For years, Meta Platforms Inc. has fought lawsuits over children’s safety behind closed doors, deploying armies of lawyers to quash claims, shift blame, and keep the most damaging allegations out of public view. That strategy just hit a wall.
On Monday, a jury trial began in Los Angeles Superior Court — the first time Meta will face a jury over allegations that its platforms, Instagram and Facebook, were deliberately designed to addict minors and cause them psychological harm. The case, brought by the state of New Mexico, represents a defining moment not just for Meta but for the entire social media industry. If a jury finds the company liable, it could trigger a cascade of similar trials across the country, fundamentally altering how tech companies build products used by children.
The stakes are enormous. And Meta knows it.
New Mexico’s Case: A State Goes on the Attack
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed the lawsuit in December 2023, alleging that Meta violated the state’s Unfair Practices Act by designing Instagram and Facebook with features that exploit children’s psychological vulnerabilities. The complaint doesn’t mince words: it accuses Meta of creating a product that functions like a slot machine for adolescents, with infinite scroll, likes, and algorithmic recommendations engineered to maximize engagement at the expense of young users’ mental health.
According to The Verge, the trial is expected to last approximately three weeks and will focus on whether Meta’s design choices constituted unfair and deceptive trade practices under New Mexico law. The state is seeking civil penalties and injunctive relief — court orders that would force Meta to change how its platforms operate for minors in New Mexico.
What makes this case particularly dangerous for Meta is the discovery process. Internal documents, including communications between executives and engineers, are expected to be presented to the jury. Some of these documents have already surfaced in congressional hearings and prior litigation, revealing that Meta’s own researchers repeatedly warned leadership that Instagram was harmful to teenage users — particularly teenage girls struggling with body image and self-worth. Meta’s internal research, first reported by The Wall Street Journal in its 2021 “Facebook Files” series, showed the company was aware that Instagram made body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.
The company has consistently argued that it took those findings seriously and invested billions in safety measures. But New Mexico’s legal team intends to show the jury that Meta’s response was cosmetic — designed to generate positive press rather than meaningfully protect children.
Torrez has been blunt about his intentions. He’s framed this not as a regulatory skirmish but as a public health reckoning. His office has pointed to rising rates of teen depression, anxiety, and self-harm that correlate with the explosive growth of social media use among minors over the past decade. Correlation isn’t causation, and Meta’s defense will hammer that point relentlessly. But the internal documents suggesting the company knew about potential harms and chose growth over safety could prove devastating in front of twelve ordinary citizens.
This trial didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the product of a broader, coordinated legal assault on Meta by state attorneys general across the country. In October 2023, more than 40 states filed suit against Meta in federal court, alleging similar claims about addictive design and harm to children. That consolidated federal case, In re Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, is proceeding in the Northern District of California under Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. But the New Mexico case moved faster because it was filed separately in state court, where procedural timelines tend to be more compressed.
Meta tried to stop it. The company filed multiple motions to dismiss and sought to move the case to federal court, where it could be consolidated with the other state AG actions. Those efforts failed. A New Mexico judge kept the case, and the trial date held.
So here we are.
Meta’s Defense and the Broader Industry Implications
Meta’s legal strategy rests on several pillars. First, the company argues that its platforms provide substantial benefits to young users — connecting them with friends, enabling creative expression, and offering access to communities of support. Second, Meta contends that parental responsibility and other external factors, not platform design, drive any negative outcomes experienced by teens. Third, and perhaps most critically, Meta invokes Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which broadly shields internet platforms from liability for content posted by users.
But Section 230 may not save Meta here. New Mexico’s claims are rooted in product design, not content moderation. The state isn’t arguing that Meta failed to remove a specific harmful post. It’s arguing that the product itself — the algorithms, the engagement mechanics, the recommendation systems — is defective. Courts have increasingly recognized this distinction. Judge Gonzalez Rogers, in the federal consolidated case, has allowed design defect claims to proceed past the motion-to-dismiss stage, signaling that Section 230 doesn’t provide blanket immunity when the allegation is about how a platform is built rather than what users post on it.
Meta spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the trial’s opening proceedings, but the company has previously stated that it has developed more than 30 tools and features to support teens and families, including parental supervision controls and time management features. The company has also pointed to its decision to default teens under 16 into restricted account settings on Instagram.
Critics call these measures insufficient. A thin coat of paint on a burning building, as one child safety advocate described it to reporters.
The implications of this trial extend well beyond Meta. Snap Inc., ByteDance’s TikTok, and Google’s YouTube all face similar allegations in the federal consolidated litigation. A jury verdict against Meta would embolden plaintiffs’ attorneys and state officials pursuing those companies. It would also send a signal to Congress, where bipartisan legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act has stalled repeatedly despite broad public support.
The timing is notable. Federal regulators under the current administration have shown less appetite for aggressive tech enforcement. But state attorneys general — both Republican and Democrat — have stepped into the vacuum. The children’s safety issue is one of the rare areas where partisan lines blur almost entirely. Red-state AGs and blue-state AGs alike have filed suits against Meta. The political incentives are obvious: no elected official wants to be seen defending a trillion-dollar corporation over the wellbeing of children.
And the financial exposure is real. Under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, the state can seek penalties of up to $5,000 per violation. If a jury finds that each instance of a minor being served harmful content or subjected to addictive design constitutes a separate violation, the damages could theoretically reach into the billions. More practically, the injunctive relief — court orders mandating specific design changes — could prove even more consequential. A court telling Meta how to build its product would set a precedent that no tech company wants to see established.
Industry lobbyists have been watching this case with barely concealed alarm. The Internet Association and other trade groups have argued that state-by-state litigation creates a patchwork of conflicting obligations that makes it impossible for platforms to operate nationally. They prefer federal preemption — a single national standard that would override state laws. But Congress hasn’t delivered that standard, and courts aren’t waiting.
Meanwhile, the evidence base keeps growing. Academic researchers have published increasingly rigorous studies linking heavy social media use to adverse mental health outcomes in adolescents. The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory in 2023 warning that social media presents a “profound risk” to children’s mental health. And former Meta employees — whistleblowers like Frances Haugen — have provided testimony and internal documents that paint a picture of a company that consistently prioritized engagement metrics over user safety.
Meta disputes this characterization vigorously. The company points to its substantial investments in AI-powered content moderation, its age verification efforts, and its partnerships with mental health organizations. It also notes that many of the studies cited by critics suffer from methodological limitations and that the relationship between social media use and mental health is complex and not fully understood.
That’s a reasonable scientific argument. Whether it plays well in front of a jury in Los Angeles — a city that has seen its own share of youth mental health crises — is another question entirely.
The trial’s outcome won’t be known for weeks. But the fact that it’s happening at all marks a turning point. For more than two decades, social media companies have operated with extraordinary legal protection and minimal accountability for the downstream effects of their design choices. Section 230, a law written in 1996 when the internet was a collection of bulletin boards and dial-up connections, provided a shield that proved nearly impenetrable.
That shield is cracking. Not from a single blow, but from sustained pressure applied by dozens of state attorneys general, hundreds of individual plaintiffs, and a growing body of scientific evidence. The New Mexico trial is the first crack that a jury gets to examine up close.
What happens next could reshape the relationship between Big Tech and the children who use its products. Or it could end with a defense verdict that emboldens the industry to maintain the status quo. Either way, the era of social media companies avoiding courtroom accountability for their impact on kids is over.
The jury is literally in.
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