Meta’s federal reckoning moved from pleadings to a packed Oakland courtroom Tuesday, and the states wasted little time reducing years of internal research, product-development decisions and public statements into a theory a jury can remember.
Hook the users. Hold them. Harvest their data. Hide the truth. California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill delivered the opening for the state and put Meta’s knowledge at the center of the case. Her argument was not that social media is inherently bad or that Instagram provides no benefit.
The charge was narrower and potentially more damaging: Meta understood the particular vulnerabilities of developing brains, engineered products to capitalize on engagement, collected the resulting data, and then publicly minimized what its own research was telling the company.
For the plaintiff bar, Day 1 was an effort to move the case away from an amorphous debate over “screen time” and toward the familiar architecture of a product case: knowledge, design choices, foreseeable users, internal warnings and public representations.
The States’ Opening: Meta’s Own Documents Take Center Stage
O’Neill told the eight jurors they would see evidence that Meta understood how children differ from adults: heightened reward seeking, sensitivity to social feedback and still-developing impulse control. The states say Meta did not merely observe those characteristics. Their case is that the company built and optimized engagement systems with that knowledge in hand.
The internal language previewed for the jury is the kind of evidence plaintiff lawyers build trials around.
One Meta study carried the title “The Young Ones Are The Best Ones.” Another internal discussion described Instagram as a drug, prompting a colleague to joke that social-media companies were effectively “pushers.” O’Neill also pointed to internal research concerning teen retention and the company’s own studies of how young users felt after using Instagram.
The states’ theory on children under 13 is equally direct. They contend Meta knew substantial numbers of underage children were using its platforms, collected their data without the parental consent required by COPPA, and failed to take measures that could have meaningfully kept them off the products.
O’Neill ultimately framed the corporate decision as one between child safety and profitability. Her message to the jury: when those interests collided, “profits won.” That is the states’ scienter case in two words.
Meta’s Opening: The Documents Are Real — the Context Is the Fight
Meta did not open by pretending there were no problems involving young users. Its lawyer, Paul W. Schmidt, acknowledged that some teenagers struggle to manage their time on social media, that users can encounter harmful material and that children under 13 sometimes lie about their ages to create accounts.
The defense instead attacked the states’ interpretation of the evidence. Schmidt told jurors the attorneys general were cherry-picking studies, emails and isolated statements while ignoring years of safety work. Meta’s position is that the same internal research the states portray as proof of knowledge is also evidence that the company was studying problems in order to address them.
The “drug dealer” employee exchange previewed by the states offers an early look at the defense playbook. Schmidt characterized that exchange as “loose language” and told jurors they would hear the context from one of the employees involved.
Meta also emphasized measures taken to identify and remove children under 13, parental and teen safety controls, privacy protections and efforts to reduce problematic experiences on its platforms. Schmidt’s larger argument was that a company continually studying how to make its products safer should not have those same studies repackaged as evidence that it deliberately harmed children. That appears to be the central defense line emerging from Oakland:
The states call the internal documents notice. Meta calls them evidence of responsible product improvement.
The next six weeks will determine which characterization survives contact with the witnesses who wrote them.
First Witness: Arturo Béjar Puts the Safety Pipeline on Trial
The states did not begin their evidence with an outside academic or a parent. They began inside Meta.
Former Facebook engineering director and Instagram safety consultant Arturo Béjar took the stand immediately after openings. Béjar worked at Facebook from 2009 to 2015 and later returned as a contractor focused on Instagram safety after his own teenage daughter experienced unwanted sexual interactions on the platform.
His testimony goes directly to the gap the states are trying to establish between Meta’s ability to identify harm and its willingness to materially change the product.
Béjar testified that safety teams generated proposals to reduce harmful experiences, but that meaningful changes could be diluted as they traveled through the company’s decision-making process. In one example involving eating-disorder content, he described a proposed response being reduced until it amounted to a change that made little practical difference.
The importance of Béjar is not simply that he is a former employee criticizing Meta.
He gives the states a witness who can potentially connect three separate pieces of the case: what Meta measured → what executives were told → what the product actually did next. That bridge is where internal corporate documents become trial evidence rather than embarrassing emails. Meta’s cross-examination of Béjar is expected to continue Wednesday.
One Procedural Detail Plaintiff Lawyers Should Not Miss
This is routinely being described as a “jury trial,” but the distinction matters. The eight jurors sitting in Oakland are an advisory jury for portions of the proceeding.
Judge Gonzalez Rogers invoked Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 39(c), explaining that an advisory jury would give the Court the community’s perspective on the alleged deceptive practices and communications at issue. Meta previously withdrew its jury demand. In other words, this is not a conventional personal-injury bellwether in which eight jurors return the final liability verdict. The State AG case sits inside MDL 3047, alongside the personal-injury and other plaintiff tracks, but the legal posture is different. That does not make the evidence less important to the plaintiff bar. It may make the record more important.
Why Day 1 Matters to the Personal-Injury Bar
The states spent opening day doing something plaintiff firms across the country have been trying to accomplish in the social-media litigation: separating the alleged defect from third-party content and putting Meta’s own product architecture on trial.
The theory centers on design and corporate conduct: engagement mechanics, retention, notifications, recommendation architecture, age verification, data collection, internal safety research and what Meta said publicly after receiving that research. NPR’s opening-day reporting likewise noted that the states are deliberately focusing on allegedly problematic design rather than attempting simply to hold Meta responsible for content supplied by users.
That line matters because Section 230 has historically protected platforms from many claims premised on third-party content. The Oakland case is testing a different proposition:
What happens when the alleged wrong is not merely what appeared on the platform, but what the company itself designed, measured, optimized, and represented about that platform?
What to Watch on Day 2
Béjar’s cross-examination should provide the first meaningful test of Meta’s defense strategy. Expect the company to attack the breadth of his knowledge, distinguish his safety work from decisions made elsewhere in the organization, and put context around the internal metrics and proposals he says were ignored or diluted.
The larger issue is whether the states can continue converting provocative documents into feature-specific proof. Internal statements make headlines. Liability will require the states to connect those statements to actual product decisions, statutory violations and representations made to consumers.
Meta, meanwhile, has signaled the opposite strategy: take every damaging document back into its original meeting, study, or email chain and argue that the states have stripped away the context.
After Day 1, the battlefield is clear.
- The states want the jury looking at what Meta knew.
- Meta wants the jury looking at everything Meta says it did about it.
Oakland will now decide whether those are two sides of the same story — or evidence of two very different companies: the Meta described to the public and the Meta reflected in its own files.