California launched a salacious opening to its hotly anticipated multistate lawsuit against Meta on Tuesday morning, detailing the tech titan’s focus on its preteen users in language that could have been lifted from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.”
“You’re going hear how Meta desperately tried to hold on to those kids, how it wanted them so badly, how it wanted them young,” California Deputy Atty. Gen. Megan O’Neill told the eight-member civil jury in Oakland federal court.
Her voice dripped with innuendo as she read out the title of a company memo: “The young ones are the best ones.”
“You’re going to hear how Meta tried to hook kids under 13, the youngest users,” she said, previewing internal documents that Meta had unsuccessfully fought to keep out of the blockbuster trial’s opening monologue. “They were looking at tweens. Tweens.”
Meta hit back hard in its own opening statements Tuesday afternoon, saying many of the memos and reports the states used to paint them as rapacious were actually evidence of the company’s efforts to protect its youngest users.
In the case of young children, the law itself prevents Meta from doing more, company lawyers said.
“The law says, if Meta finds people under the age of 13, it can’t keep their data. So it can’t use the very data that would let it make computer models” to exclude them, said Paul W. Schmidt, one of the lawyers representing Meta.
The lawsuit is the latest and largest of this year’s groundbreaking actions against the social media giant — cases that could radically alter how the company operates its platforms and leave Meta on the hook for billions in damages.
What is the lawsuit about?
California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey led a coalition of 29 state attorneys general suing Meta over claims the company intentionally designed its platforms to hook children, left in place features it knew to be dangerous, and repeatedly lied to the public about the safety of its products.
The attorneys general also contend the company violated the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by mining valuable data from thousands of preteens and grade-schoolers — youngsters Meta has made limited efforts to remove or restrict from its platforms, despite terms of service that technically bar them.
“Meta harvested kids data. That’s how Meta makes money,” O’Neill said. “We’re all from the Bay [Area] here — I think you’ve probably heard the saying, ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.’ Kids are the product.”
Nearly two-thirds of 11- and 12-year-olds have social media accounts, according to a 2025 literature review in the medical journal Current Pediatric Reports. Other research has produced similar findings.
Meta’s own internal estimates suggest about 20% of 11-year-olds and 30% of 12-year-olds in the U.S. are on Instagram, according to records shown in opening statements.
“Meta thought about taking more proactive steps, about doing more to find and remove children under 13, but it decided not to,” O’Neill told the jury Tuesday. “Why? Because it was scared of what it might find out, and it was scared of what the legal consequences might be.”
Meta calls the suit an unprecedented cash grab by prosecutors looking to burnish their populist credentials with a public eager to pin the blame for flagging test scores and exploding teen anguish on the wealthy tech titan.
“We asked California [public health officials], what kinds of things impact teen mental health in California?” Schmidt said. “We were told all kinds of things other than social media.”
Schmidt said Instagram has introduced tools to help protect children and nudge them into more measured use.
“You will hear again and again from Meta witnesses that they have long-term interest in people liking their services — you’ll hear that all the way up to Mr. Zuckerberg,” he said, referencing Meta chief executive and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, who is expected to testify this fall.
O’Neill called those features “too little, too late.”
“Kids have been on Meta’s platforms for over a decade,” the deputy attorney general said. “These tools have not. Too often they came after the deception, after years of Meta knowing about the risks to kids, even after the states started investigating Meta for its deceptive behavior.”
How is it different from past cases?
The attorneys general’s lawsuit and the one tried in Los Angeles earlier this year are bellwethers — test cases chosen from among thousands of related actions in a single court system.
The Los Angeles case, brought by 20-year-old Kaley Glenn-Mills, was the first of its kind to reach a jury. It was chosen from among scores of related suits in the Judicial Council coordinated proceeding in California state court.
The attorneys general’s suit is the first among many hundreds to go to trial in federal court, where cases are consolidated into a multidistrict litigation run out of California’s Northern District by Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
Legally, the suits make similar arguments, on a shared foundation of evidence, with many of the same witnesses expected to appear.
But the outcome could be radically different, even if the states win, as Glenn-Mills did in March.
The attorneys general are asking for damages several orders of magnitude larger than the $6 million jurors awarded Glenn-Mills. They are also seeking injunctive relief — a nonmonetary judgment that would force Meta to change its business practices in specific and legally enforceable ways.
The claims in the current case also significantly expand Meta’s potential liability, experts said. According to calculations filed with the court in June, the states could seek more than $3 billion for those violations related to under 13-year-olds alone.
What are the stakes for Meta?
Put simply, the stakes are unprecedented. Meta claimed in its filings that the attorneys general were seeking roughly $1.4 trillion in monetary damages, just below the company’s market cap, or the total value of its stock.
Even adjusted for inflation, that’s many times larger than the Big Tobacco settlement from the 1990s.
The company has said the design changes the states seek are technically unworkable and would compromise the value and utility of its products.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed about 60% of Americans favor greater regulations on social media. Meta has said it supports legislative efforts to regulate the industry, though critics charge it has undermined those that would be most effective.
The case itself is a significant test of Section 230, a powerful federal law that protects internet companies from liability for what users do on its platforms.
Until this year, Section 230 had in effect prevented actions like this one from ever reaching a jury. Ahead of this month’s trial, Meta petitioned the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to block it on grounds the company was immune from suit under the law.
The appellate court rejected that argument, saying Section 230 was a defense at trial, not an immunity from it.
What happens next?
The trial is expected to continue well into the fall. Whatever the outcome, the parties are all but certain to appeal.
“Nothing happening here is final at all, and the 9th Circuit will definitely be reviewing this on appeal,” said Peter Jackson, a privacy and cybersecurity attorney in Los Angeles.
“Each side is trying to win this trial, but Meta has this uber trump card [in Section 230], and how it goes about its defense at this trial is potentially more important for how that trump card gets played in the future.”
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