States take Meta to trial in California in the biggest fight yet over
social media harms to children
[August 17, 2026] By
BARBARA ORTUTAY
Of the thousands of lawsuits Meta faces over child safety on its
platforms, none may be more consequential than one going to trial this
week in California.
States are seeking extensive financial damages that could, in theory,
total as much as $1.4 trillion, plus changes to how the company operates
Facebook and Instagram.
The lawsuit accuses the social media giant of contributing to the youth
mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features
that get children addicted to its platforms. It also claims that Meta
routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents’
consent, in violation of federal law.
“Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice,
engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Its motive is profit,
and in seeking to maximize its financial gains,” the lawsuit says.
Dozens of states filed the lawsuit three years ago. The trial set to
begin Tuesday in federal court in Oakland, California, features four of
the states as plaintiffs — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New
Jersey. The other 25 states are expected to have trials later.
Meta said it disputes the allegations, and the trial evidence will show
its commitment to supporting young people. “We’ve listened to parents,
worked with experts and law enforcement, and conducted in-depth research
to understand the issues that matter most,” the company said in a
statement.
States seek to land a major blow against Meta
For Meta, which already lost two pivotal cases over harms to children
and teens this year, the stakes are high. The company reported a rare
profit decline last month, in part due to $2.4 billion in legal
expenses.
The $1.4 trillion figure, which Meta disclosed in a legal filing, is
almost as high as the Menlo Park, California, company’s entire market
capitalization — that is, the value of all its outstanding shares on the
stock market. Paying it would inevitably put Meta Platforms in
bankruptcy and perhaps put the company under state ownership.
“The state attorneys general are going for the gusto,” said Eric
Goldman, a professor and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at
Santa Clara University School of Law. “They are trying to set the
definitive precedent in this case and they have asked for extraordinary
damages and they are going to seek extraordinary structural remedies if
they succeed.”
Meta calls the possible penalty “untethered to any claimed violation” by
the states.
“A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer
protection enforcement,” Meta said in a July 6 filing with the U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of California.
If Meta loses the trial, the court would have wide discretion over the
size of any financial penalty, and legal experts say anything close to
$1.4 trillion would be unlikely.
“It’s not plausible in the sense that Meta doesn’t have that much money
and could not get it,” said James Grimmelmann, a law professor at
Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech. “An award that large would put Meta
into bankruptcy, wipe out its owners, and effectively result in the
states owning Meta.”
As a practical matter, Grimmelmann added, “that seems extremely unlikely
to happen.”
In other cases that have involved high potential damages for multiple
individual offenses, he said courts have stopped short of imposing the
maximum penalties. One example is the Anthropic artificial intelligence
training case, where plaintiffs were claiming damages of $150,000 per
book that Anthropic copied, but the penalty ended up being $3,000 per
book, totaling about $1.5 billion.
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Attorney Paul W. Schmidt, representing Meta, right, arrives at a
Federal Courthouse Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026, in Oakland, Calif. (AP
Photo/Jeff Chiu)
 Trial seeks to hold Meta
accountable on state and federal statutes
The federal trial this week is more complex than one earlier this
year, in Los Angeles, where a state court awarded $6 million in
damages from Meta and Google’s YouTube to a single plaintiff, a
young woman who testified she became addicted to social media as a
child.
That case was a bellwether, or test case, picked from thousands of
similar civil tort lawsuits to give both plaintiffs and the
defendants an idea of how their arguments fare in court. The jury
determined that Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design or
operation of their respective platforms, and that the negligence was
a substantial factor in causing harm to the plaintiff. They also
determined each company knew their platforms could be dangerous when
used by a minor and that they failed to adequately warn of that
danger.
The Oakland case, meanwhile, has state attorneys general as the
plaintiffs and centers on state and federal statutes they allege
Meta violated, which lay out potential penalty amounts for each
violation.
“And there’s a lot of them because it’s four different states and at
least three different kinds of statutes. There’s a child privacy
statute, there’s a false advertising statute and there’s unfair
competition statutes,” said Rebecca Allensworth, a professor at
Vanderbilt University Law School.
Meta has added safety tools — but states want more
An outcome that leads to changes in how Facebook and Instagram
operate could be as consequential as any financial penalty.
Meta has introduced a slew of new features in recent years designed
to protect minors. In 2024 it launched teen accounts on Instagram,
which are private by default and come with messaging and content
restrictions, and parental controls. The company also uses
artificial intelligence to determine if kids under 13 are using
Instagram or if teenagers are lying about their age to access adult
accounts.
Safety advocates have called on the company to do more. A New Mexico
judge earlier this month ordered new safety measures on the
platforms including time limits for minors, AI chatbot restrictions,
and mandatory warnings on the platforms, but his order applied only
to users in the state.
“These AGs have a real chance at fixing the product,” Laura
Marquez-Garrett of the Social Media Victims Law Center said Friday
in a virtual discussion with advocates hosted by the Tech Oversight
Project. “For these companies, this is a real point of reckoning. As
these cases go forward, this is a leap forward, folks, not a step.”
During jury selection last week, prospective jurors were asked
whether and how much they believe Meta has contributed to the youth
mental health crisis. While many agreed that it did, they also put
responsibility on parents, and said things like climate change and
the state of the world are also causing children's and teenagers'
mental health issues.
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AP Technology Writer Kaitlyn Huamani contributed to this report.
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