LOS ANGELES — A blockbuster battle in federal court is set to open in Oakland this month, pitting Silicon Valley against attorneys for the state of California in a $1.4 trillion contest with existential stakes and potentially eye-watering payouts.
In true Hollywood fashion, the record-smashing, celebrity-studded legal drama is also a sequel.
At the heart of the fight is an essential, hotly contested question: Is social media addiction even real?
Meta’s answer, articulated across years of filings and months of litigation, is a resounding “no.”
Earlier this year, Meta lost two groundbreaking civil suits in state courts, with juries in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Los Angeles concluding its products were harmful to children in verdicts rendered just hours apart. The company is appealing both cases.
The damages were relatively small: $375 million to New Mexico for enabling child predators and $4.2 million to Kaley Glenn-Mills in Los Angeles for designing features to hook kids, figures well below Sandoz’s generic drug price-fixing settlement and L.A.’s most recent dog-bite payout, respectively.
But their impact was seismic.
On Thursday, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay an additional $567 million on top of the earlier damage judgment, ruling the company was a “public nuisance.” In a July 29 earnings report, Meta said that the 2026 trials could “significantly impact” its bottom line.
Now, attorneys general in California and three other states are hoping to parlay that success into an unprecedented verdict in federal court, one that could prove far more significant — and orders of magnitude more costly — than any civil suit before.
The states allege Meta intentionally designed its products to addict kids and repeatedly lied to the public about it, telling parents and politicians its apps were safe for children while mining underage users for valuable data. The lawsuit seeks a whopping $1.4 trillion in damages from the company.
The company’s lawyers have filed a motion to block the “staggering figure” from reaching jurors when the trial opens on Aug. 18, arguing it is unprecedented.
Meta argues it can’t keep very young kids off its apps, and that there’s equal evidence showing its products are good for older adolescents as to suggest they might be harmful.
To cast doubt on the existence of social media addiction, Meta’s lawyers have zeroed in on the absence of a formal diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often called the bible of psychiatry, or the DSM.
“Courts — including the U.S. Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit — routinely refer to the DSM as an authority to inform the definition and diagnosis of mental disorders,” attorneys for Meta wrote in a motion for summary judgment in April.
“The fact that neither of the two definitive authorities for diagnosing mental disorders recognizes the existence of social media addiction — after having studied the issue and the literature — is fatal to the AGs’ core claims, especially given the lack of admissible evidence to the contrary,” the filing said.
But the relationship between the manual and the courtroom is rarely so straightforward, experts argue.
