Meta Trial Opens; States Say It Hooked Kids

O'Neill summed up the states' theory of Meta's business model this way: "Hook the users; hold them for as long as they can; harvest their data; hide the truth from the public when making public statements."

She told jurors Meta studied how children's brains work — that they constantly seek rewards, are sensitive to social feedback and are "still developing their ability to control impulses the way adults do" — and then built for those vulnerabilities. "'The young ones are the best ones' is a title of a Meta study we are going to show you," she said, adding that for Meta, "kids are the product."

O'Neill also said Meta knew children under 13 were on its apps and "failed to take the simplest most obvious steps to keep them off." When Meta found a Facebook user was under 13, she said, it would disable that Facebook account but not the connected Instagram account. California's lawyer said "millions" of 11- and 12-year-olds were on Instagram and Meta "did little to keep them off." Meta's side put the number at just over 100,000.

Schmidt confronted the states' evidence directly. On an internal Meta document finding "1 in 5 teens says Instagram makes them feel worse," he told the jury: "That sounds pretty bad." Then: "What else does the document say? That 41% of teens said it made them feel better and another 41% said it had no effect."

Schmidt said what is not in dispute is that some children under 13 lie about their ages, some teens struggle to manage their time, and some people post negative content. He argued the privacy laws Meta is accused of violating are the same laws that stop it from keeping the data needed to verify every user's age. He pointed to past statements from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri that the apps were not designed to be addictive and that the science does not establish social media addiction. "Much of this lawsuit is about the government attorneys and their witnesses saying in trying to improve, we'd do it a little differently," he said.

Bejar testified that Meta's safety research was not being used to improve the products. On eating-disorder content, he said engineers "had very good ideas on how to make it better," but "once it was reviewed, it got whittled down to a little pebble that didn't make a difference." Yahoo News reported that the whistleblower told the court the number of teens exposed to graphic content was at least 100 times higher than Meta reported.

Outside the courthouse, parents who blame social media for their children's deaths held photos and a banner several feet long listing names and ages. Mary Rodee, whose son Riley Basford died by suicide at 15 after being sextorted on Facebook Messenger, said 39 names have been added since March. "It's not just a banner," she said. "Every name that I wrote on there is a promise that these children will never be forgotten and that their stories will force accountability where silence once reigned."