For two days this week, my colleague Paresh Dave and I sat in a packed federal courtroom in Oakland, California, watching one of the most consequential legal battles over children’s safety on social media unfold in real time. The defendant was Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and the plaintiffs were 29 state attorneys general from across the country, led by the top law enforcement officers of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. The trial is taking place in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, before Chief District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, and it carries the weight of years of accumulated anger, grief, and frustration over what social media has done to young people. This is not Meta’s first time in the dock, of course. Earlier this year, Meta and YouTube lost a landmark California case in which a jury found them liable for harming a young user through certain design features. Then, just a few weeks ago, a New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay more than $940 million for being a public nuisance and causing psychological harm to children. But this federal trial feels different. It is not one family’s lawsuit or one state’s crusade; it is a coordinated, multi-state effort to hold Meta accountable under federal law, and the outcome could reshape how platforms treat minors for years to come. Walking into the courtroom, you could feel the tension in the air—lawyers in dark suits huddled over documents, journalists squeezed into the back benches, and a jury that would soon be asked to untangle some of the most complicated questions in modern technology law.
The heart of the plaintiffs’ case is a federal privacy law known as COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which was designed to protect children under the age of 13 from having their personal information collected without their parents’ consent. The state attorneys general argue that Meta violated this law by knowingly allowing children under 13 onto Facebook and Instagram, and then harvesting their data in ways that were neither transparent nor legally permissible. They also claim that Meta made deceptive statements about how its platforms work, statements that were likely to mislead consumers, including parents. The two apps at the center of the trial are Facebook and Instagram, both of which have long claimed to have minimum age requirements of 13, but both of which have been widely known to host younger users. The plaintiffs say this is not an accident. They argue that Meta built features specifically designed to attract children, to keep them engaged, and to extract as much personal data from them as possible, all while publicly insisting that it was protecting young users. Meta, for its part, denies these allegations. The company maintains that it satisfied COPPA’s requirements, that its statements about how its apps work were not deceptive or misleading, and that it should be shielded from liability by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. That law, which has become one of the most debated statutes in American internet law, essentially says that platforms are not responsible for the content that users post on them. Meta’s lawyers argue that this protection should extend to the design and operation of its apps, and that the states are trying to hold the company liable for things that are ultimately the responsibility of users and parents, not the platform itself.
Opening arguments set the tone for the entire trial. Megan O’Neill, the deputy attorney general at the California Department of Justice, stood before the jury and laid out the states’ theory in plain, forceful language. She told the jury that over the course of the trial, they would see just how many features Meta has built into its apps, and how those features work both individually and together to keep people inside the apps. The goal, she said, was to draw young users in and keep them coming back, again and again, for as long as possible. Meta, she argued, had used these features to hook children, to keep them scrolling, liking, commenting, and sharing, all while collecting vast amounts of personal information about them. It was a damning narrative, and O’Neill delivered it with the calm certainty of someone who believes deeply in her case. Then Meta’s lead attorney, Paul Schmidt, rose to respond. He did not try to deny that some children use Meta’s apps, nor did he pretend that social media is always a positive experience for teenagers. Instead, he pointed to the dozens of safety features that Meta has built into its platforms over the past several years, and he insisted that the company is genuinely committed to improving its apps. He also shifted some of the responsibility onto users and their families, noting that there is no dispute that some kids find their way onto Meta’s apps, and that some teenagers struggle to manage their time online. He reminded the jury that inevitably, some people will post negative content on social media, and that platforms cannot be expected to police every thought, every post, and every interaction. The courtroom was packed for these arguments, and you could see members of the jury leaning forward, trying to absorb the competing narratives. It was a classic legal clash: one side painting a picture of a corporate giant that knowingly exploited children for profit, the other side painting a picture of a company that has tried to do the right thing while navigating an impossible landscape of human behavior and technological complexity.
Perhaps the most striking testimony came from Arturo Bejar, a former Meta employee who has become a key witness in multiple trials involving the company. Bejar worked at Meta for years, and he testified this week about what he saw from the inside. His central message was simple and devastating: Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and CEO, did not prioritize youth safety. During Bejar’s time at the company, he said, the culture was such that if you had even an inkling of an idea for a feature that would spur growth, you could just test it. There was no rigorous process for asking whether that feature might cause harm to vulnerable users, especially children. Bejar described a culture in which it was “near impossible” to screen products and features for potential harms before they were released into the world. That testimony matters because it goes to the heart of the states’ case. The plaintiffs are not just arguing that Meta’s apps are dangerous; they are arguing that Meta knew about the dangers and chose to ignore them in favor of growth. Bejar’s testimony gives the jury a window into the company’s internal priorities, and it is not a flattering picture. He described a workplace where safety concerns were often treated as obstacles to be overcome rather than problems to be solved, where the people who raised alarms were sometimes dismissed or sidelined, and where the relentless focus on metrics like engagement and time spent overshadowed any meaningful consideration of the well-being of young users. On Thursday, the trial was put on pause because a juror fell ill, but the testimony from Bejar lingered in the air. It is one thing to hear lawyers argue about corporate policies and legal standards; it is another thing entirely to hear a former insider describe a culture that seemed, at best, indifferent to the welfare of children.
This trial is unfolding against a backdrop of years of scandal and controversy for Meta, much of which has faded from public memory or been settled quietly out of court. Over the past decade, the company’s platforms have been implicated in stoking violence around the world, from Myanmar to Ethiopia, and in swaying elections, from the 2016 U.S. presidential race to Brexit. The company has regularly siphoned personal data from users in ways that were purposefully opaque, often hiding behind dense privacy policies and confusing settings menus. And through depositions, books, and investigative news reports, we have learned an enormous amount about the internal dysfunction at Meta—the infighting, the missed warnings, the desperate attempts to fend off competitors like TikTok, and the willingness to sacrifice long-term safety for short-term growth. Many of these stories have become so familiar that they no longer shock us. We have become numb to the headlines, and the company has learned to weather the storms, issuing apologies, hiring more safety staff, and promising to do better. But this trial is different. The states are not asking for an apology or a promise. They are asking a jury to find that Meta broke the law, and they are seeking remedies that could force the company to change the way it designs its products for children. That is a much bigger ask, and it is one that Meta is fighting with everything it has. The company has brought an army of well-heeled lawyers to the courtroom, and they are leaving no argument unexplored. There is something almost ironic about watching these high-priced attorneys struggle with technical difficulties at the microphone, fumbling with cords and speakers in a case about a company that controls some of the most sophisticated technology in the world.
As the trial continues, the stakes could not be higher. For the 29 state attorneys general, this is an opportunity to establish that social media companies can be held accountable for the design of their platforms, not just for the content that users post. For Meta, it is a fight for its business model, its reputation, and its future. For parents, it is a moment of reckoning, a chance to hear, in a courtroom, under oath, how the apps their children use every day actually work. And for the children themselves, the ones who are too young to testify, too young to vote, and often too young to fully understand what is happening to them, it is a rare moment in which their interests are at the center of the conversation. The trial has been paused for now because of a sick juror, but it will resume, and the jury will eventually have to decide some of the most difficult questions in American law: What does it mean to protect children online? How much responsibility should a company bear for the way its products are used? And what role should the law play in regulating the attention economy that has come to dominate so many of our lives? There are no easy answers, and the courtroom is likely to be the site of many more heated arguments, emotional testimonies, and legal maneuvers in the weeks to come. But one thing is already clear: this trial is not just about Meta. It is about all of us, and the world we are building for the next generation.
