“The Youngest Are the Best”: Meta on Trial in Oakland - Facing a Possible $1.4 Trillion Penalty

In a federal courtroom in Oakland, Megan O’Neill from the California attorney general’s office said the sentence that the entire case hangs on. Meta had deceived the public for years and deliberately turned children into compulsive users of Facebook and Instagram in order to boost its own advertising revenue. Twenty-nine states have sued together, an alliance rarely seen on this scale. They want to hold the company accountable for keeping children and parents in the dark about risks to their safety and intrusions into their privacy. For five weeks, the courtroom will hear the question of whether a company is responsible for the effects of its own design.

O’Neill reduced the business to a single image. “Meta’s business model can be reduced to four things: hook users, keep them for as long as possible, collect their data and hide the truth.” Then came the sentence that hung in the courtroom. “The youngest are the best: They are the easiest to hook, and they are the ones the company makes the most money from in the long run.” In that calculation, a minor ranks above an adult because they are easier to bind and stay longer. A child becomes the best investment before it even understands what an investment is. The number next to its name does not measure its well-being. It measures the minutes it does not put the device down. You have to understand the reversal contained in that. In an ordinary business, the adult with money to spend is the most important customer. Here, what matters is who has not yet developed a habit strong enough to resist the pull, who waits for the next image with the least suspicion. Vulnerability itself becomes the advantage that the calculation rewards. Where that applies, protecting children is not some minor issue of design, it stands in the way of the design’s purpose.

Meta rejects the allegations. The attorneys general’s demands are an attempt to force unreasonable changes to the design of its products and an “outlandish payout.” The states had presented no evidence that users were misled. The company does not dispute its own numbers on its reach among teenagers. What it challenges is the conclusion that those numbers amount to deception.

The allegation of deception is not aimed at one single false statement. It is aimed at the years-long gap between what Meta promised parents and children about safety and privacy and what its own design actually did. Parents were supposed to believe they were handing their children over to a protected place. The 29 states claim that this place was built to keep the child there longer than any parent would ever have wanted. Parental protection relies on the promise of the person or company to whom the child is entrusted. That exact promise is being tried in Oakland, and the company made it for years.

The dispute centers on violations of several states’ consumer protection laws and a federal privacy law. Both provide for penalties of up to $20,000 per violation. On its own, that sounds manageable. Multiplied by millions of young Instagram and Facebook users, the number grows beyond comprehension. By Meta’s own calculation, the company could face penalties of up to $1.4 trillion if it loses. That amount is close to its market value and would be almost without precedent in legal history. A company calculating its own abyss in order to warn against it is, at the same time, putting a number on the scale of what it has earned from young users.

The attorneys general have not publicly named an exact amount so far. At a hearing last week, O’Neill put the figure closer to about $193 billion. Meta, she said, was citing the highest theoretically possible amount mainly for its shock value. Even the lower figure would rank among the largest payments ever sought in court. It is similar to the $206 billion settlement state attorneys general reached with tobacco manufacturers in 1998 over cigarette addiction.

The comparison is deliberate, and it fits. Back then, a product bound its customers through the body, and the manufacturers knew it while insisting on the opposite. Today, the attachment sits in the mind, it is harder to prove, and it begins at an age when the body is still growing. It took decades before the tobacco industry was caught by its own documents. The $206 billion from 1998 also sounded at first like a number with no bottom, until the money actually flowed over the years. Whether Meta’s calculation will have the same effect will become clear in Oakland.

O’Neill moved early to keep the case from slipping into the convenient question of bad content. This was not about the bad people in the world who put harmful content in front of children. What is on trial is the design of the platforms themselves. “We are holding Meta responsible for its own conduct,” she said, “for what the company said and left unsaid, for what it did and failed to do.” The distinction is legally decisive. A provider is not automatically liable for every post made by someone else on its platforms. That is not the same as the question of how long a child stays stuck in an endless stream of images because the company designed it that way.

The trial is expected to last about five weeks. It is taking place at a time when social networks are under pressure around the world because they are accused of making profits at the expense of young users. A growing body of scientific research suggests that heavy use of algorithm-driven platforms can harm the health of teenagers. The court is not putting that research on trial in general. It is examining what one particular company did with it once that research had long been available. For the teenagers at the center of the case, the outcome is not some distant legal question. They are already living with the consequences while Oakland is still arguing over the cause.

In Australia and Europe, authorities introduced or proposed outright bans on such networks for minors over the past year. In the United States, corresponding legislation has so far stalled. That has made the courts the decisive place for this fight because lawmakers left that space open. Additional pressure came from Brussels. On July 10, the European Commission preliminarily found that Meta had violated the European Union’s Digital Services Act. The design of Instagram and Facebook, its statement said, promotes addictive behavior. Two legal systems have therefore arrived at the same conclusion, by different routes and without coordination.

What is at stake in Oakland goes beyond Meta. If the states prove that a company deliberately turned children’s vulnerability into profit, it changes what a court can demand from providers of such services in the future. An acquittal would establish the opposite, that the design of a network remains the company’s business as long as nobody can prove an explicitly false statement. The burden of proof rests with the 29 plaintiffs, and they carry it against one of the best-funded legal departments in the world. O’Neill set the frame early in a way that takes that escape route away from the company. Whether it holds will be decided in the coming weeks.

The case is People of the State of California v. Meta Platforms Inc., 23-cv-05448, before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland. For five weeks, the court will examine what has long been written into the company’s own calculation: that a child who cannot put it down is the best entry on the books. Meta supplied the numbers itself.