Meta Faces Trial Over Child Safety on Facebook and Instagram

Meta is defending its child-safety record on two fronts at once. A federal trial opened in Oakland on approximately August 11 in the Northern District of California and is expected to run about seven weeks. The case originated with a 29-state coalition, but this trial phase covers only the first four states, California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey, which allege addictive product design and violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act through the collection of under-13 data without verified parental consent.

Separately, the Ninth Circuit ruled that Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snap cannot immediately appeal, clearing the way for more than 3,000 youth-addiction suits to proceed. Those are consolidated as MDL No. 3047, In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the same district. Plaintiffs include states, school districts, municipalities, and individual families. Section 230 is the central legal question, and the appeals panel treated it as an affirmative defense rather than a bar to suit, which is what allows the cases to move forward.

Meta has also been removing accounts at scale in Australia. The company says it deactivated 756,000 under-16 accounts, 462,000 on Instagram and 294,000 on Facebook, between December 2025 and June 30, 2026, under the Australian under-16 social media law that took effect December 10, 2025.

For META the exposure is less about any single damages figure than about product design constraints. An adverse outcome on the addictive-design theory would reach the recommendation and engagement systems that drive ad inventory, and the Section 230 ruling removes the procedural shield that historically ended these cases before discovery. Watch the trial's seven-week calendar and the MDL bellwether schedule rather than headline damages numbers.

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