Two lawsuits accusing the world’s largest social media companies of harming children begin this week, marking the first legal efforts to hold companies like Meta responsible for the effects their products have on young users.
Opening arguments began today in a case brought by New Mexico’s attorney general’s office, which alleges that Meta failed to protect children from sexually explicit material. A separate case in Los Angeles, which accuses Meta and the Google-owned YouTube of deliberately designing their platforms to be addictive for children, is set to begin later this week.
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TikTok and Snap were also named in the original California lawsuit but later settled under undisclosed terms.
The New Mexico and California lawsuits are the first of a wave of 40 lawsuits filed by state attorneys general around the US against Meta, specifically, that allege that the social media giant is harming the mental health of young Americans.
New Mexico case
In the opening argument in the New Mexico case, which was first filed in 2023, prosecutors told jurors on Monday that Meta – Facebook and Instagram’s parent company – had failed to disclose its platforms’ harmful effects on kids.
“The theme throughout this trial is going to be that Meta put profits over safety,” said lawyer Donald Migliori, who is representing the state of New Mexico against Meta.
“Meta clearly knew that youth safety was not its corporate priority… that youth safety was less important than growth and engagement.”
Prosecutors say they will provide evidence and testimony that Meta’s algorithms and account features not only enticed young people and made them addicted to social media, but also fostered a “breeding ground” for predators who target children for sexual exploitation.
Late last month, in the process of discovery, the New Mexico attorney general’s office said the company did not put in safeguards to protect children from accessing sexualised chatbots on Facebook and Instagram.
In emails obtained by the court, some of Meta’s safety staff had expressed objections that the company was building chatbots geared for companionship, including sexual and romantic interactions with users, according to the Reuters news agency.
The artificial intelligence chatbots were released in early 2024. The documents cited in the state’s filing do not include messages or memos authored by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In October 2025, Meta added parental controls to the chatbots.
California case
The California case is more wide-reaching and alleges that Meta and YouTube, which is a unit of Alphabet-owned Google, used deliberate design choices that sought to make their platforms more addictive to children to boost profits.
The case centres around a 19-year-old identified only by the initials KGM. The case could determine how thousands of other, similar lawsuits against social media companies will play out.
KGM claims that her use of social media from an early age made her addicted to the technology and exacerbated her depression and suicidal thoughts.
“Borrowing heavily from the behavioral and neurobiological techniques used by slot machines and exploited by the cigarette industry, Defendants deliberately embedded in their products an array of design features aimed at maximizing youth engagement to drive advertising revenue,” the lawsuit says.
Executives, including Zuckerberg, are expected to testify at the trial, which will last six to eight weeks. It is unclear if they will attend the New Mexico case.
The tech companies dispute the claims that their products deliberately harm children, citing a bevvy of safeguards they have added over the years and arguing that they are not liable for content posted on their sites by third parties.
“Recently, a number of lawsuits have attempted to place the blame for teen mental health struggles squarely on social media companies,” Meta said in a recent blog post. “But this oversimplifies a serious issue. Clinicians and researchers find that mental health is a deeply complex and multifaceted issue, and trends regarding teens’ well-being aren’t clear-cut or universal.
Narrowing the challenges faced by teens to a single factor ignores the scientific research and the many stressors impacting young people today, like academic pressure, school safety, socio-economic challenges and substance abuse.”
A Meta spokesperson said in a recent statement that the company strongly disagrees with the allegations outlined in the lawsuit and that it is “confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people”.
Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesperson, said the allegations against YouTube are “simply not true”.
“Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” he said in a statement.
High stakes
The outcome of the cases could shape the future of social media.
“In my mind, an existential question for social media services is whether they’re liable for harm suffered by users from using the services. If so, the damages could be more money than the defendants have, Eric Goldman, a professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, told Al Jazeera.
“We’re talking about massive financial stakes, and we’re also talking about the ability of the plaintiffs to veto or potentially override editorial decisions by the services about what’s in the best interests of their audiences,” he said.
“It’s essentially taking away power from the services to decide and handing it to plaintiffs’ lawyers. So, not only could there be existential damages, but there could also be a massive loss of editorial control over their services. The stakes could not be higher for social media services or the internet.”
Goldman said this was because the same argument could be used to shape claims against video game makers and generative AI, which refers to AI that can create original content, including text and video.
“If these theories work against social media, they might also work against video games, against generative AI, and who knows what else. That’s why I said the stakes are so high for the internet,” he added.
There are already lawsuits that claim that interactions with OpenAI’s ChatGPT led to instances of suicide and murder-suicide.
