An eight-person jury in Oakland, California, heard opening statements Tuesday in what may be the most consequential tech trial of the decade. Four US states — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey — have brought Meta to federal court, arguing that the company knowingly engineered its platforms to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities of children and then lied to the public about it. California Deputy Attorney General Megan O'Neill went straight for the jugular. Meta, she told the jury, had studied how adolescent brains crave social rewards, struggle with impulse control, and are acutely sensitive to peer feedback — and then deliberately designed Instagram to target those exact weaknesses.

She cited an internal Meta study titled "The Young Ones Are the Best Ones," which she said revealed a chilling corporate logic: for Meta, children are not users to be protected but a product to be monetised. The states also allege that Meta routinely collected personal data from children under 13 without parental consent, violating federal privacy law. Meta's attorney, Paul Schmidt, pushed back hard. He acknowledged that some users have difficult experiences online but argued that the scientific evidence shows no clear link between social media use and adolescent harm.

Meta, he said, has invested meaningfully in tools designed to help vulnerable users — and that the states' case amounted to little more than a disagreement over how those tools should work. The stakes are enormous. The 29-state coalition that filed the original lawsuit in 2023 is seeking roughly $200 billion in damages, alongside sweeping structural changes to Meta's platforms. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify.