Analysis
Opening arguments begin August 18 in federal court in Oakland in a consolidated trial brought by 29 state attorneys general against Meta over alleged harm to young users, according to CNBC. California, Colorado, New Jersey and Kentucky will argue on behalf of the full coalition before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the same judge who oversaw the Epic v. Apple antitrust case.
The dollar figures at stake are unusually wide-ranging even for a case this size. Meta's own attorneys have told the court a loss could produce damages as high as $1.4 trillion -- larger than the market cap of most companies in the S&P 500 -- while lawyers for the states have argued roughly $200 billion is the more realistic outcome. New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez, who has also been pushing new state-level social media safety legislation ahead of the trial, told CNBC that Meta "could wake up with a headline judgment that is... astronomical."
“The dollar figures at stake are unusually wide-ranging even for a case this size.”
The Big Tobacco comparison
The case centers on alleged violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and a range of state consumer protection statutes, with plaintiffs arguing Meta designed engagement features -- infinite scroll, algorithmic feeds, notification patterns -- knowing they caused documented harm to adolescent users, and continued deploying them anyway. Industry observers have taken to calling it social media's "Big Tobacco" moment, a reference to the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement that cost tobacco companies more than $200 billion and reshaped how an entire industry was allowed to market to consumers.
The trial's outcome carries stakes well beyond Meta. A verdict establishing that platforms can be held liable in this way -- rather than shielded by Section 230 or dismissed on causation grounds, as many prior youth-safety suits have been -- would reset the legal exposure calculus for every major social platform simultaneously, at a moment when several of them are also racing to embed AI companions and chatbots into products used heavily by teenagers.
