Meta’s internal teen-harm research moves to center of landmark 29-state trial over Instagram and Facebook
By Victoria Bond
OAKLAND, California — Meta's public assurances about protecting children on Instagram and Facebook are facing one of their most consequential tests yet, as a coalition of U.S. states attempts to convince a federal jury that the company knew substantially more about risks to young users than it disclosed publicly.
Opening arguments began Tuesday in federal court in Oakland in litigation involving 29 states, with California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey leading the first state-law claims while the broader coalition jointly pursues federal allegations involving children's privacy.
The states accuse Meta of deliberately designing Facebook and Instagram to encourage compulsive use among children and teenagers while publicly portraying its platforms as safer than its own internal research allegedly indicated.
Meta denies those allegations.
The company argues that the states are selectively presenting internal communications, that adolescent mental health is influenced by numerous factors, and that scientific evidence does not establish the straightforward causal relationship between social media and mental-health problems alleged by the plaintiffs.
But evidence emerging in court is shifting the dispute away from a simple debate over whether social media can harm teenagers.
The more consequential question is becoming what Meta itself knew, how it measured those risks and whether its public safety representations accurately reflected its internal findings.
Lawyers for the states presented internal Meta material describing concerns over teenagers' relationship with Instagram, including company research suggesting some young users continued using the platform despite negative experiences.
One internal document presented during opening arguments contained the assessment that “Teens are hooked despite how it makes them feel,” according to reporting from the courtroom.
States argue that such material undermines Meta's longstanding position that it has consistently prioritised youth safety.
Meta says isolated internal statements are being stripped of context and points to years of investment in safety systems, parental controls, age protections and restrictions designed specifically for teenage accounts.
The dispute arrives at a particularly difficult moment for the company because this is no longer the first courtroom in which Meta's treatment of young users has been tested.
Earlier this month, a New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a fund intended to address harms to young people's mental health.
That followed a March verdict imposing another $375 million penalty, bringing Meta's liability in that case to approximately $942 million.
Meta has said it will appeal.
The Oakland litigation is potentially much larger.
Reuters reports that penalties sought across the state and federal claims could theoretically reach extraordinary levels depending on how violations are calculated, although actual damages would ultimately depend on what the states prove and how the court applies relevant laws.
More important than the potential dollar figure may be what the states are seeking to change.
The litigation challenges features at the core of how modern social-media platforms operate, including infinite scrolling, notifications, recommendation systems and engagement mechanisms that plaintiffs argue encourage young users to remain online.
That distinguishes the case from litigation focused solely on individual pieces of harmful content.
States are effectively asking whether aspects of the platforms' design itself created risks for children.
The legal strategy bears similarities to earlier mass litigation involving tobacco and opioids: multiple states combining resources to argue that a major industry possessed internal knowledge about risks while presenting a different picture to consumers and regulators.
That comparison does not establish that Meta committed comparable misconduct.
It does explain why the company's internal documents have become so important.
If jurors conclude Meta's own researchers identified significant risks while executives publicly minimised them, the states' case becomes substantially different from a general argument that teenagers sometimes encounter harmful material online.
The trial also contains a separate privacy issue involving children under 13.
The states accuse Meta of collecting personal information from children below that age without obtaining parental consent as required by the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
Meta disputes that it intentionally permits under-13 users and says it has systems designed to identify and remove accounts belonging to children who are too young to use its services.
Age verification, however, has become one of the industry's most difficult regulatory problems.
Meta said just last week that it had removed more than 756,000 accounts in Australia suspected of belonging to users under 16 as it sought to comply with that country's youth social-media restrictions.
Yet Australian government data indicated large numbers of underage users remained active across social platforms after the restrictions took effect.
The gap illustrates the technical problem underlying Meta's U.S. defence: building age restrictions is one challenge; reliably identifying the age of hundreds of millions of users is another.
Meta has continued expanding its youth protections.
In June it announced wider content restrictions for Teen Accounts across Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, designed to limit teenagers' exposure to material considered inappropriate for their age.
But outside testing has repeatedly challenged whether those safeguards perform as effectively as advertised.
Research published in 2025 involving former Meta employee and whistleblower Arturo Béjar, academics and child-safety organisations tested Instagram's Teen Accounts and concluded that many of the platform's promised protections were ineffective.
Meta rejected the study's conclusions, saying the research misrepresented how its safety tools work.
That history makes the allegations now entering federal court particularly consequential.
A safety feature can fail for many technical reasons.
A much more serious legal question arises if plaintiffs can demonstrate that a company possessed internal evidence showing its safeguards or public measurements understated the actual risk and nevertheless continued making stronger public claims.
That is also why claims attributed to whistleblowers about dramatically higher exposure to harmful or graphic material require unusually careful treatment.
A whistleblower's calculation can constitute important evidence, but it is not automatically an established measurement simply because it is presented in litigation.
SCN NEWS could not independently verify from currently available primary court records the precise claim that the number of teenagers exposed to graphic content was at least 100 times higher than Meta reported.
That figure should therefore remain attributed to the whistleblower unless underlying methodology or court evidence independently substantiates it.
What can already be established is substantial.
Meta is confronting a bipartisan coalition of 29 states over allegations involving addictive design, youth safety representations and children's data.
Internal company research is being placed before a federal jury.
Meta has already suffered major adverse judgments in separate youth-safety litigation this year.
And executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri are expected to become part of a trial examining decisions made at the highest levels of the company.
The emerging issue is consequently larger than whether one whistleblower's estimate is ultimately proved correct.
For years, the public debate focused on whether Instagram and Facebook were safe for teenagers. The courtroom battle is increasingly focused on whether Meta's own internal measurements and research told the company something materially different from what parents, regulators and the public were being told.
That difference — if the states can prove it — could determine not only Meta's financial liability but whether courts eventually force fundamental changes to how Instagram and Facebook are designed for young users.