Meta deliberately hooked a generation of kids on Facebook and Instagram — and then lied about it to the public, a blockbuster lawsuit alleges as the biggest legal showdown in the social media giant’s history kicked off Tuesday.

A federal jury in Oakland, Calif., will spend the next six weeks hearing from top attorneys for 29 states and Meta’s own lawyers in a trial that could cost the tech titan billions — and force it to gut the very features that made it a money machine.

“Hook the users; hold them for as long as they can; harvest their data; hide the truth from the public,” Megan O’Neill, a lead attorney for California, told the court in a blistering opening salvo that painted Meta as a company that put profits over children’s safety.

“Millions” of underage kids

The states’ case landed its first body blow early: O’Neill revealed that Meta’s own research found “millions” of 11- and 12-year-olds were already on Instagram — and the company “did little to keep them off.”

Meta’s lead attorney Paul Schmidt shot back that the company actually found just over 100,000 such users — and dropped a bombshell defense of his own: social media addiction, he argued, doesn’t exist.

“There can be no dispute that Meta has recognized people struggle, or can struggle, with their use of social media, and has come up with tools to try and address that,” Schmidt told jurors. But he pointed to past statements from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram boss Adam Mosseri insisting the apps were never designed to be addictive — and that science hasn’t proven social media addiction is even a real thing.

“1 in 5 teens says Instagram makes them feel worse”

The courtroom clash turned on a trove of millions of internal Meta documents — research reports, employee emails, and chat logs stretching all the way up to Zuckerberg himself.

O’Neill wielded one damning internal study finding that “1 in 5 teens says Instagram makes them feel worse.” Schmidt pounced: “That sounds pretty bad. What else does the document say? That 41% of teens said it made them feel better and another 41% said it had no effect.”

But the states had more ammunition. Another internal Meta document stated plainly: “Teens have an addict’s narrative about use.” Yet another conceded that “product features designed to increase time spent are inherently at odds with well-being and take away from people’s ability to focus on activity that adds value to their lives.”

Profits over safety?

The core of the states’ case is that Meta knew its platforms were harming teen mental health — and targeted young people anyway, all while publicly insisting its apps were safe for kids.

“Meta said it put safety over profits, but hid the reality that, time and again, when it came to make a decision, profits won,” O’Neill told the jury.

Schmidt countered that the very privacy laws Meta is accused of violating prevent it from collecting the data it would need to effectively verify every user’s age and keep underage kids off its platforms — a Catch-22 he laid squarely at the feet of the regulators now suing the company.

What the states want

The lawsuit, originally filed in 2023 by 29 states including California and New York, accuses Meta of numerous violations of federal and state child privacy laws.

The states aren’t just after a payday — they’re demanding sweeping changes to Instagram and Facebook, including killing off “like” counts and the infinite scroll that keeps users glued to their screens.

For Meta, the stakes couldn’t be higher: a loss could reshape the features that turned a Harvard dorm project into a trillion-dollar empire — and finally force the company to answer for what it knew, and when it knew it.