Meta is an inviting defendant. It’s enormous, plenty of people dislike it, and—not incidentally—it’s fabulously wealthy. Its executives have written embarrassing things in internal messages, its products can consume too much of a teenager’s attention, and most parents have at some point wondered whether the glowing rectangle in their kid’s hand is doing more harm than good.
None of that makes Meta legally responsible for the youth mental-health crisis, and it certainly doesn’t justify a financial penalty that Meta says could reach $1.4 trillion. When a civil lawsuit starts to resemble the federal budget, common sense ought to get a hearing too.
The trial beginning in Oakland is formally a consumer-protection and children’s-privacy case brought by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, with claims involving 29 states in all. Politically, though, it’s being sold as something much bigger: a verdict on Facebook, Instagram, and the entire social-media age. The states’ lawyers want to cast Meta as the Big Tobacco of the smartphone era, knowingly addicting children while hiding the consequences from the public.
It’s a compelling story. It also runs well ahead of both the science and the legal claims that actually survived to trial.
Some young people undeniably have bad experiences on social media. Kids get bullied, exposed to disturbing material, kept up too late, drawn into ugly competitions over looks and popularity. A platform can make things worse for a child who’s already anxious, depressed, or isolated. Parents have every reason to worry about this, and Meta can be scrutinized over what it knew and what it did about it.
Meta’s internal documents don’t make that defense any easier. Researchers and employees discussed “problematic use,” compared Instagram to a drug for some users, and worried about teenagers staying up late scrolling. If Meta told the public one thing while its own researchers privately believed another, a court can and should examine those statements one by one. If it knowingly collected data from children under 13 without the parental consent required by federal law, it should answer for that.
But “some children were harmed” is a different claim than “Meta caused a generation’s mental-health crisis.” The first is plausible on its face. The second is the sort of claim lawyers reach for when they want to turn a messy social problem into an enormous damages number.
The National Academies’ review of the evidence didn’t back the sweeping conclusion that social media causes population-wide changes in adolescent mental health. Most studies find effects that are small, inconsistent, or highly dependent on the individual. And causation likely runs both ways—troubled teenagers may turn to social media in unhealthy ways, while others find community, information, or real help there.
That distinction matters. Identifying a risk factor is not the same thing as making a single company financially responsible for the mental health of an entire generation.
Plenty of things shape how kids feel: family life, school quality, preexisting conditions, neighborhood safety, the pandemic, money troubles, sleep, drugs, academic pressure—the list goes on. Instagram didn’t invent cruelty, vanity, exclusion, or teenage obsession. It gave those old problems a faster way to spread, which is worth taking seriously, but that’s not the same as treating every troubled teenager as a compensable injury Meta is on the hook for.
There’s a real gap between the states’ rhetoric and their actual legal case. Most of the public criticism is about infinite scroll, recommendation algorithms, notifications, likes, and similar engagement features. But Section 230 rulings have already cut deeply into design-based claims like these. What’s left concerns narrower matters: appearance-altering filters, time-management tools that allegedly don’t work well, and the ability to run multiple Instagram accounts.
Those claims can still go to trial. But proving them isn’t the same as proving Meta built an addiction machine that caused a mental-health crisis—and it’s a stretch from there to justify handing four state attorneys general and a single federal judge ongoing authority over Instagram’s algorithms and interface.
The filter allegation is probably the strongest of the surviving design claims. It’s not hard to see why software encouraging teenagers to reshape their nose, alter their body, or smooth their skin might feed appearance anxiety, and Meta will have to explain its choices there. The time-limit claim is weaker: a tool can be imperfect, or get circumvented by inventive teenagers, without being fraudulent. And the multiple-accounts claim is weaker still—a general feature doesn’t become illegal just because some minors use it to dodge their parents.
Meta also has a real record of trying to address these concerns. It’s rolled out private-by-default teen accounts, overnight notification limits, screen-time reminders, and parental controls, among other things. Critics say some of this came too late, or was more about public relations than protection. Maybe. But a company that’s made imperfect efforts is not the same as a company that made none.
Then there’s the money. Meta says the states’ damages theory could produce a $1.4 trillion penalty. The states dispute that framing and have floated a number closer to $200 billion instead—which is a bit like arguing over whether a ransom note demands the moon or merely several large continents.
Consumer-protection penalties exist to punish proven violations and discourage repeating them. They shouldn’t turn into an exercise in multiplying every user, every statement, every day and every technical interaction until the total has no relationship to any actual injury. A number that reaches hundreds of billions of dollars isn’t measuring harm anymore—it’s leverage.
And that leverage extends well beyond this courtroom. Thousands of private lawsuits have been filed against social-media companies, including suits from individuals and school districts, and plaintiffs’ firms are actively recruiting clients for “social media addiction” claims. A state victory here—especially one with sweeping factual findings attached—would raise the settlement value of all of it.
I haven’t seen any evidence that the four states in this case have promised an outside law firm a cut of the recovery. But the case sits inside a much larger industry where public enforcement and private mass-tort litigation feed each other. Look at New Mexico’s separate case against Meta: Reuters reported that the firm Motley Rice could collect as much as $67.1 million under a contingency arrangement, tied to a $942 million award that’s still on appeal. Financial incentives don’t disprove the underlying allegations, and lawyers are entitled to get paid. But they help explain the appetite for tobacco comparisons, sky-high damages demands, and legal theories broad enough to turn nearly any adolescent difficulty into a claim against a solvent company. State attorneys general have their own incentives too, including the ability to tell voters they brought home a multibillion-dollar settlement.
A case against Meta generates headlines, national attention, and a chance to look like the protector of children. None of that means the underlying claims are false. It just means prosecutorial outrage isn’t proof.
There’s also an institutional question here that should matter even to people who have no love for Meta. Congress passed a specific privacy law covering children under 13. Enforce it. If lawmakers think platforms need stricter age verification, real time controls, limits on appearance filters, or special duties toward teenagers, they can write those rules and debate the costs before putting them into effect.
That’s how this is supposed to work in a democracy—not asking a court to invent a national regulatory code out of broad consumer-protection statutes and then apply it retroactively with penalties large enough to bankrupt a company.
The stakes go beyond compensating individual children. The remedies being sought could reach how Facebook and Instagram select, rank, and present content to hundreds of millions of adult users. The Supreme Court has already recognized that social-media feeds involve editorial judgments protected by the First Amendment. Whatever you think of Meta’s editorial judgment, it shouldn’t become something state attorneys general get to run.
Meta’s strongest defense is that the states are trying to bridge some large gaps: between risk and causation, between concern and deception, between imperfect safeguards and unlawful conduct. They’re taking a narrow set of disputed practices and trying to use them to hold one company responsible for one of the most complicated social shifts of our time, then asking for remedies that go far beyond what those narrow claims could support.
Parents, schools, legislators, and tech companies all have a role to play here, and Meta should carry its share of the responsibility. But it shouldn’t be turned into a national scapegoat, a piggy bank for the litigation industry, or a public utility run out of a federal courtroom.