Meta's jury trial is a product spec fight: 30 states want like counts, infinite scroll and autoplay gone

A jury trial opens Tuesday in a suit that 30 states, California and New York among them, filed against Meta in 2023, alleging numerous violations of federal and state privacy laws for children ^[1]. The damages figure is enormous, but the part that matters to anyone shipping a consumer feed is the remedy list, because the states are asking a court to order specific features out of the product ^[2].

The published asks are concrete: end "like" counts and infinite scroll ^[2]; implement parental verification for teenage users; change what the states call "dopamine-manipulating recommendation algorithms"; remove many image filters that alter appearance; end autoplay of video; prohibit the creation of multiple accounts; and end disappearing or "ephemeral" posts such as Instagram Stories ^[3]. The BBC notes that all of these features are central to the current user experience on Meta's platforms ^[4]. The states contend they are designed to keep users, including teenagers and children, on the apps as often and as long as possible, and that Meta makes it hard to cut back through frequent notifications engineered to pull young people back in ^[5].

Read that as a specification rather than a grievance, and it covers most of the growth surface a modern consumer app ships with. That is why the money is the less interesting half. Meta's market value is about $1.5tn ^[7]; the states are seeking upwards of $1 trillion, roughly two thirds of that ^[6][1]. In New Mexico, Judge Bryan Biedscheid fined Meta a collective $942m and ordered changes of the same shape: no like counts for users under 18 on Instagram and Facebook, a ban on teenagers sending or receiving nudity, and push notifications limited to certain hours ^[8]. That fine is about 0.06 percent of Meta's market value ^[2]. The fine is payable. The order is not.

Biedscheid also declared Meta a "public nuisance," comparing it to a factory polluting the air an entire population breathes ^[9]. Meta said it would appeal ^[10]. His order binds only New Mexico ^[11], which is the constraint the 30-state case removes: those states represent nearly two thirds of the US population ^[12], and per the BBC a loss would almost certainly force platform changes across the country ^[13]. Nobody maintains two versions of a feed at that scale, so the strictest jurisdiction sets the default, and a teen-scoped remedy quietly becomes the shipped product for everyone.

The case goes to Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, a chief federal judge in California who presided over the Elon Musk v Sam Altman trial and has spent nearly 20 years on the bench ^[14]. Meta denies the allegations; a spokeswoman said the company strongly disagrees and is "confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people" ^[15]. The plaintiffs' evidence is not abstract. A young woman identified as Kaley, who prevailed against Meta earlier this year, testified that she created dozens of accounts on YouTube and Instagram to like her own posts and drive engagement; she was nine, and was diagnosed with depression at ten ^[16]. Research over recent years has linked engagement metrics such as like counts to feelings of rejection and depression ^[17]. Likes have been part of the company since its Facebook-only years and are now the main way people engage with what they see online ^[18].

Watch whether any verdict carries injunctive relief at all or collapses into damages, and whether relief is age-gated as in New Mexico or written platform-wide. Watch the multiple-accounts ban in particular: enforcing it requires identity verification, which is a far deeper build than deleting a counter.