hard over what evidence reaches the jury.

Two earlier losses and a six-million-dollar verdict

Meta does not arrive in Oakland with a clean record on these questions. Al Jazeera reported that the company has already lost two state-court cases this year on claims similar to those in the federal suit, and that a Los Angeles jury in March found Meta and Google to blame for a young woman's depression and anxiety, awarding her $6m in damages.

Those verdicts do not bind Judge Gonzalez Rogers or her jury. They do, however, establish that juries have been willing to accept the causal chain the states are advancing, which changes the calculation on both sides of any settlement discussion.

Zuckerberg on the stand and the twenty-five states still waiting

Meta has denied the allegations throughout the litigation, and its own opening statement and defence case are still to come; nothing the jury has heard so far has been tested by cross-examination. The company's account of what it knew, and when, will be the substance of the next several weeks.

The immediate landmarks are Zuckerberg's appearance, the internal research the states have said they will put in front of the jury, and the verdict form Judge Gonzalez Rogers ultimately settles on. Beyond that sit twenty-five more states whose own trial dates have not yet arrived, and for whom this jury's answer will be the first real price signal.

Sources

• CNBC - California AG Bonta says case against Meta is about restitution and distortion, not damages
• NPR - Meta heads to court in a landmark trial about kids and social media addiction
• NBC News - Meta trial that could reshape Facebook and Instagram gets underway
• Al Jazeera - Landmark trial on Meta's impact on children's mental health begins in US
• ABC7 San Francisco - Opening statements to begin in Oakland in Meta's federal trial over Facebook, Instagram child safety
• Bloomberg - Meta Stares Down Trillion-Dollar Threat as Landmark Social Media Trial Begins