Meta Defends Child Safety Record in Landmark Trial

A landmark federal trial in Oakland, California, is testing whether Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, deliberately designed its platforms to be addictive to children and teens. Four states — California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey — are seeking billions of dollars in damages and fundamental changes to how Meta operates its apps, while the company insists it has taken child safety seriously and introduced numerous protections.

The Case Against Meta

The lawsuit, filed in 2023 by 29 state attorneys general, alleges violations of consumer protection laws, false and misleading statements, and violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting data on users under 13 without parental consent. The four states now in trial are seeking fines of approximately $200 billion, according to AP News.

In opening statements, California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill laid out the states’ case in stark terms. “Meta’s business model can be summed up in four simple words: ‘hook’ the users, ‘hold’ them for as long as they can, ‘harvest’ their data, and then ‘hide’ the truth from the public when making public statements,” she said, as reported by NPR. “It was especially bad for kids.”

O’Neill cited internal Meta communications, including a study titled “Long Term Retention: The Young Ones Are The Best Ones,” which examined how early use of the platforms correlated with long-term engagement and revenue generation. “For Meta, kids are the product,” she told jurors.

Meta’s Defense

Meta lawyer Paul Schmidt argued in his opening statement that the company takes child safety seriously and has introduced numerous protections, including Instagram Teen Accounts launched in 2024, parental supervision controls, time management tools, and in-app nudges for teen users.

“Children’s mental health, and what they do and see on social media, are all issues Meta takes seriously and tries to act on,” Schmidt said. He argued that much of the lawsuit is about government attorneys disagreeing with how Meta approaches improvement, telling the court, “It’s meaningful, and the evidence will be meaningful, these efforts Meta has taken to improve.”

Meta spokesperson Stephanie Otway pushed back on the states’ claims, telling Al Jazeera that “the state attorneys general offer no proof anyone in their states was misled” and accused them of attempting to “penalise Meta” for industry-wide challenges. “Rather than sticking to the facts or the law, the states have instead decided to chase an outlandish payout,” she added.

Whistleblower Testimony

The states’ first witness is Arturo Béjar, a former Meta safety engineer who worked at the company from 2009 to 2015 and returned as a contractor from 2019 to 2021. Béjar testified that Meta took a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to children under 13 on its platforms and that safety was an afterthought, according to AP News.

“If you step away from the product, they are not going to make any money,” Béjar said. He also testified that Meta used the euphemism “problematic use” rather than “addiction,” saying, “‘Problematic use’ is an example of something where they created a label and it undercounted what in some academic literature is considered to be addiction.”

Béjar described a company culture that made safety improvements nearly impossible. “At the end of the day, it was the company culture that Mark had created that made it so that it was practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the wellbeing and safety issues that we’ve been talking about,” he said, as reported by NPR.

Regarding safety features like Instagram’s “Take a Break” tool, Béjar said they are “designed to fail” because they are optional rather than default settings. “Most people will not turn the setting on,” he testified. “It’s like you have to turn on the air bag every time you get into the car.”

Critics Say Efforts Fall Short

Advocacy groups argue that Meta’s safety measures are insufficient. A September 2025 report co-authored by Béjar and four online safety nonprofits found that 60% of Meta’s 53 safety features for teens on Instagram were either not available or didn’t work as advertised, according to AP News.

Haley Hinkle, policy counsel at Fairplay, said the organization found that “what Meta was marketing under Teen Accounts was very lacking in actual protections.” Marc Berkman, executive director of the Organization for Social Media Safety, noted there’s been a “lack of real institutional willingness to act here.”

Ashley Shea, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University specializing in social media, pointed to what academics call “attention-capture deceptive designs” — including infinite scrolling, “casino style” pulls to refresh, push notifications, and algorithmic recommendations — that “prey on the cognitive vulnerabilities” of young people with developing brains.

Prior Court Losses and Financial Pressure

Meta has already lost two major cases this year. In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for a young woman’s social media addiction, awarding $6 million in damages. A New Mexico case resulted in Meta being ordered to pay $942 million total — $375 million from a March jury verdict plus $567 million ordered by a judge in August, which also included new safety measures such as a 90-hour monthly time limit for users under 18.

The company reported a rare profit decline in Q2 2026, in part due to $2.4 billion in legal expenses, and its stock closed down 4.4% on the first day of the trial. The stakes are existential: potential penalties could reach as high as $1.4 trillion, roughly Meta’s market cap, though the coalition is seeking approximately $200 billion.

Broader Legal Landscape

The trial is part of an avalanche of lawsuits against Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube over social media harms to children. Hundreds of school districts and thousands of individual plaintiffs have filed similar lawsuits, with the The Guardian reporting that the case has been compared by some legal experts to landmark tobacco litigation in the 1990s.

Unlike previous legal challenges that were shielded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, this trial focuses on design rather than content — arguing that the platforms themselves were built to be addictive. The jury’s role is advisory; Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will make the final decision.

What’s Next

The trial is expected to last six to eight weeks, with testimony from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri potentially expected. Outside the courthouse, parents of children who died from social media-related harms gathered with banners bearing victims’ names. Mary Rodee, whose 15-year-old son Riley Basford died by suicide after being sextorted on Facebook Messenger, said, “It’s not just a banner. Every name that I wrote on there is a promise that these children will never be forgotten and that their stories will force accountability where silence once reigned.”

As Ashley Shea noted, “The momentum only continues to grow. Ultimately, these are for-profit companies that respond to economic pressures. And so I think that the more economic pressure they’re confronted with through these litigations, the quicker they will have to adapt.” The outcome of this trial could reshape how social media platforms are designed and operated for years to come.