Meta on trial over children: states calculate up to $1.4 trillion in penalties
Jury selection started on 12 August in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California, in the case four American states brought against Meta. The states say Facebook and Instagram were built to hold children's attention on purpose and that the company collected data on users under 13 without their parents' consent. Opening arguments are set for 18 August, the trial is expected to run six to seven weeks, and a verdict is expected in early October.
Who is suing and over what
The case was filed in 2023 by attorneys general of 29 states. Only four of them go first: California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey. Their claim has two halves. One is about design: photo filters, visible like counts, notifications and recommendation feeds are described not as neutral features but as mechanisms tuned to keep a teenager scrolling. The other is about data: routine collection of information on children under 13 without parental consent, which in the United States is a straightforward violation of federal law.
The sum being quoted comes from the plaintiffs, not from the company. In pre-trial filings the states calculated that penalties could reach 1.4 trillion dollars, a figure close to Meta's entire market value. That number is a ceiling in an argument, not a bill, and no court has awarded anything yet.
What the states want besides money
- Hand over the profits earned from underage users.
- Redesign the features that keep young people scrolling, by court order rather than by press release.
- Improve age checks, so that the platforms actually know when a user is a child.
- Set stricter privacy defaults for minors and accept outside oversight of how the rules are followed.
That third point is the one worth watching from outside the United States. Age verification has been arriving through parliaments for two years, in Britain, in the European Union, in Australia. Here it may arrive through a courtroom, as a remedy imposed on one company, which other platforms would then copy pre emptively.
What Meta says
The company's defence has two lines. Social media addiction is not a recognised diagnosis, and Facebook and Instagram are not aimed at children in the first place, whatever the internal documents say; Meta also points to the teenage version of Instagram it introduced recently. The judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, rejected both arguments before the trial began, along with earlier attempts to end the case on free speech grounds and on the law that shields platforms from liability for user content.
Why a US courtroom decides things for everyone
Platforms rarely build one product for one country. When a rule is expensive to implement, the cheap move is to implement it everywhere, which is how European transparency requirements and British age rules ended up shaping what users see in countries that never passed them. A court ordered redesign in California would travel the same way.
The privacy cost is the part that gets lost in the headline. Reliable age checking means either documents, or face estimation, or a third party vouching for you, and each of those turns an anonymous visit into an identified one. A settlement written to protect children can quietly become the moment when the rest of the internet stops being anonymous, unless the remedy is drafted with that in mind.
Where a VPN sits in this
A VPN moves your connection, not your identity. If a platform starts asking for a document or a face scan tied to your account, no tunnel removes that request, and data the company has already gathered stays gathered. What a VPN does is keep the network you sit on from being a second source of information about you. Worth being precise about, because age verification is exactly the topic where people expect privacy tools to do more than they can.
What happens next
Opening arguments on 18 August, roughly six weeks of testimony, a verdict expected in early October, and then the second phase where the judge decides what Meta must change. The remaining twenty five states are waiting behind this trial with the same claims. Whatever the jury says, the interesting document will be the remedy, because that text, not the damages, is what the rest of the industry will read.
