Jury selection kicked off Wednesday in Oakland federal court in a landmark trial over whether Meta deliberately hooked children on its platforms and illegally harvested their data — giving ordinary Americans their closest look yet at whether the system will hold a surveillance empire accountable or let it walk.
The stakes go beyond one company. Meta built its fortune on attention extraction and data harvesting, and children became the raw material. If twenty-nine states can't win concrete consequences here, the message to every tech giant is clear: build your empire on minors, pay a fine, and keep going.
The 2023 federal lawsuit claims Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without parental consent, violating federal law. The complaint, as the Baltimore Sun reported, alleges Meta "harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens" and that "its motive is profit." The states say Meta "concealed the ways in which these platforms exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable consumers: teenagers and children."
The Oakland trial covers the first four plaintiff states — California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey — and is expected to run six to eight weeks. Eight other states, including Tennessee, are pursuing their own suits in state court.
This trial doesn't exist in a vacuum. Last week, a New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $567 million to address harms to young people, on top of $375 million in civil penalties a jury imposed in March after finding the company knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. Prosecutors pushed for fundamental changes — reining in addictive features, tightening age verification, and enforcing default privacy settings. Meta says it has already introduced dozens of safety features and is appealing the New Mexico decision.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's coverage noted the basic trial mechanics — jury selection, timeline, plaintiff states — but omitted the New Mexico verdicts and the damning language from the complaint. The Baltimore Sun included both, giving readers a fuller picture of the accountability track record heading into Oakland.
Meta is hardly alone in the dock. The lawsuit wave targets Google's YouTube, TikTok, and Snap over the same playbook: addict young users, vacuum their data, and dare regulators to keep up. The question is whether any penalty short of structural change will alter the business model.
The same company that lectured Americans about "misinformation" and "safety" while censoring dissent built a platform that prosecutors say ensnared children for profit. A jury will weigh the evidence — but in a system where Big Tech funds the think tanks, lobbies the regulators, and appeals every verdict, real accountability remains an open question.
