Published: August 23, 2026 | Category: Legal & Regulation

Twenty-nine attorneys general accuse the company of designing Instagram and Facebook to hook children, and the figure Meta itself floated in a court filing approaches its entire market value.

Meta has told a federal court that penalties in a child-safety case that opened in Oakland on Tuesday could reach as much as $1.4 trillion, a sum that approaches the company’s entire market value. The trial pits Meta against a coalition of 29 state attorneys general, with lawyers for California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey arguing that the company deliberately engineered Instagram and Facebook to addict children and then misled the public about the risks.

The $1.4 trillion figure comes from Meta’s own estimate of maximum exposure, filed with the court, not from a number the states have put forward. It is large because the case is built on consumer-protection law, where penalties are assessed per violation. The attorneys general want Meta to pay for each instance in which a child’s data was collected or an addictive notification was served, and those counts run into the billions across more than a decade of use.

The states, which brought the case in 2023, allege that Meta built its platforms to maximize the time young users spend on them, knew the features were psychologically manipulative and harmful to children’s mental health, and collected minors’ personal data without parental consent in breach of the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Deputy California Attorney General Meghan O’Neill told jurors that Meta’s model came in four parts: hook users, hold them as long as possible, harvest their data and hide the truth. Meta denies the allegations and says its platforms are safe and that it has built tools for parents and teenagers.

The trial is a consumer-protection action, not a personal-injury suit. The jury is being asked whether Meta’s design choices were unfair or deceptive and whether its public assurances were misleading given what the company knew internally, rather than whether the platforms harmed any single child. Any penalties would go to the states, not to families.

Money is not the only remedy on the table. The states are asking the court to force structural changes to Instagram and Facebook, including age verification to keep younger children off the platforms and the elimination of infinite scroll, a feature that plaintiffs’ experts say is built to keep users engaged past the point of choice. An order of that kind would reach further into Meta’s product than any fine, and would set a template other regulators could copy.

Meta enters the trial having already lost related cases this year. A Los Angeles jury returned a $6 million verdict for a young woman in a separate social-media addiction claim, and a New Mexico case produced roughly $942 million in penalties along with required safety changes. Those outcomes give the state coalition a record to build on, and a loss here would hand other states, school districts and individual plaintiffs a roadmap for their own claims.

The mood in the courtroom offered an early signal of the risk. When a lawyer for Colorado asked prospective jurors whether they believed Instagram and Facebook are safe for children, none raised a hand. For Meta, the immediate exposure is reputational and operational as much as financial: even a penalty far below its own $1.4 trillion ceiling, paired with a court-ordered redesign, would change how the company builds the products that generate most of its revenue.

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