Most states across the nation have opened cases against Meta Platforms Inc. California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey have recently joined the lawsuit against Meta that dates back to 2023, accusing the company of engineering Instagram and Facebook to be addictive to children. The majority are correct, and such an accusation is long overdue for the social media industry.
The evidence so far is very damaging for Meta. Prosecutors cited an internal Meta document that said, “The young ones are the best ones.” Another said, “Teens are hooked despite how it makes them feel. Instagram is addictive.”
Former Meta engineer Arturo Béjar testified as the state’s first witness. He said the company shifted from a product people use to “a product that uses you.” This showed that this is not a company that failed to anticipate how its product would be used. Instead, it’s a company that, according to the 29 states, understood the psychological toll and optimized for engagement anyway.
Meta continues to deny the allegations and argues the case should be dismissed on free speech and Section 230 grounds. A spokesperson said the states “chase an outlandish payout” with claims that are “unsubstantiated.” A company should not get to hide behind an industry-wide defense when its own documents show it knew the specific harm it was causing.
Money alone will not fix this. States are seeking roughly $200 billion, an amount that is close to Meta’s annual revenue. Even a penalty that size risks becoming a cost of doing business for a company still worth about $1.4 trillion. What actually changes behavior is structural: design limits, not settlements.
New Mexico already offered a preview. A judge there declared Meta a “public nuisance” and ordered it to end like counts for users under 18, ban teens from sending or receiving nude images on its platforms and restrict push notifications to certain hours, according to BBC. A separate order in that case capped platform access for users under 18 at 90 hours a month, per PBS.
Every state, and ideally federal law, should adopt a monthly cap like New Mexico’s.
Ninety hours works out to roughly three hours a day. While that is still a substantial amount of screen time, a hard ceiling forces the platform to stop optimizing for infinite engagement once a user starts using it, unlike banning individual features one at a time.
Not everyone agrees a cap is the right fix. Santa Clara law professor Eric Goldman told PBS that “communities that are benefiting from social media have no voice in this trial,” warning a cap could trigger a “downward spiral” in engagement that hurts users who rely on those communities.
Any cap should include exceptions for supervised or educational use.
But that risk is smaller than the one already here. The states cite Meta’s own research linking design features such as like counts to “increased loneliness, worse body image, and negative mood.” A cap is not a perfect fix, but it is a real one, and it is something regulators can enforce.
Meta built its empire by keeping people online as long as possible. It is time the law started asking how long is too long, especially for users who never agreed to the experiment in the first place.
