August 18 – The Prosecution: “Hook, hold, harvest, hide”

Megan O’Neill, California’s deputy attorney general, opens the states’ case. She sums up what the prosecution describes as Meta’s strategy in four words: “hook, hold, harvest, hide” — attract children, keep them on the platforms, collect their data and hide the risks.

O’Neill says Meta knew what effects its products could have on young people and that, when safety came into conflict with financial results, “time and again, profits won.”

Internal Documents Presented by the Prosecution

An internal Meta study titled “Long Term Retention: The Young Ones Are the Best Ones and Other Learnings” is presented. Its conclusion: users who join at a very young age are especially valuable because of their long-term retention.

An internal 2016 email is also presented in which “teen time spent” appears as an Instagram objective.

The prosecution also presents internal communications in which Meta employees compared Instagram to a drug. For the states, these documents are meant to show the gap between what Meta knew internally and what it said publicly about the safety of its products.

August 18 – Meta Responds

Paul Schmidt, Meta’s lawyer, says the states cherry-picked the most dramatic phrases from millions of documents and stripped them of context.

Meta does not deny that some teenagers struggle to control the amount of time they spend online or that minors lie about their age. But it disputes the claim that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to create addiction.

Schmidt points to the company’s safety tools and says Meta removed more than one million accounts it determined belonged to children under 13.

August 18 – First Witness: Arturo Béjar

The states’ first witness is Arturo Béjar, a former Facebook engineering director and former Meta safety consultant.

Béjar says that in Facebook’s early years the priority was rapid product launches, which meant that safety and security were often “an afterthought.”

He also claims Meta replaced the term “addiction” in its research with the narrower term “problematic use,” which he says led to the problem being perceived as less serious.

August 19 – Béjar Puts Zuckerberg at the Center of the Trial

Béjar continues his testimony and describes Meta as a company in which Zuckerberg can change priorities very quickly:

“If Mark makes something a priority, mountains move in months.”

Béjar says he interacted with Zuckerberg around 100 times and that in 2021 he personally sent him an email about teen safety problems.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell”

Béjar says Meta had technology capable of potentially identifying millions of accounts belonging to children under 13, but describes the company’s effective policy as:

“don’t ask, don’t tell.”

He argues that aggressively identifying and removing those users would have hurt platform growth. Meta rejects the allegation and insists that accounts belonging to children under 13 are prohibited.

“Take a Break” Was “Designed to Fail”

Béjar directly attacks one of the safety measures highlighted by Meta: the Take a Break feature.

He calls it “designed to fail,” because users have to activate it themselves and the warnings can easily be ignored.

Meta Pushes Back Against Béjar

During cross-examination, Meta’s lawyers get Béjar to acknowledge that the company had hundreds of employees working on safety and that many of them were doing their jobs well.

The defense is trying to separate Béjar’s criticism of specific management decisions from the much broader allegation that Meta ignored child safety altogether.

After Béjar, Elena Davis

After Béjar, jurors watch recorded testimony from Elena Davis, a Meta researcher who studied problematic social media use.

An internal report is introduced examining whether Facebook could be modified so that the product had less potential to become habit-forming and could help users interrupt usage patterns they did not want.

The document matters because it shows that the issue of habit formation was being explicitly studied inside Meta.

Situation at the Start of the Day

As of this update, Mark Zuckerberg has not testified in this trial. Adam Mosseri has not testified either.

Both are expected to appear as witnesses.

We will update this timeline as soon as new testimony, internal documents or court decisions emerge.

August 20 – Expert Jean Twenge takes the stand. The San Diego State University psychology professor began testifying for the states. She said that adolescent mental health underwent a major shift around 2010, alongside the rapid rise of smartphones and social media, and that studies show an association between spending more hours per day on social media and a higher likelihood of depression. Her testimony is expected to continue next week.

We now also have a more precise figure from Meta’s defense: attorney Paul Schmidt said that between 2020 and 2024, Meta disabled nearly 1.5 million accounts suspected of being used by children under 13. In the previous version, we only had the wording “more than one million.”

Another important detail has emerged from Béjar’s testimony about the Take a Break feature: in his view, a safety tool that has to be manually enabled is comparable to having to switch on the airbag every time you get into a car. It is a much clearer explanation of why he described the feature as “designed to fail.”