Meta is facing arguably the most significant legal challenge in its history, with a coalition of 29 state attorneys general in the U.S. alleging that the company intentionally designed addictive systems, despite knowing that those systems pose risks to users.
The trial began in California last week, and some projections estimate that if the finding goes against Meta, the company could face more than $1 trillion in damage claims, per Reuters.
That would be a crippling blow for the business. Meta’s current market cap is around $1.5 trillion, but that’s before factoring in the hundreds of billions of dollars Meta has invested into artificial intelligence development.
So what are the actual allegations against Meta, and is the company likely to lose the case?
Here’s a look at the two critical claims that are on trial.
Social media addiction
At its core, the case against Meta relates to social media addiction and whether social media apps can be habit-forming in a medically diagnosable sense.
Meta said social media addiction is not a recognized psychological condition verified by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Therefore, the company argued, this cannot be considered a legal liability.
It’s possible Meta will be able to win against this claim because the balance of academic research is in the company’s favor, though that’s partially based on a technicality.
In 2017, Nature published a paper approved by the U.S. Surgeon General, which found that the neurological impact of using social media are similar to other addictions, such as substance abuse and gambling, in terms of brain anatomy alterations.
According to the National Library of Medicine gambling addiction has been recognized condition since 1980. However, gambling addiction is rarely diagnosed because patients generally present with co-occurring conditions including depression and anxiety, which become the main focus of treatment.
This is likely Meta’s main defense here, and the company may argue that social media addiction is not a recognized condition in itself, and that any negative impacts of social media use are the result of other diagnosable conditions, rather than solely due to social media use.
In her 2021 book “Dopamine Nation,” Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke argued that dopamine addiction caused by social media networks can have significant negative impacts. Lembke said social connection has become “druggified” by social media apps, leaving users vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption.
“These apps can cause the release of large amounts of dopamine into our brains' reward pathway all at once, just like heroin, or meth, or alcohol,” Lembke said in an interview with Stanford Medicine. “They do that by amplifying the feel-good properties that attract humans to each other in the first place.”
Meta’s counterargument could be that dopamine addiction may be a thing, but that social media addiction is not, and while apps may be a contributing factor, that doesn’t rise to the level of legal liability.
According to a 2024 paper published in the National Library of Medicine, social media addiction is a real condition characterized by “excessive screen time, compulsive checking, and detrimental effects on real-life relationships and responsibilities.”
However, the paper also cited compounding factors that exacerbated social media addiction: “This addiction is driven by a combination of psychological factors, such as low self-esteem and mental health issues, technological mechanisms like infinite scrolling and personalized notifications, and social influences, including peer pressure and exposure to idealized content.”
Which again could enable Meta to argue that other recognized psychological conditions are the actual causes of what’s being labeled as social media addiction, but that the condition in and of itself doesn’t actually exist.
Essentially, while Meta’s systems may well align with these outcomes, the company could argue that social media addiction is not the core problem.
In that case, the judge may order Meta to alter its systems and give users more ways to opt out of addictive elements. The judge could even impose restrictions and limits on social media use to negate these impacts.
But it seems unlikely that Meta will be found guilty of feeding into social media addiction based on a reading of the existing parameters around what qualifies as a psychologically dependent condition.
Meta knowingly built addictive systems
The claim that Meta knowingly built addictive systems in order to keep users hooked to their apps stems from internal insight shared by former Meta employee Frances Haugen, who leaked thousands of pages of Meta’s proprietary research documents to the Wall Street Journal in 2021.
WSJ subsequently published “The Facebook Files,” a series of expose pieces claiming that Meta, based on this evidence:
- Publicly downplayed the mental health impacts of Instagram use among teen girls, even though the company’s internal research showed that Instagram usage was linked to negative mental health impacts in this specific user group
- Shielded VIP users from standard content moderation rules
- Implemented algorithmic changes that increased political polarization and misinformation
- Misled the SEC about its safety metrics
Meta refuted this evidence, claiming that these were all partial research elements or initiatives that did not present the full scope of its internal research.
However, other former Meta executives have supported Haugen’s claims, including former Facebook engineering director Arturo Bejar, who said Meta management repeatedly ignored recommendations to implement systems to better protect young users, and instead focused on growth.
Bejar was the first witness called to testify in the trial last week.
Another former Meta executive, Sarah Wynn-Williams, published a memoir titled “Careless People,” in which she claimed that Meta’s’s leadership repeatedly downplayed significant ethical and safety risks in pursuit of global expansion.
As reported by the BBC, Wynn-Williams, who was previously Facebook’s director of public policy, was recently banned from speaking publicly about her claims due to ongoing legal action from Meta.
The company has been pushing back against the claims of former employees for some time, and it seems unlikely that the testimony of these former employees will prove any more compelling now. Meta said it has implemented various protection measures and controls to address these claims, and has been successfully able to frame these former employees as having ulterior motives for their public statements.
But former employees are just one element.
In March this year, Meta lost a high-profile case in California, in which a user of Facebook and Instagram accused the company of creating systems that caused her harm. In that case, both Meta and Google-owned YouTube were found to have ignored known risks in order to maximize business opportunities.
The jury in that case ruled that the addictive elements of social media platforms had negatively impacted the defendant’s mental health. The defendant was subsequently awarded $3 million in compensatory damages, while the jury also awarded an additional $3 million in punitive damages. Meta will pay $4.2 million of that amount, with YouTube to pay $1.8 million.
A key difference in that case was that it was a binding jury trial, and this latest trial will have an advisory jury, meaning the final decision will come down to the ruling of the presiding judge.
This could prove to be a significant shift, because a jury of people could arguably be more swayed by the ills of social media but less likely to be moved by the specifics of legal technicalities.
Either way, it seems likely that Meta could be asked to review addictive elements, such as infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations. But again, a finding of full liability on this element seems unlikely.
In the end, it seems unlikely that Meta is going to be held liable for the full scope of claims being made against it, nor will the company likely be on the hook for the maximum amount of potential compensatory damages.
That said, the findings of this case could lead to significant changes in Meta’s approach, including the implementation of usage time limits and algorithm opt-outs, among other measures.
