Meta is confronting one of the biggest legal battles in its history, as four US states seek damages that could reach as high as $1.4 trillion over allegations tied to Facebook, Instagram, and how the company has treated young users.
The case is playing out in a federal court in Oakland, California, part of a much wider legal campaign involving attorneys general from 29 states, who accuse Meta of designing its platforms to encourage excessive use among children and teenagers while failing to adequately protect them.
That $1.4 trillion figure needs some unpacking though, it isn’t a fine Meta has actually been ordered to pay, it’s Meta’s own calculation of the maximum penalty it could face if it loses under the states’ proposed legal theories.
A lawyer for California has since indicated the states’ real estimate runs considerably lower, closer to $193 billion. That gap matters because the trillion-dollar number has dominated headlines around the trial, even as the court still has to decide whether Meta actually broke the laws in question and what penalties or remedies would follow if it did.
California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are leading the current federal case, with other states pursuing related litigation separately. At its core, the states allege Meta deliberately engineered Facebook and Instagram to keep young people engaged for longer stretches, while misleading both parents and the public about how safe its platforms actually were.
A separate strand of the case focuses specifically on children under 13, with the states claiming Meta collected data from young users without the parental consent federal children’s privacy rules require, and failed to do enough to identify and remove underage accounts from its services.
A former Meta engineering director has emerged as one of the trial’s central witnesses. Arturo Béjar, who worked at Meta and later returned as a contractor, testified that child safety received far less attention internally than user growth and engagement did, describing what he called a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach toward children under 13 using the platforms.
Béjar also took aim at some of Meta’s own safety tools, telling the court that features meant to curb harmful use often fell short because they relied on users to take action themselves, and that the company had internal knowledge of problems affecting young users but didn’t respond forcefully enough. His testimony carries particular weight because it speaks to how the company handled safety concerns internally, not just how users experienced the platforms from the outside.
Béjar has also pulled Mark Zuckerberg’s own role into scrutiny, testifying about direct interactions with the Meta chief and suggesting decisions made at the top shaped how safety concerns were handled company-wide.
Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify during the trial, alongside Instagram chief Adam Mosseri.
Meta, for its part, rejects the allegations outright, arguing it has already rolled out measures to protect teenagers and that the states haven’t established Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to harm young users.
The company has also pushed back hard on the scale of the potential penalties being discussed.
The financial stakes matter here well beyond the courtroom, since advertising still sits at the heart of Meta’s business.
The company reported $60.8 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, up 28 percent year-on-year, with advertising accounting for the overwhelming majority of that figure. At the same time, Meta has been pouring money into AI infrastructure, with full-year capital expenditure guidance running between $130 billion and $145 billion, and free cash flow dropped sharply during the quarter as that AI spending ramped up, with the company noting legal proceedings had also generated significant charges.
A ruling against Meta could reach further than just its legal bill. The states are pushing for actual changes to how Facebook and Instagram operate, potentially including restrictions on engagement-driving features, stronger age protections, and changes to how the company handles data from younger users, changes that would strike directly at products central to Meta’s advertising business.
That risk lands at a particularly costly moment, given how aggressively Meta is already committing capital to AI, a major penalty paired with product-design restrictions would hit right as the company tries to scale up new computing capacity and AI infrastructure simultaneously.
The trial is expected to run roughly six weeks, with one unusual courtroom feature: the eight-member jury serves only in an advisory capacity, while the final ruling rests with the federal judge.
This isn’t Meta’s first brush with youth-safety litigation either, earlier this year, state courts in the US ordered the company to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and remediation across separate proceedings involving alleged harms to young users.
