OAKLAND, 26 AUG 2026 — Meta is in the second week of a federal trial brought by 29 state attorneys general, who say it designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children and collected data on under-13s without parental consent. It is the first case in the federal social media litigation to reach a jury.
Two features of the proceeding are being lost in the coverage, and both change what a verdict would mean. The jury's verdict is advisory. And this is not the Meta trial in which Mark Zuckerberg testified.
What is actually being tried
Opening arguments began on 18 August before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland. The case was filed in 2023 and is scheduled to run about six weeks.
California Deputy Attorney General Megan O'Neill put the states' theory in four verbs during her opening: hook the users, hold them as long as possible, harvest their data, and hide the truth when making public statements.
The states' claims are of two kinds. The first is about design, alleging that Meta knowingly built features to maximise young users' time on the service despite the harm. The second is a more mechanical compliance question, alleging that it collected data on children under 13 without the parental consent federal law requires.
The jury does not decide this
The most consequential detail is easily missed. The jury returns an advisory verdict, and Judge Gonzalez Rogers decides the civil penalties and any required changes to the products.
This follows from the remedy the states are seeking. Juries decide claims for money damages. Where a plaintiff seeks equitable relief — an order to change how a product works — the decision has historically rested with the judge, and any jury empanelled alongside it advises rather than binds.
The practical consequences run in both directions. A jury finding for Meta would not end the matter, because the judge is not obliged to follow it. A jury finding against Meta would not by itself impose anything, because the remedy is the judge's to write.
Headlines about a jury deciding Instagram's future are therefore wrong. The verdict will be a strong signal of how the evidence landed with twelve ordinary people, and it will not be the outcome.
Four states are arguing it and twenty-five are waiting
Twenty-nine attorneys general are behind the case. Four of them — California, Colorado, New Jersey and Kentucky — are actually trying it. The remaining twenty-five go to trial later.
This structure is ordinary case management for a coalition of that size. A judgment for the first four states will not automatically resolve the other twenty-five cases, which rely on different state consumer protection statutes with their own elements and remedies.
What this trial does produce is a template. The evidence, the rulings on what a jury may hear and the judge's eventual reasoning become the reference point for the cases that follow. That is the more realistic description of what is at stake: not a single verdict that reshapes the products, but the first full test of whether this theory survives contact with a courtroom.
There are two Meta trials, and they are being blurred
Anyone searching this subject will encounter Zuckerberg giving evidence, a jury finding against Meta, and a six million dollar award. None of that belongs to the Oakland case.
Those events come from a separate proceeding in Los Angeles state court, an individual claim brought on behalf of one young woman, in which Zuckerberg testified in February and a jury found in March that Meta and Google bore responsibility for her depression and anxiety.
The two are different in almost every respect that matters. One is an individual personal-injury claim in state court seeking damages for one plaintiff. The other is a coalition of state enforcers in federal court seeking penalties and structural changes to the products. Coverage that treats a development in one as a development in the other is common at the moment and is worth checking before relying on it.
The under-13 claim may be the more dangerous one
The addictive-design allegation gets the attention, and it is the harder claim to prove. The states must establish intent, or something close to it, about the effects of design choices on a population. Meta has room to argue causation, the state of the science and the role of parental responsibility.
The under-13 data claim is a different kind of problem for Meta. It is a compliance question. Were children under 13 on the service, was their data collected, and was verifiable parental consent obtained? Those are questions of company records rather than of duelling experts.
Claims of that shape tend to be the ones that produce penalties, because they turn on documents rather than on contested science. If Meta faces a serious financial consequence out of this trial, the mechanical claim is the likelier source of it.
Section 230 is not the shield it once was
The reason a case like this can reach a jury at all is that the states have framed the harm as a product design defect rather than as harm caused by content.
Federal law has long protected platforms from liability for what their users publish. It says nothing about how a company designs a recommendation system, a notification schedule or an infinite feed, and courts have increasingly accepted that distinction — as when the Ninth Circuit declined to treat the provision as blanket immunity.
That framing is the whole architecture of the states' case. It is also why the outcome matters well beyond Meta: if design choices are actionable, every platform making engagement decisions about minors is exposed to the same theory.
What it means from here
For the region, the connection is regulatory rather than legal. Litigation of this kind is slow, appealable and confined to American law, and nothing decided in Oakland binds anyone in ASEAN.
What it does is generate discovery — internal documents about what platforms knew and when — and that material travels. Regulators drafting rules elsewhere read it, and it tends to shift the argument from whether harm exists to what should be required in response. Malaysia has already moved, with age verification for under-16s tied to a national digital identity, and it will not be the last.
At the end of the six weeks, the document to read will not be the jury's verdict. It will be Judge Gonzalez Rogers's ruling, which is the part with force.
Correction, 27 August 2026: this article originally described Meta as three weeks into the Oakland trial. Opening arguments began on 18 August and this article was published on 26 August, so the trial was in its second week. The opening sentence has been corrected. The scheduled six-week length, reported correctly, is unchanged. Meta settled the case on 26 August, and the advisory-verdict question this article set out was therefore never reached — see our report on the settlement.
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