Four states are seeking the death penalty for a 22-year-old — not a person, but a company. Attorneys general in California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are demanding up to $1.4 trillion in penalties and disgorgement from Meta, roughly the total market capitalization of the tech giant. Meta’s threatened punishment would almost certainly amount to the company’s execution and erase the value that billions of users derive from its platforms.
A penalty of that size has no historical comparison. Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill — which ranks as the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history — BP paid a total of $65 billion. The penalties pursued against Meta are more than 20 times higher than what was levied against BP — and triple the annual budgets of the four plaintiff states combined. On both its merits and its scale, the AGs’ punitive $1.4 trillion ask is disconnected from reality.
The unprecedented demand stems from a lawsuit in which the four states allege that Meta misled the public about its platforms’ safety, chiefly by denying that Facebook and Instagram were designed to be addictive. Given that the states’ consumer protection laws impose fines on a per-violation basis, the size of the demand can quickly skyrocket depending on how many “violations” the states can count. Those claims will now be tested at trial before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, where jury selection began earlier this week and opening statements are set for August 18.
The Anatomy of a Trillion-Dollar Fine
In a traditional negligence or product liability case, a plaintiff would have to prove that Meta had a duty to its customers, that it breached that duty, and that the breach directly caused individualized harms. Meeting that bar would require the states to prove that Meta’s platforms caused psychiatric harm in identifiable teens, a link researchers continue to dispute. However, because the states are prosecuting the social media company under state Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices (UDAP) laws, the states do not necessarily have to demonstrate that any user suffered a diagnosed psychiatric disorder or other harms, only that they have been “deceived” into compulsive and prolonged usage of the company’s products.
In the states’ view, Meta deceptively informed the public that its platforms were safe, and each teen who was allegedly deceived counts as a separate violation. But as Meta’s filing details, the states never attempt to show that any individual teen saw these statements, believed them, or was harmed by them. Instead, they simply count every teen whose daily use of the apps exceeded as little as half an hour in a given month, or who held an account at all. In effect, the states treat the usage itself as proof of deception: any teen whose screen time crossed the states’ arbitrarily low thresholds is presumed to have been misled.
Even if Meta’s statements were proven to be misleading, the states still must show that teens used the platforms compulsively. Their method of calculating violations, however, is wholly indefensible. First, by no reasonable standard does spending half an hour a day on an app qualify as compulsive or prolonged use. Under that logic, a teenager streaming a single episode of Stranger Things is addicted to Netflix. The research that ties social media to poor mental health generally locates the risk above three hours a day, six times the states’ lowest threshold, and even those findings remain contested. The American Psychological Association has concluded that using social media is not inherently harmful to young people, while the Surgeon General’s advisory acknowledges the benefits teens draw from social media. If a scientific case for these cutoffs existed, the states would have made it. Yet none of the states’ expert witnesses have identified these specific increments as clinical markers of compulsive, prolonged, or otherwise problematic use.
Second, Judge Gonzalez Rogers dismissed the states’ claims against the platform’s algorithmically personalized feed, infinite scroll, and push notifications under Section 230 immunity. The states must now tie the compulsive use they allege to the three features that remain: cosmetic filters, time-management tools, and the ability to hold multiple accounts. As Meta’s filing lays out, the states’ experts have yet to even attempt to show such a connection — a likely admission that those features fail to meaningfully contribute to prolonged usage.
Regulation by Litigation
The four states behind this demand are working backward from the predetermined conclusion that Meta’s platforms are harmful to its users in an effort to inflict maximum financial pain on the company. Accordingly, the penalty is better understood as an attempt to punish Meta for features that the states have failed to restrict through the traditional legislative process. In charging Meta for every month in which a teen’s screen time surpasses a manufactured threshold, the states convert engagement driven by legally protected features into a recurring fine. In doing so, these attorneys general are attempting to bypass the constitutional limits that have stopped legislatures across the country, anointing themselves the final arbiters of how free speech should be exercised online. Indeed, this fight is taking place in a courtroom largely because similar ideas have been tried by state legislatures over the years only to be blocked time and time again on First Amendment grounds, most recently in Nebraska this past June.
If consumer protection law can transform protected design choices into trillion-dollar fines, platforms will reshape their products to satisfy whichever attorney general threatens them next, leaving those who should help decide — parents, voters, or legislators — with no say in the process. The result is a system of regulation by settlement. If the states want to redesign social media, the Constitution gives them a path: pass a law and defend it in court.
