Meta went on trial in Nashville on Monday over Tennessee’s allegation that it engineered Instagram to keep teenagers compulsively scrolling, one of the first state cases to put the question of addictive design before a jury.
Jury selection began on 20 July in a proceeding expected to run about seven weeks, part of a wider wave of litigation in which a federal judge recently cleared states to argue that Meta hooked children on its apps.
Tennessee’s attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, contends the company deliberately built features such as autoplay, Reels, notifications, and disappearing posts to maximise engagement among minors while publicly playing down the risks.
The complaint also alleges Meta buried internal research linking Instagram to youth harm, an accusation that runs through a separate $1.4 trillion penalty demand four other states have filed for an August trial in California.
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The state says internal documents show executives, including chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, were warned about the app’s effect on teenagers and were slow to respond.
Meta disputes that reading of the record and argues its research has been mischaracterised in filings across the country.
The case is being tried in two phases. A jury will first decide whether Meta broke Tennessee’s consumer-protection law, after which a second phase would weigh penalties and any order to redesign the app.
That structure lets the state separate the question of wrongdoing from the harder fight over what a remedy should look like, and it gives the jury a narrower first task than the sprawling complaint might suggest.
Under that statute, the state is seeking damages of up to $1,000 for each violation, a figure that could mount steeply given the scale of Instagram’s teenage user base.
Tennessee is also asking the court to compel changes to features it says were engineered to be habit-forming.
Meta rejects the allegations. “We’ve spent a decade building safe, age-appropriate defaults for teens alongside simple tools for parents to set the right boundaries for their family,” a company spokesperson said.
The company argues the suit is aimed at content posted by users rather than the design of the platform itself, and that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields it from liability on that basis.
How the Nashville jury draws that line could carry weight for the many state cases still queued behind this one.
Tennessee’s action, filed in Nashville, is part of a series of state suits that gathered pace after a coalition of attorneys general took Meta to court in 2023.
Skrmetti’s office has framed the trial as a test of whether consumer-protection law can reach the way a social network is built rather than merely what appears on it.
The company arrives in court on a losing run. In March, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in a separate child-safety case, and a Los Angeles jury the same month found the company liable, alongside YouTube, for harming a young woman’s mental health.
Meta has said it is appealing the Los Angeles verdict and maintains that no court has found its products to be defectively designed.
The company also points to years of investment in parental supervision tools and dedicated teen accounts that restrict who can contact younger users.
Regulators abroad are moving on similar ground. The European Commission has been probing addictive design on Facebook and Instagram under the Digital Services Act, with a focus on infinite scroll, autoplay, and notifications aimed at children.
The timing is awkward for Meta. The Nashville trial runs into the autumn and overlaps with the larger California proceeding, where a court has already declined to dismiss the states’ central claims and set damages arguments for August.
What the jury makes of Instagram’s design remains the open question. A finding for Tennessee would hand the remaining states a template to follow, while a defence win would blunt the momentum that a run of adverse verdicts has lately given the plaintiffs.
