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State of Tennessee v. Meta: the first trial over a safety tool the company knew was broken

State of Tennessee, ex rel. Jonathan Skrmetti, Attorney General and Reporter v. Meta Platforms, Inc. and Instagram, LLC, No. 23-1364-IV, Chancery Court of Davidson County, Tennessee (Part IV), Chancellor Russell T. Perkins

This is the raw, evidence-tiered claim ledger behind the Tennessee case file. It is published for transparency: the source of truth, with its tiers intact, current as of 2026-08-28.

how to read the tiers

Each claim is tagged by the strength of the evidence behind it, not by how certain it sounds.

  • [ESTABLISHED]: stated in a primary source (a court order or filing, the docket, an official release) or, for a hearing, said on the official record. A fact about what was filed or said, not necessarily adjudicated true.
  • [OBSERVED]: carried by secondary coverage, or by a document read into the record.
  • [ASSUMED]: the distiller's inference, flagged as such.
  • Provenance flags ([interested-party], [advocacy-witness], [single-witness], [lawmaker characterization]) mark a claim that rests on one interested voice: reported, not adjudicated.

Tier key (this record's calibration, per the parent plan): ESTABLISHED means stated in a primary source (a court order or filing, the docket register, an official government release) with independent corroboration where available; OBSERVED means carried by secondary coverage or inferred from it; ASSUMED means the drafter's inference, flagged as such. This authority-based calibration is the plan's deliberate adaptation for legal records.

Reader summary

Tennessee tried Meta and Instagram before a Nashville jury in the summer of 2026, and the trial ended on August 26, 2026, in its fifth week of evidence, without a verdict: the multistate settlement of the federal MDL lists this case by name among the state-court actions it resolves, and the Chancellor dismissed the jury the day it was announced. The attorney general had sued in October 2023 under the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act, arguing two things: that Instagram was designed in a way that induces compulsive use in young people (an unfairness claim), and that Meta lied to the public about how safe Instagram was and about whether its own well-being features worked (a deception claim). Tennessee's share of the settlement is $751,922,691.13, which the attorney general says goes to the state's Children's Digital Protection Fund; about 30 percent of the main component is contingent on Snap, TikTok and YouTube accepting equivalent obligations, and the design-change order the State asked the court to write will now never be ruled on.

The second claim is the one that matters most for anyone studying whether platform safety controls actually function, because Tennessee pleaded it as a specific, documented allegation rather than a general complaint. Meta announced time-management tools in 2018 and promoted them as evidence of its commitment to user well-being. The State alleges that by March 2020 Meta's own staff knew the tool was reporting materially wrong numbers to users, that the team responsible for retiring features recommended removing it, and that Meta kept it in place anyway, because it was the company's most visible proof that it took addiction seriously.

A jury of fifteen was sworn on Friday, July 24, 2026, after a week of selection, and opening statements followed on Monday, July 27. The court's own calendar runs the trial to September 3, 2026. The jury decides only whether Meta broke the law; if it did, Chancellor Russell Perkins separately decides the money and whether to order Meta to change the product.

In the first week of evidence the State called Arturo Bejar, the former Meta engineering director who told a Senate subcommittee in 2023 that the company measured how often children were harmed and chose not to act. He testified for about four days and was cross-examined at length about why he became a whistleblower. That is the same witness giving an account of the same conduct to Congress and to a jury, two and a half years apart.

Three honest cautions. First, the operative version of the complaint is a 2024 amended version that has never been made public, so every quotation in this record comes from the original 2023 complaint, one generation behind. Second, Tennessee has won every procedural fight so far, but "Meta lost its appeals" overstates it: Tennessee's appellate courts declined five times to hear Meta's interim appeals, which is a refusal to take the question up, not a ruling that Meta is wrong. Third, and specific to the trial itself: there is no public transcript and the gavel-to-gavel video is paywalled, so what was said in that courtroom cannot be checked against a retrievable record. Everything this record says about the trial is what reporters in the room reported, and it is labelled that way.

Brake-integrity relevance (why this case feeds the de-amplify thesis)

This is the strongest control-integrity artifact in the American litigation record, and it is stronger than the MDL's "public relations stunt" finding, because in Tennessee the broken control is not evidence supporting a wider theory. It is a separately pleaded count, with its own heading, its own paragraphs, and its own Bates-numbered internal documents.

The site's standard says a control that a platform offers must actually work. Tennessee alleges a control that did not work, that the company knew did not work, and that the company kept precisely because removing it would have cost it credibility on the harm the control was supposed to address. That is not a brake that failed. That is a brake retained as signage after the company had established it was not connected to anything.

The exact shape of the allegation, in the State's own sequence: Meta announced the tools (2018), Meta's staff found the data was wrong (by March 2020), Meta's own decommissioning team recommended removal (mid-2020), and Meta declined, on the reasoning that the regulatory and brand risk of removing "our only addiction-related features" outweighed the benefit of accurate data.

Scope discipline, and it matters. Tennessee's control-integrity theory is "Time Spent," and nothing else. In the unredacted complaint body the phrase "Time Spent" appears 51 times, while "Take a Break" appears zero times, "parental control" zero, "Family Center" zero, "Teen Account" zero, "Quiet Mode" zero (positive controls: "Instagram" 403, "Meta" 686). Those other features appear only inside attached exhibits, which are Meta's own congressional testimony. Do not attribute a "Take a Break" allegation to Tennessee; that belongs to the federal MDL record.

Claims (the ledger)

(a) The case, the court, the posture

  1. [ESTABLISHED] The case is State of Tennessee, ex rel. Jonathan Skrmetti, Attorney General and Reporter v. Meta Platforms, Inc. and Instagram, LLC, No. 23-1364-IV, in the Chancery Court of Davidson County, Tennessee (Twentieth Judicial District, at Nashville), Part IV, before Chancellor Russell T. Perkins. Filed October 24, 2023. (Complaint p.1; the court's own docket "Judicial Officer" field; Perkins's signature block on the 2024 motion-to-dismiss order; and all five appellate orders, each captioned "Chancery Court for Davidson County / No. 23-1364-IV".)

  2. [ESTABLISHED] Two counts are pleaded, both under the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act, Tenn. Code Ann. section 47-18-104(a) and (b): Count 1, unfairness, and Count 2, deception. Count 1's theory is stated as "By designing and deploying Instagram in a manner that induces compulsive use, Defendants have engaged in unfair trade practices prohibited by the TCPA." Each instance is pleaded as a separate violation, which is what drives the penalty arithmetic. (Unredacted complaint, section V.)

  3. [ESTABLISHED, but read the caveat] The operative pleading is a 2024 Amended Complaint that has never been made public (redacted version filed 2024-07-16; unredacted version filed under seal 2024-08-27 with 107 exhibits). Every quotation in this ledger comes from the original October 2023 complaint as unredacted in January 2024, which is one generation behind. Paragraph numbering and wording may differ in the operative version. (Court register; direct probes on the AG document domain returned 404 against a passing control.)

  4. [ESTABLISHED] Two documents of this case are public only because they were filed elsewhere. The full 34-page motion-to-dismiss order is on the MDL 3047 docket, filed by the California Attorney General as a Statement of Recent Decision, and a May 17, 2024 hearing transcript before Chancellor Perkins is on that docket too. In effect the federal MDL docket is a partial free mirror of a Tennessee record that otherwise sits behind a paid subscription. (N.D. Cal. Dkt 683 and Dkt 882-1.)

(b) The control-integrity count (the reason this case is on this site)

  1. [ESTABLISHED] The complaint contains a dedicated section whose heading reads, verbatim: Meta Deceived Consumers By Promoting "Time Spent" Tools Despite Known Inaccuracies. (Unredacted complaint, section heading at paragraph 324. Verified as an exact substring of the cached extraction.)

  2. [ESTABLISHED] The State alleges Meta announced time-management tools on August 1, 2018, promoting activity dashboards, daily-use reminders and a notification-limiting tool, and said it hoped they would give people "more control over the time they spend on our platforms". (Unredacted complaint, paragraphs 325 to 326.)

  3. [ESTABLISHED] The State alleges the representation was untrue and that Meta knew: "That representation was false. By March 2020, Meta employees recognized that the Time Spent tool presented materially flawed information to consumers." (Unredacted complaint, paragraph 328. Verified as an exact substring of the cached extraction.)

  4. [ESTABLISHED] The State quotes a Meta staffer's contemporaneous internal message (Ex. 84, Bates MT-IG-AG-00171486) stating that the Time Spent data as shown was incorrect, that "Ours is wrong. Far worse.", that the company was sharing bad metrics externally, and that "we vouch for these numbers." (Unredacted complaint, paragraph 329.)

  5. [ESTABLISHED] The State alleges that by mid-2020 Instagram's own decommissioning team recommended removing the tool (Ex. 85, Bates MT-IG-AG-00174125). (Unredacted complaint, paragraph 330.)

  6. [ESTABLISHED] The State alleges Meta kept it anyway, quoting an internal message (Ex. 88, Bates MT-IG-AG-00202191) that "The regulatory and brand risk from removing our only addiction-related features outweighs" ... "the wins around user trust in the data from the few users who use it." (Unredacted complaint, paragraph 335. The ellipsis marks elided text in the original quotation.)

  7. [ESTABLISHED] The State quotes Instagram's Head of Policy (Ex. 86, Bates MT-IG-AG-00197537) describing the time-spent dashboard as the "biggest proof point we have on tech addiction/problematic use" and the tool with the most positive sentiment from mental-health stakeholders. (Unredacted complaint, paragraph 333.)

  8. [ESTABLISHED] The tool allegation is pleaded into the deception count, not merely as background: Count 2 reaches misrepresentations about "the efficacy of Instagram's 'well-being' related platform features (such as the 'Time Spent' feature)." (Unredacted complaint, paragraph 411. Quoted with normalized punctuation; the source uses curly quotation marks, and the extraction of this particular paragraph is one of the passages affected by the doubling artifact, so it is restated rather than reproduced character-for-character.)

  9. [ASSUMED] The distiller's characterization, flagged as such: this is a stronger artifact than the MDL's "public relations stunt" evidence, because there the broken-brake material is evidence supporting a wider theory, whereas here it is a pleaded count with its own documentary record. A court has not adopted this characterization and it is not a legal conclusion.

(c) What the court has actually decided

  1. [ESTABLISHED] Meta's motion to dismiss the original complaint was denied in full on March 13, 2024, on all four grounds raised. From the order's Conclusion: "Defendants have sufficient minimum contacts with Tennessee for this Court to exercise specific personal jurisdiction over them", and "Because the allegations in the Complaint can be construed as being based on conduct other than the publishing of third-party content, Section 230 immunity and First Amendment protections do not bar the Complaint." (Order fetched and read in full.)

  2. [ESTABLISHED, posture warning] Claim 14 is a Rule 12 pleading-stage denial, decided on the standard that the court must view the complaint in the light most favourable to the State. It is not a merits holding that Section 230 does not apply, not a summary-judgment ruling, and not an appellate holding. The personal-jurisdiction holding and the 12.02(6) holding are separate and should not be collapsed. (The order's own stated standard.)

  3. [ESTABLISHED, and the most likely thing to be reported wrong] Meta sought interlocutory review three times and was refused five times: Court of Appeals denials on 2024-07-10, 2025-02-25 and 2026-02-13, and Tennessee Supreme Court denials on 2025-08-08 and 2026-04-13. All five are one-paragraph per curiam orders with no reasoning. A denial of permission to appeal is a discretionary refusal to hear, not an affirmance. No Tennessee appellate court has ruled on the merits of the Section 230, First Amendment or personal-jurisdiction questions, and describing these rulings as "upheld on appeal" would be exactly the error class this project has been burned by. (All five orders fetched.)

  4. [ESTABLISHED] Summary judgment was denied on Count 1. This is established from the court's own register, in the clerk-entered title of Meta's follow-on motion: "Defendants' Motion for Partial Reconsideration of the Court's Order Denying Summary Judgment on Count 1" (filed 2026-06-26, after the summary-judgment order of 2026-06-24). (Court register.)

  5. [OBSERVED] The disposition of Count 2, and of the State's own cross-motion for summary judgment, is not established. Both sides moved on 2025-10-15. That the case reached a jury on liability implies the State's motion was not granted outright, but that is inference. The order text is not public. (Court register; RECAP searched with a passing positive control.)

  6. [OBSERVED] A Daubert / McDaniel hearing was held on 2026-02-13 on Meta's motions to exclude several experts, including Arturo Bejar. No separately titled ruling appears in the register; it may be folded into another order or delivered from the bench. Treat as unresolved, not absent. (Court register.)

(d) The trial

Read with section (g): the trial ended on 2026-08-26, in its fifth week of evidence, when the multistate settlement reached Nashville. The claims below record how it ran while it ran.

  1. [ESTABLISHED] Jury selection ran Monday July 20 to Friday July 24, 2026, and a jury was sworn at 12:06 p.m. on July 24. (WSMV live blog, timestamped; corroborated by the court's trial calendar.)

  2. [ESTABLISHED] Opening statements were delivered on Monday, July 27, 2026, as the court's calendar had set them. Several pre-trial previews had said "Friday July 24"; those were wrong, and the July 24 session was motions after the jury was sworn. (Court calendar, consulted 2026-07-25; confirmed after the fact by same-day coverage from at least three independent outlets, all datelined July 27.)

  3. [ESTABLISHED] The court's own calendar sets trial days through September 3, 2026, which is the primary-source version of the "six to seven weeks" reported in coverage. (Court register.)

(d.1) Trial week one, July 27 to July 31, 2026

Read the tier before reading the claims. Everything in this subsection is OBSERVED, and it is a weaker OBSERVED than elsewhere in this ledger. There is no public transcript of this trial and the gavel-to-gavel video is behind a paid subscription, so nothing said in this courtroom can be checked against a retrievable record. What follows is what multiple independent outlets reported, and it is carried as reporting, not as testimony. No sentence attributed to a person in this subsection is offered as a verified verbatim quotation, and none of it belongs in a quote-bank.

22a. [OBSERVED] Opening statements were split on both sides. For the State, Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti personally delivered opening remarks and Tom Cartmell, of the outside firm Wagstaff & Cartmell, delivered the substantive opening. For Meta, Bob Cooper, a former Tennessee Attorney General now at Bass Berry & Sims, introduced the defense and Kevin Huff, of Kellogg Hansen, argued it. (Same-day coverage, 2026-07-27, corroborated across independent outlets on a 2026-08-02 re-check. The Cooper detail rested on a single outlet when this section was first written; a second independent report and his own firm's professional listing now carry it, so the earlier "least corroborated" flag is retired.)

22b. [OBSERVED] The State's opening framed the case as design plus concealment rather than design alone: Skrmetti is reported to have told the jury that Meta designed Instagram in a way that is harmful to children and then decided to hide those harms. Cartmell is reported to have played the sound of a phone notification to the jury, arguing that unpredictable rewards of that kind drive compulsive use in developing brains, and to have shown internal Meta material including a 2017 document in which product managers wrote that features such as notifications and infinite scroll were at odds with well-being and that the company needed to warn the public, plus a message describing Instagram as a drug. (Reported speech, 2026-07-27, re-checked against additional independent coverage 2026-08-02. Not verified against any record; the wording of the 2017 document is reported, not quoted here, because no retrievable source for it exists.)

22c. [OBSERVED, corrected 2026-08-02] Meta's opening, as reported, ran on two lines. First, that internal documents of the kind the State showed are evidence of a company looking for problems in order to fix them, not evidence of concealment, and that Meta has built tools to limit problematic use and to involve parents and teachers. Second, that time spent on Instagram reflects a service people value rather than proof of harm. What this claim previously said, and why it changed: it asserted that Meta's second line was that the ranking system treats minors no differently from anyone else. That rested on a single fetch summarizer's rendering of one phrase, it was not corroborated by two subsequent independent searches, and the better-reported core of the defense (documents as diligence) was missing entirely. Recorded rather than silently rewritten, because the failure mode is the one this ledger's D-6 already documents. (Reported speech, 2026-07-27, corrected on a 2026-08-02 re-check.)

22d. [OBSERVED, and the most significant development of the week for this site] The State's first witness was Arturo Bejar, and he testified across roughly four days, into the week ending Friday July 31. Coverage reports he was cross-examined at length about his motivations in becoming a whistleblower, and that his direct testimony covered competitive pressure from TikTok and Snapchat driving Meta's prioritization of Reels, the company's avoidance of research into features such as infinite scroll, and gaps in what Meta understood about child safety on Instagram. (MLex headlines and standfirsts; WSMV; JURIST. The article bodies are subscriber-gated, so the substance is carried at headline and summary level.)

22e. [ESTABLISHED, resolving an open question in claim 19] Bejar testified. Meta had moved to exclude him ahead of trial and the register showed no ruling on that motion, which this record flagged as unresolved rather than absent. He took the stand, so the motion did not keep him off it. What is not established is the capacity in which he testified: whether the court admitted him as an expert, limited him to fact testimony, or something between. Do not state that his expert testimony was admitted. (Inferred from the fact of his appearance, which is uncontested across outlets; the underlying order remains non-public.)

22f. [ASSUMED] The distiller's cross-reference, flagged as such: Bejar is the central witness of this project's November 2023 Senate ledger, was deposed under a joint caption naming this case (claim 30), and has now testified at trial in it. That is the same witness giving an account of the same conduct to a Senate subcommittee and to a jury, two and a half years apart, in two branches of government. This record makes no claim about whether the two accounts agree; nobody has compared them, because the trial half is not publicly retrievable.

  1. [OBSERVED] The trial is bifurcated: the jury decides liability, and Chancellor Perkins separately decides civil penalties and any equitable or design-change relief. Corroborating docket circumstantials are primary (the 2025 jury-demand fight, a stipulation on penalties experts, and a Special Master appointed 2026-07-01), but the structure itself is reporter-sourced; the December 12, 2025 order that would establish it is not public. (Reuters via Rappler; JURIST; court register for the circumstantials.)

  2. [ASSUMED] The December 12, 2025 order is titled "Order Addressing Defendants' Motion to Strike Plaintiff's Jury Demand." "Addressing" rather than "Denying", combined with a jury actually being empanelled, is consistent with a partial ruling that kept the jury for liability while reserving penalties to the court. This is the distiller's inference from a document title, not a sourced holding.

(e) Relief sought, including the design-change ask

Read with section (g): the Chancellor will not rule on any of this. The settlement resolves the case before the design-change request was decided, so the asks below are recorded as what the State sought, not what any court weighed.

  1. [ESTABLISHED] The State seeks civil penalties of not more than $1,000 per violation, per defendant, under Tenn. Code Ann. section 47-18-108(b)(3), with each instance pleaded as a separate violation. No source found states the State's aggregate demand, and the "$1,000" figure alone badly understates the arithmetic. (Unredacted complaint, Request for Relief (c).)

  2. [ESTABLISHED] The State asks the court to "Issue a permanent injunction prohibiting Defendants from using platform features that cause compulsive use among Young Users" and to "Order that Defendants meaningfully disclose, on a regular basis, the risks posed by Instagram to Young Users". (Unredacted complaint, Request for Relief (d) and (e). Both verified as exact substrings of the cached extraction.)

  3. [ASSUMED, re-framed 2026-08-14 after the New Mexico judgment] Relief (d) is a product-design injunction and (e) is a standing disclosure obligation. Both would be decided by the Chancellor rather than the jury. When this ledger was built that made Tennessee one of two live American proceedings positioned to produce a design-change order rather than a payment; New Mexico was the other, and it was decided on 2026-08-06, which leaves Tennessee the last one standing. (Distiller's characterization; the bifurcation it rests on is itself OBSERVED, see claim 23.)

27a. [ESTABLISHED as to New Mexico; the read-across to Tennessee is the distiller's, and is the most useful thing to know about what an order here would actually reach] New Mexico is now a decided precedent for what a design-change order from a state court looks like, and the answer is narrower than the request. That court ordered three measures aimed at under-18 accounts and granted no abatement relief against the recommendation algorithm at all, drawing its line on proximity to content: push notifications and like counts were "least connected with platform content" and were ordered; the feed was not. A Tennessee order of the same shape would reach notifications and counts and stop short of the thing this site is actually about. (See new-mexico-v-meta claims 34 to 38 for the judgment's own language.)

(f) The relationship to MDL 3047

  1. [ESTABLISHED] Tennessee was never transferred into the federal MDL; it stayed in Davidson County Chancery. It is instead a named "Related Action" under the MDL's deposition protocol, listed verbatim in Appendix A of the Stipulation and Order Governing Protocol for Fact Depositions (N.D. Cal. Dkt 742, so ordered 2024-04-03), which permits parties to cross-notice and attend depositions across the MDL, the California JCCP and any Related Action. (Order fetched.)

  2. [ESTABLISHED] The volume is substantial: Discovery Management Order No. 6 (Dkt 875, 2024-05-20) records a dispute "presently limited to roughly thirty-two cross-noticed depositions that were originally noticed by the Tennessee Attorney General." (Order fetched.)

  3. [ESTABLISHED, correcting a natural but wrong framing] Depositions of Mark Zuckerberg (2025-03-27), Antigone Davis, Alison Lee, Margaret Gould Stewart, Arturo Bejar (April 2025 sessions), Nick Clegg and Vaishnavi Jayakumar are publicly available as unsealed exhibits on the MDL docket and are connected to this case. But their transcripts do not bear a Tennessee-only caption: they carry a three-forum joint caption naming the MDL, the California JCCP, and then Tennessee in a "THIS DOCUMENT RELATES TO" block. A search of the MDL docket for a Tennessee-court-only caption returns zero against passing positive controls. Say "taken under a joint caption that names Tennessee," not "taken in the Tennessee case." (RECAP.)

  4. [OBSERVED] Cross-noticing did not sweep the Tennessee record wholesale. MDL plaintiffs later had to serve a document request seeking transcripts from the Tennessee case, which indicates only the depositions they elected to cross-notice inside the protocol's window became shared. (N.D. Cal. Dkt 2174-1, 2025-08-09.)

(g) The settlement that ended the trial (added 2026-08-28)

The trial recorded in section (d) did not reach a verdict. It ended when the multistate settlement of the federal MDL swept this case in. The controlling documents are on the federal docket and cached there; this section quotes them and the Tennessee Attorney General's own release.

  1. [ESTABLISHED] This case is named in the settlement. The agreement executed 2026-08-26 and entered as a consent judgment in the federal MDL the same day defines "Actions" as "the MDL Action and the Satellite AG Actions", and the Satellite AG Actions list includes, verbatim: "State of Tennessee v. Meta Platforms, Inc., et al., Chancery Court, Twentieth Judicial District, Davidson County, No. 23-1364-IV (Tenn.)". That is this case. For each satellite case the settling state and Meta "shall jointly move in each Satellite AG Action within ten (10) business days" of the agreement's notice "for the entry of the Consent Judgment fully and finally resolving the Releasors' Claims". Source: the agreement (MDL Dkt 572-1), Sections I.A, I.ZZ and X.I (primary, cached).

  2. [ESTABLISHED] Tennessee's own announcement, the same day. The Attorney General's release states Tennessee "will receive $ $751,922,691.13" (the doubled dollar sign is the release's own typo, preserved because the cache is verbatim), going to the state's Children's Digital Protection Fund, and quotes General Skrmetti: "We took Meta to trial because Instagram was hurting kids and misleading parents. Now we're ending the trial with a settlement that imposes unprecedented protections for kids and delivers record-setting money for Tennessee's Children's Digital Protection Fund". The release also says the quiet part about the forum: "The agreement comes as Tennessee nears the end of a lengthy trial against Meta in front of Davidson County Chancellor Russell T. Perkins." Source: TN AG release pr26-33 (primary, official, cached 2026-08-28).

  3. [ESTABLISHED, and it reconciles the state's number to the agreement's own tables] The $751,922,691.13 (about $751.9 million) is the sum of two lines in the agreement's exhibits: Tennessee's Exhibit B maximum of $739,456,441.19 (ten installments of $51,674,036.64 guaranteed plus $22,271,607.48 contingent) and Tennessee's Exhibit E Cambridge allocation of $12,466,249.94, which together give $751,922,691.13 exactly. The composition matters more than the total: $222,716,074.80 of Tennessee's money, about 30 percent of the Exhibit B piece, is contingent on Snap, TikTok and YouTube becoming bound to equivalent teen time-management obligations, and reverts to Meta if that never happens within the ten-year term. The release presents one number and does not make that distinction. Source: Dkt 572-1, Exhibits B and E; see the mdl-3047 ledger, section (k), for the contingency mechanics.

  4. [OBSERVED] The jury was dismissed on 2026-08-26. Nashville coverage reports that Chancellor Perkins dismissed the jury and declared the trial over that Wednesday, with General Skrmetti present in the gallery. Tiered OBSERVED because the Chancery record itself is paywalled, which is this ledger's standing structural limit; the fact of the settlement is ESTABLISHED from the agreement and both attorneys general's releases, and only the courtroom scene rests on reporting. Source: Nashville Banner, 2026-08-26; corroborated by WSMV, WKRN and the Daily Memphian the same day.

  5. [ESTABLISHED as to the terms; the significance is the distiller's] What ended without an answer. The jury heard five weeks of evidence on the Time Spent count and will return no verdict on it. The Chancellor will not rule on the State's request for "a permanent injunction prohibiting Defendants from using platform features that cause compulsive use among Young Users". This was the last live American proceeding positioned to produce a contested design-change order (claim 27), and it now produces an agreed one instead: the same settlement's Phase I terms (a default daily limit and overnight block on Instagram and Facebook, parent-gated, with an anti-circumvention duty). What Tennessee sought by verdict it receives by contract, with the contract stating that it does not "establish a standard of care for, or serve as precedent in" any non-settling jurisdiction. Source: Dkt 572-1; the consent judgment (MDL Dkt 576); this ledger's claims 25 to 27a.

  6. [ESTABLISHED, and it is the settling attorney general arguing this site's closing argument] The same release ends with General Skrmetti saying the settlement is not the fix: "This settlement is the best possible solution we could get through litigation, and it delivers serious accountability with both comprehensive injunctive terms and record-setting money. But in the long run, we need federal legislation that clearly imposes a duty of care on every tech company that interacts with kids". The attorney general who just extracted the largest technology settlement in state history is saying, in the sentence announcing it, that litigation cannot produce the standard. That is the exact claim this project's policy paper makes, stated by the office best positioned to know what litigation can produce. Source: TN AG release pr26-33 (primary, cached).

Tensions / open questions

  • The operative pleading is invisible. Everything documentary in this record is from a superseded complaint. The 2024 Amended Complaint, with 107 exhibits, is under seal. If the trial turns on a paragraph that changed between versions, this ledger cannot see it.

  • The court's own orders are paywalled. Five substantive orders exist per the register and none of their text could be obtained: the amended-complaint motion to dismiss, the jury-demand ruling, the summary-judgment order, the reconsideration order, and any expert-exclusion ruling. Davidson County Chancery documents require a paid subscription. This is a structural limit on how well any public record of this case can be tiered, and it is worth stating rather than hiding behind confident prose.

  • Winning every procedural fight is not the same as being right on the law. Tennessee has survived dismissal, survived summary judgment on at least Count 1, and seen Meta refused interlocutory review five times. None of that is an appellate merits holding, and now none will ever be tested by one: the jury that was hearing the evidence was dismissed by the settlement having returned nothing, and both the procedural wins and the untested defenses simply end where the case does.

  • The largest untapped vein is public but hard to reach. A sixteen-part series of "Notice of Filing ... Unsealed Documents" was filed in mid-2026, unsealing Meta's summary-judgment memorandum, its statement of undisputed material facts, an affidavit, and the expert-exclusion briefing. Those are public documents sitting behind the same paid portal.

  • There is no retrievable record of this trial, and that is a harder limit than the paywalled orders. An order behind a subscription still exists as a fixed document somebody could buy. Live testimony leaves no free artifact at all here: no public transcript, and Courtroom View Network's gavel-to-gavel video is a paid product. So the single richest source in this whole case, weeks of sworn testimony about the "Time Spent" tools, is the part this project can least verify. Every trial claim in section (d.1) is reporting about testimony, not testimony, and it should never harden into a quote-bank entry on a later pass.

  • The one comparison worth making can now never be made from a public record. Bejar gave an account of Meta's internal safety knowledge to a Senate subcommittee (2023, official transcript, fully verifiable) and to a Nashville jury (2026, no retrievable record). With the trial ended by settlement, no transcript of the Nashville account will ever be produced by an appeal or a public-record request this project can reach. The comparison stays listed because its impossibility is itself a fact about how this record closed.

  • This record will age faster than anything else on the site. CLOSED 2026-08-28, by the trial ending rather than by the record catching up. The trial was set to run to September 3 and stopped on August 26, in its fifth week, when the settlement reached it. The weeks of evidence between this ledger's last trial pass and the end (August 3 to August 25) were never distilled and now never will be from a live record; they exist only in the paywalled video and whatever coverage survives. Section (g) records how it ended.

  • Has the Davidson County consent judgment actually been entered? OPEN (2026-08-28). The agreement runs two clocks (see the mdl-3047 ledger, claim 61): a 24-hour obligation to ask each court to vacate its deadlines, and then a joint motion for entry of the consent judgment "within ten (10) business days" of that notice. With execution on 2026-08-26, the second falls due around 2026-09-10. The Chancery portal lists event titles free but the documents are paid, so entry is checkable by register even without buying the order. Until entry, the case is settled but not formally resolved, and Tennessee's first guaranteed installment does not flow until its consent judgment is entered (the agreement says so in terms). Trigger: the Chancery register showing a judgment-entry event, or the next re-seed pass, whichever first.

Sources

  • PRIMARY (the settlement that ended this trial): Settlement Agreement between Meta and the State Attorneys General, fully executed, filed 2026-08-26 in the federal MDL as Dkt 572-1 (cached in sources/ as mdl-3047-2026-08-26-dkt572-1-settlement-agreement.txt, fetched 2026-08-28). Its Satellite AG Actions definition lists this case by number; its Exhibit B carries Tennessee's payment row; its Exhibit E carries Tennessee's Cambridge allocation: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.572.1.pdf
  • PRIMARY (official announcement): Tennessee Attorney General press release pr26-33, Attorney General Skrmetti Announces Largest Big Tech Settlement in History, 2026-08-26 (fetched and cached 2026-08-28 as tennessee-2026-08-26-ag-settlement-release.txt): https://www.tn.gov/attorneygeneral/news/2026/8/26/pr26-33.html
  • PRIMARY (the State's own published pleading): Unredacted civil enforcement complaint, published 2026-01-10 by the Tennessee Attorney General. https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/attorneygeneral/documents/pr/2024/pr24-03-unredactedcomplaint.pdf (fetched 2026-07-25; plain-text copy cached at sources/tennessee-2023-10-24-unredacted-complaint.txt). READ THE EXTRACTION NOTE IN THAT FOLDER'S README BEFORE QUOTING: the default and -layout pdftotext modes produce 160+ doubled word pairs on this file, apparently a redaction-overlay artifact, and quoting from them yields corrupted text. The cache is the -raw extraction, which has zero doubling but interleaves footnote markers.
  • PRIMARY (announcement of the filing): Tennessee AG press release pr23-48, 2023-10-24. https://www.tn.gov/attorneygeneral/news/2023/10/24/pr23-48.html (fetched 2026-07-25)
  • PRIMARY (announcement of the unsealing): Tennessee AG press release, 2024-01-10. https://www.tn.gov/attorneygeneral/news/2024/1/10/pr23-03.html (fetched 2026-07-25; note the real ID mismatch, the release is pr23-03 while the PDF is pr24-03)
  • PRIMARY (the motion-to-dismiss order in full, 34pp): Order on Defendants' Motion to Dismiss, 2026-03-13 [sic 2024-03-13], Chancellor Perkins, publicly filed as an exhibit on the MDL 3047 docket by the California AG as a Statement of Recent Decision (N.D. Cal. Dkt 683, filed 2024-03-15). https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/gov.uscourts.cand.401490.683.1.pdf (fetched 2026-07-25). OCR caveat: the introductory paragraph renders 'Section 230' as 'Section 320'; the Conclusion renders it correctly, so quote the Conclusion.
  • PRIMARY (the court's own register): Davidson County Chancery public portal (Tyler Odyssey), case 23-1364-IV, CaseID 81082. https://portal-tnnashville.tylertech.cloud/PublicAccess/ (consulted 2026-07-25). ACCESS NOTE: the search form silently returns a blank result unless a NodeID location is posted first (100,110,120,130,140,145 for all Chancery; 140 is Part IV). A search without it looks exactly like zero results and is the likely cause of an earlier false negative. Order and filing DOCUMENTS are behind a paid subscription; only event titles and dates are free.
  • PRIMARY (appellate history): Tennessee AOC Public Case History, https://pch.tncourts.gov (fetched 2026-07-25; requires a full browser header set, a bare request is rejected). Five per curiam orders obtained: M2024-00877-COA-R9-CV (denied 2024-07-10); M2025-00155-COA-R9-CV (denied 2025-02-25); M2025-00155-SC-R11-CV (denied 2025-08-08); M2026-00124-COA-R9-CV (denied 2026-02-13); M2026-00124-SC-R11-CV (denied 2026-04-13).
  • PRIMARY (the cross-noticing mechanism): Stipulation and Order Governing Protocol for Fact Depositions, N.D. Cal. Dkt 742, so ordered 2024-04-03 by Magistrate Judge Peter H. Kang; Appendix A names this case verbatim as a Related Action. Discovery Management Order No. 6, Dkt 875 (2024-05-20), quantifies roughly thirty-two cross-noticed depositions originally noticed by the Tennessee Attorney General. (Fetched 2026-07-25 via RECAP.)
  • SECONDARY (trial structure and jury): Reuters via Rappler; JURIST; WSMV live blog (the 12:06 p.m. jury-sworn timestamp); The Tennessean; Courtroom View Network schedule page. All fetched 2026-07-25.
  • SECONDARY (trial week one, ADDED 2026-08-02): WSMV live blog for the opening-statements day, https://www.wsmv.com/2026/07/27/live-updates-tn-attorney-general-skrmetti-expected-make-opening-arguments-during-meta-trial-nashville/ ; Yahoo News aggregation of opening statements, published 2026-07-27, https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/instagram-drug-state-shows-internal-201635753.html ; MLex, 'Former Meta executive wraps crucial testimony in Tennessee addictive design trial' and 'Competitive pressure on Meta sidelined addiction concerns, Tenn. jury hears' (headline and standfirst only; the bodies are subscriber-gated); JURIST. All consulted 2026-08-02. NONE of these is a primary source for what was said in the courtroom: see the trial-record note in Tensions.
  • NOT OBTAINABLE (the trial record itself): there is no public transcript of this trial. Courtroom View Network carries it gavel to gavel but the video is behind a paid subscription, and the Chancery portal's document access is paid as well. Consequence: no statement made in this courtroom can be verified to this project's quote standard, and none is carried in this record as a verified verbatim span.
  • NOT OBTAINED: the operative 2024 Amended Complaint (redacted version filed 2024-07-16, unredacted under seal 2024-08-27); the orders of 2024-10-17 (amended-complaint MTD), 2025-12-12 (jury demand), 2026-06-24 (summary judgment), 2026-07-16 (partial reconsideration); any separately-titled Daubert/McDaniel ruling. All exist per the court's register. Direct probes on the AG document domain returned 404 against a passing control.

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