Twenty-nine states want a federal judge to reach into Instagram and Facebook and pull out the infinite scroll.
The list also includes autoplaying video, disappearing Stories, beauty filters, visible like counts and the engagement-optimizing algorithm, plus daily time limits and age restrictions on minors’ accounts. The states are asking for all of it nationwide — for every user in the country, not only their own residents.
“This week, we’re in court with the largest consumer protection lawsuit in American history,” Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman said as the trial opened.
The states say Meta built those features knowing what they did to kids, then said otherwise in public. “Meta’s business model can be summed up in four simple words,” California deputy attorney general Megan O’Neill said in her opening statement: “‘hook’ the users, ‘hold’ them for as long as they can, ‘harvest’ their data, and then ‘hide’ the truth from the public when making public statements.”
She read from the company’s own documents. One Instagram study of tweens was titled “Long Term Retention: The Young Ones Are The Best Ones.” A 2016 email to Instagram head Adam Mosseri named “teen time spent” as the app’s overall company goal. “Meta said it prioritized safety over profits,” O’Neill said, “but it hid the reality that when it came time to make a decision, time and again profits won.”
The states’ first witness was Arturo Béjar, who ran engineering at Facebook from 2009 to 2015 and later returned as a consultant on Instagram’s wellbeing team. He testified that autoplay, like counters and infinite scroll are “inherently unsafe for teenagers,” and that the safety settings Meta points to are optional by design. Most people never switch them on, he said: “It’s like you have to turn on the air bag every time you get into the car.”
Meta’s attorney Paul Schmidt told the court the states had cherry-picked documents. “Let me be clear: Meta has talked over the years about people struggling with social media,” he said. “That’s something Meta takes seriously, and tries to act on.”
He said the company had flagged 1.4 million accounts over four years where users appeared to be under 13. A Meta spokesperson, Stephanie Otway, said the states’ “limited claims are unsubstantiated and their financial demands are vastly disproportionate.”
The case was filed in 2023 and opened Aug. 18 in federal court in Oakland. California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are trying it first under their own consumer protection laws, with all 29 states’ claims under the federal children’s privacy law heard alongside. The eight-person jury is advisory — Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers decides the case, and a ruling is expected in October.
The $1.4 trillion attached to this trial in headlines is not what the states are asking for. O’Neill put their number at roughly $193 billion. “To be clear, we are not asking for $1.4 trillion dollars,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said. “This is not a damages case.”
The closest thing to a precedent came out of New Mexico this month, where Judge Bryan Biedscheid ordered time limits and warnings on minors’ accounts — and declined to touch infinite scroll or the recommendation algorithm, citing the First Amendment. That order applied only to that state’s users.