MDL 3047: the federal social media addiction case

About this page. Where the record stood as of July 16, 2026; this litigation moves weekly, and every figure carries its date. Claims are labeled: court-held (decided as a matter of law), jury-found (verdict returned, appeals possible), evidence cited (in the record, still disputed), requested (a party's proposed remedy or estimate), scheduled (a current court date, subject to change). This page is the reader's rendering of the project's evidence-tiered claim ledger for this case; corrections land in the ledger first, then here.

The case in one paragraph

MDL 3047 gathers thousands of youth-harm lawsuits against Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snap before one California federal judge. In an order filed June 29, 2026 the state attorneys general's claims survived summary judgment and are headed to an August 2026 trial against Meta alone; four states put Meta's theoretical exposure at $1.4 trillion, which Meta disputes. No company has been found liable yet. (As of July 16, 2026.)

What an MDL is, and is not

A multidistrict litigation is a procedural mechanism, not a class action: related federal cases are centralized before one judge for coordinated pretrial work. MDL 3047 holds three distinct tracks that coverage routinely blurs: personal-injury suits by young people and families, school-district suits, and a multistate action by state attorneys general. The bundle held 2,893 pending actions as of the July 1, 2026 Judicial Panel report, up exactly 229 in a month, before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland. The formal caption is In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation (master docket 4:22-md-03047; the consolidated state-AG case is 4:23-cv-05448, filed October 24, 2023 by a 33-state coalition).

The June 29 order, labeled

• Court-held: Meta's motion for summary judgment on the states' deception and unfair-practices claims was denied; those claims go to trial. The court also gave the states a narrower pretrial win on COPPA, the federal children's-privacy statute: there is no factual dispute that Meta's notice and parental-consent procedures did not comply with the statute's requirements. That is a finding about procedures, not yet liability; whether COPPA even applied to the services (child-directed status, knowledge of under-13 users) remains for trial.
• Evidence cited: in the same order (at page 23; verified directly on the public docket), the court found Meta's own documents could support the theory that its time-restriction tools were a "public relations stunt," deployed while the company knew more time on the platform was linked to worse outcomes for teens. Disputed evidence, not a finding. It puts the functionality of the offered brakes directly inside the trial record.

The August trial

Scheduled: jury selection begins August 12, 2026; opening statements August 18, in Oakland. The defendant is Meta alone; the other MDL defendants face the separate tracks. The trial combines the 29 participating states' consolidated COPPA claims with consumer-protection claims from four of those states (California, Colorado, Kentucky, New Jersey). The court will seat an advisory jury (Meta withdrew its jury demand; the judge retains the ultimate findings, deciding the COPPA claims herself). A follow-on trial for 14 more states' own state-law claims is planned for February 2027, and the first school-district bellwether (a Tucson case) is expected around then too; the two February events are different things.

The money

• Requested (an estimate, not an award): roughly $1.4 trillion is Meta's own characterization, in a July 2026 filing, of its theoretical statutory exposure under the four states' penalty methodology, which counts each month a teen used the platforms more than half an hour. The filing calls the demanded remedies "entirely unmoored" from the claimed practices, a sanction with "no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement." No court has endorsed any number; the fight underneath is what counts as one violation.
• Documented: the first federal bellwether to approach trial, brought by a Kentucky school district, settled in May 2026 for about $27 million combined (Meta $9M, Snap $8M, ByteDance $8M, Alphabet $2.01M), per the settlement agreements obtained by Reuters through a public-records request. No admission of liability, and no enforceable design standard resulted.

What happens next

The August trial decides liability on the surviving state claims. If the states win, remedies come after: the states also seek injunctive relief, which the court (not the jury) would decide in a remedies phase, so this case could eventually produce a design-change order. Then the February 2027 trials. Each date above is a scheduled fact and can move.

Why this case matters for the brake

The most consequential thing in this record is not the trillion-dollar number; it is that whether the platform's own brakes worked as advertised is now litigated evidence. That is exactly the question this project's brake integrity standard turns into a testable rule, and the scorecard is the same test written for anyone's feed.

Sources

Primary: the summary-judgment order, Dkt 3214 (CourtListener/RECAP, verified 2026-07-16); Meta's penalty filing, Dkt 455; the JPML pending-actions reports (July 1 and June 1, 2026); the MDL docket and state-AG docket; the California AG's June 30 release and October 2023 filing release. Secondary: Reuters wire coverage; JURIST; Engadget; Top Class Actions.

Provenance: this page is derived from the project's per-case, evidence-tiered claim ledger for MDL 3047 (a distillation record maintained in the repository), last seeded July 16, 2026 after a primary-source audit. Corrections flow ledger-first: the ledger is verified against the docket, then this page is re-seeded. Figures are as of the dates shown; legal characterizations are directional and for counsel to confirm.