Meta has told a federal court that four US states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties over claims it engineered Facebook and Instagram to hook young users, a figure the company put on the record in a filing on Monday. The sum, first reported by Reuters, sits uncomfortably close to Meta’s own market capitalisation of about $1.5 trillion.
The number appeared in Meta’s response to filings by California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey on how penalties should be calculated should the states prevail at trial. A judge cleared the states to try those claims after refusing to dismiss them, and independent estimates suggest the eventual payouts could dwarf even Meta’s vast AI budget.
Meta was quick to call the sum absurd. “A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement,” the company wrote, arguing that the amount was unsupported by the evidence, according to the filing.
How the states reached $1.4 trillion is not fully public. Their own filings are sealed, but at a June hearing they said they had arrived at the total by multiplying the number of alleged violations by fine amounts fixed in state law.
The count of violations, in turn, rests on the estimated number of teens and young users the states say were affected. Multiply a per-violation fine across millions of minors and the arithmetic climbs fast, which is roughly how a consumer-protection case ends up rivalling a trillion-dollar company’s entire valuation.
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Meta, for its part, frames the $1.4 trillion as the states’ theoretical maximum rather than a likely outcome, and no court has endorsed the figure. Penalty calculations of this kind are typically pared back heavily, if they are reached at all, and the sealed state filings mean the public is currently seeing the ceiling through Meta’s eyes.
The trial is scheduled to open on 18 August before US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who oversees the consolidated federal case in the Northern District of California. She rejected Meta’s bid to cancel the trial last month, ruling that genuine disputes remained over whether the apps were built to be addictive and whether Meta misrepresented their safety.
The proceedings fold together two strands. Twenty-nine states are pressing claims under the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, while California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey pursue separate allegations that Meta broke state consumer-protection laws by misleading the public about its apps.
Gonzalez Rogers has signalled that she intends to seat an advisory jury for at least some of the states’ claims, an unusual arrangement that leaves the ultimate call on liability, and on any penalty, with the judge herself.
The demand also lands against a bruising run of courtroom results. A New Mexico jury found this year that Meta had concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation and mental-health harms on its apps, and a separate California jury returned an early verdict in a social-media addiction case, the first of its kind to reach a jury.
Meta denies wrongdoing. The company says the attorneys general have produced no evidence that it deceived anyone about addictiveness, partly because “social media addiction” is not a recognised psychiatric diagnosis, an argument it has run repeatedly even as it rolls out tighter teen-safety settings across its apps.
More than 40 state attorneys general have now filed child-safety suits against the company, and the August case is only one front. Whatever the advisory jury makes of the trillion-dollar demand, the number itself is likely to frame how the public reads a fight that has already outlasted several rival platforms’ decisions to settle.
