The Trillion-Dollar Trial Against Meta Is Too Big to Succeed

Meta heads to federal court in Oakland, California, on Tuesday in a trial brought by four states alleging the company’s flagship platforms, Facebook and Instagram, were designed to be addictive to children. The potential financial penalties are shocking, totaling as much as $1.4 trillion in the worst case scenarios, according to Meta. The company is currently valued at about $1.5 trillion, making that kind of financial blow an existential threat. But experts think there’s no way Meta is paying that much, even if it loses.

Attorneys General for California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey have brought the case that goes to trial Tuesday and is being overseen by District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The states want Meta to redesign its platforms to eliminate design features perceived as having a connection to addiction, like infinite scroll. The states also want new time restrictions for kids under 18 on platforms like Instagram and the deletion of any AI systems trained on data from children.

After decades of little to no regulation of social media in the U.S., American officials have recently tried to hold the Big Tech companies accountable for alleged connections to poor mental health in children. Meta has settled two lawsuits recently, including one with Kentucky’s Breathitt County School District that sought financial compensation for the cost of helping kids with mental health issues.

Many people have compared the legal issues facing social media companies like Meta to the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s. At the time, states brought lawsuits in order to be reimbursed for the Medicaid expenses of people in their states who suffered from smoking-related illnesses. And much like the tobacco litigation, much of the question comes down to what the Big Tech companies knew. When Big Tobacco companies were shown by internal documents to have ignored the health hazards of their products and still marketed them to children anyway, it helped turn the cases against them.

“This week, we’re in court with the largest consumer protection lawsuit in American history. We’ll show a jury that Meta concealed what it knew about the harm its products cause young people because looking away was more profitable,” said Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman in a press release . “AGs are in the perfect position to get this done,” continued Coleman. “We did it with the Tobacco Settlement in the 1990s. We did it with the companies behind the opioid crisis. We’ll do it again with Meta.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri are expected to testify, and Meta has pushed back against these claims of harm.

“The State AGs may call this a landmark case, but their limited claims are unsubstantiated and their financial demands are vastly disproportionate.