Twenty-nine US states are now prosecuting Meta in an Oakland courtroom, alleging the company ran a deliberate four-phase extraction cycle on children: hook them onto Facebook and Instagram, hold their attention as long as possible, harvest their data without parental consent, and hide the resulting harms from the public. The trial opened Tuesday before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, with an advisory jury of eight. Potential damages reach $200bn — equivalent to the $1.36tn company's full 2025 annual revenue. The states' case rests on two legal pillars: violations of federal child privacy law (COPPA) for collecting data on under-13s without parental permission, and state-level consumer protection violations for designing deliberately addictive products. California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are leading the prosecution. Meta has denied all allegations, with spokesperson Liza Crenshaw calling the payout demand "outlandish" and attorney Paul Schmidt arguing the company built tools to address social media struggles and disabled more than 1 million underage accounts. The week's most damaging testimony came from Arturo Béjar, a safety engineer who worked at Meta in two stints between 2009 and 2021. Béjar told the jury his own teenage daughter received unwanted sexual advances, photos of male genitals, and misogynistic insults on Instagram — and that the platform's reporting tools were either ineffective or unavailable. He described Meta's child safety posture as a "don't ask, don't tell" strategy. Béjar presented a 2021 survey he emailed directly to Zuckerberg: 51% of teen users reported bad or harmful experiences within the previous seven days, while harmful content was removed only 0.02% of the time. He chose Zuckerberg because "when Mark makes something a priority, mountains move." Zuckerberg never responded. Meta fought to block Béjar from testifying, filing multiple motions to strike his exhibits — all rejected — and afterward attacked his credibility, claiming he overinflated his role. The trial arrives against a backdrop of escalating legal losses. In March, Meta lost its first two child-safety trials: a nearly $1bn verdict in New Mexico for enabling child sexual exploitation, and a $4m-plus finding of deliberate addictive design targeting a young woman. Thousands more lawsuits from families, school districts, and other attorneys general are pending. The states want more than money — they're asking the court to force design changes to Meta's products, a structural remedy that would permanently alter the company's engagement-maximization business model. The jury also heard recorded depositions from former Meta UX researchers Elena Davis and Natalie Troxel, along with brief testimony from psychologist Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, who will continue next week. Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri are both expected to testify during the six-to-eight-week trial. The advisory jury will recommend a verdict and damages to Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who holds final decision-making authority. The structural question is whether the American legal system can force a trillion-dollar company to stop treating children's attention and data as its primary raw material — or whether fines simply become a cost of doing business.
