State of Tennessee v. Meta: the broken tool that stayed

About this page. Where the record stood as of August 28, 2026. The trial is over: it ended on August 26, 2026, in its fifth week of evidence, when the multistate settlement of the federal case swept in this one by name. No verdict was returned and none will be. The trial sections below are kept as the record of how it ran, with their original one-week-in sourcing warnings intact. Claims are labeled: court-held (decided as a matter of law), court-entered (a judgment the parties agreed and the court signed, not a finding of liability), alleged (the State's contention, never tested by a verdict), requested (a party's proposed remedy, now never to be ruled on), documented (established by a document such as the settlement agreement). 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

Tennessee's attorney general sued Meta and Instagram in October 2023 under the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act, pleading both unfair design and deception. A jury was sworn on July 24, 2026, and heard five weeks of evidence on the case's distinctive allegation, a dedicated count about the "Time Spent" tools: the State says Meta learned by March 2020 that the tool showed users materially wrong numbers, that its own team recommended removing it, and that Meta kept it because it was the company's "biggest proof point" on tech addiction. The jury never answered. On August 26, 2026 the multistate settlement of the federal MDL swept in this case by name, the Chancellor dismissed the jury, and Tennessee's share is $751,922,691.13, about 30 percent of its main component contingent on Snap, TikTok and YouTube accepting equivalent obligations. The design-change order the State sought will never be ruled on. (As of August 28, 2026.)

Why this case is different

Three American proceedings have already produced something. This one is producing the thing this site is actually about.

The federal MDL found that Meta's own documents could support the theory that its time-limit tools were a "public relations stunt." That is evidence, cited inside a wider case about addictive design. New Mexico won on deceptive safety claims. California's bellwether was about one teenager's harm.

Tennessee pleaded the broken control as its own count, with its own heading and its own documents. The allegation is not that a safety feature was inadequate. It is that Meta knew the feature was reporting false numbers, that Meta's own decommissioning team recommended pulling it, and that Meta kept it anyway because it was the company's most visible evidence that it took addiction seriously.

That is not a brake that failed. That is a brake kept as signage after the company established it was not connected to anything.

The allegation, in the State's sequence

Every item here is alleged: this is the State's contention in a complaint, not a finding by any court, and Meta has not answered it in any document this project could obtain.

• August 2018. Meta announces time-management tools, promoting activity dashboards, daily-use reminders and a notification limiter, saying it hopes they give people "more control over the time they spend on our platforms".
• By March 2020. "That representation was false. By March 2020, Meta employees recognized that the Time Spent tool presented materially flawed information to consumers." A staffer writes internally that the data as shown is incorrect: "Ours is wrong. Far worse."
• Mid-2020. Instagram's own team responsible for retiring features recommends removing the tool.
• And it stays. An internal message weighs it up: "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." Instagram's Head of Policy describes the dashboard as the "biggest proof point we have on tech addiction/problematic use".

The State pleads this into its deception count, not merely as background.

One scope note, because it is easy to get wrong. Tennessee's control-integrity theory is "Time Spent" and nothing else. In the published complaint, "Take a Break", "parental controls", "Family Center", "Teen Accounts" and "Quiet Mode" appear zero times in the body; they show up only inside attached exhibits, which are Meta's own congressional testimony. Do not attribute a "Take a Break" allegation to this case. That belongs to the federal record.

What the court has actually decided

• Court-held: Meta's motion to dismiss was denied in full on March 13, 2024, on all four grounds. From the order's conclusion: "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."
• Read that precisely. It is a pleading-stage ruling, decided on the standard that the court must view the complaint in the light most favorable to the State. It is not a merits holding that Section 230 does not apply.
• Court-held: summary judgment was denied on Count 1 (the unfairness count). The disposition of Count 2 is not public.
• Meta tried three times to get an interim appeal and was refused five times, at both the Court of Appeals and the Tennessee Supreme Court, most recently in April 2026. This is not a win on the law. All five are one-paragraph orders with no reasoning, and a refusal to hear an appeal is not a ruling that the appellant is wrong. No Tennessee appellate court has decided the Section 230 or First Amendment questions.

The trial

A jury of fifteen was sworn at 12:06 p.m. on Friday, July 24, 2026, after a week of selection, and opening statements were delivered on Monday, July 27. Several pre-trial previews said openings would happen on the Friday; they did not. The court's calendar ran trial days through September 3, 2026. The trial never got there: on August 26, in its fifth week, the settlement ended it (next section).

The trial is bifurcated: the jury decides only whether Meta broke the law. If it did, Chancellor Russell Perkins separately decides civil penalties and whether to order changes to the product. (The bifurcation is reported rather than confirmed from an order; the ruling that would establish it is not public.)

Week one, and how to read it

A sourcing warning first, because it governs this whole section. There is no public transcript of this trial, and the gavel-to-gavel video is behind a paid subscription. So unlike everything else on this page, nothing below can be checked against a document. It is what reporters in the room reported, recorded in the ledger at the weaker tier for that reason, and no sentence here is offered as a verified quotation of anyone.

Reported: Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti delivered opening remarks himself, with Tom Cartmell of Wagstaff & Cartmell giving the State's substantive opening; for Meta, Bob Cooper, a former Tennessee Attorney General now in private practice, introduced the defense and Kevin Huff of Kellogg Hansen argued it.

The State framed the case as design plus concealment: that Meta built Instagram in a way that harmed children and then hid the harm. Cartmell is reported to have played the jury the sound of a phone notification, arguing that rewards arriving unpredictably are what drive compulsive use in a developing brain, and to have shown internal company material including a 2017 document in which Meta product managers wrote that features like notifications and infinite scroll were at odds with well-being and that the public needed warning.

Meta's answer, as reported, was that documents like those are evidence of a company hunting for problems so it can fix them rather than evidence of concealment, that it has built tools to limit heavy use and to bring parents and teachers in, and that time spent on Instagram reflects a service people value rather than proof of harm.

Reported, and the part that matters most here: the State's first witness was Arturo Bejar, who testified for about four days and was cross-examined at length about his motives in becoming a whistleblower. His direct testimony is reported to have covered competitive pressure from TikTok and Snapchat pushing Meta toward Reels, the company's avoidance of research into features like infinite scroll, and gaps in what Meta understood about child safety on Instagram.

That name should be familiar. Bejar is the engineer whose November 2023 Senate testimony is one of this site's four hearing records, and he was deposed under a joint caption naming this case. He has now given an account of the same conduct to a Senate subcommittee and to a Nashville jury, two and a half years apart. Whether those two accounts match is the most interesting question this trial raises for this project, and it is one nobody can currently answer: the Senate half is a public transcript, and the trial half is not retrievable at all.

One narrower thing did get resolved. Meta had moved before trial to exclude Bejar, and no ruling on that motion ever appeared on the register. He took the stand, so it did not keep him off it. In what capacity, expert or fact witness, is still not public, and this page does not assume.

The settlement that ended it

Court-entered in Oakland, August 26, 2026; the Nashville jury dismissed the same day. The multistate settlement of the federal MDL, entered as a consent judgment by the federal court, does not merely resemble a resolution of this case. It names it: the agreement's list of "Satellite AG Actions" includes, verbatim, "State of Tennessee v. Meta Platforms, Inc., et al., Chancery Court, Twentieth Judicial District, Davidson County, No. 23-1364-IV (Tenn.)", and obliges Tennessee and Meta to move jointly, within ten business days, for a consent judgment in this court "fully and finally resolving" the State's claims. Nashville coverage reports Chancellor Perkins dismissed the jury that Wednesday with General Skrmetti in the gallery. Whether the Davidson County consent judgment has been entered yet is not something this project has verified; the Chancery register is the place to check.

Documented, and reconciled to the cent. The Attorney General's release says Tennessee will receive $751,922,691.13, destined for the state's Children's Digital Protection Fund. That number is the sum of two lines in the agreement's own exhibits: Tennessee's Exhibit B maximum of $739,456,441.19, plus a $12,466,249.94 Cambridge Analytica-era allocation under Exhibit E. The composition matters more than the total: of the Exhibit B piece, $222,716,074.80, about 30 percent, is contingent. Tennessee receives it only if Snap, TikTok and YouTube become bound to equivalent teen time-management obligations within ten years; otherwise it is forfeited back to Meta. The release presents one number and does not make that distinction.

What Tennessee sought by verdict it now receives by contract. The State asked this court to write a design order: a permanent injunction against compulsive-use features, and a standing disclosure duty. The Chancellor will rule on neither. Instead the settlement's own product terms apply, and they are real: a default two-hour daily limit on Instagram and Facebook, a default overnight block, both changeable only by a parent, with an express anti-circumvention duty. They are also, by the judgment's own words, not a standard: nothing in it may "establish a standard of care for, or serve as precedent in" any non-settling jurisdiction, and it records no admission of liability. The full terms, including which of them are contingent on the rest of the industry, are on the MDL page and in the MDL ledger.

The settling attorney general's own verdict on the mechanism is worth quoting, because it is this site's argument delivered by the office that just used the alternative. Announcing the settlement, General Skrmetti called it "the best possible solution we could get through litigation", and then: "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 largest technology settlement in state history, described by its own architect as second-best to a written standard.

And the Time Spent count was never answered. Five weeks of sworn evidence about whether Meta knowingly kept a broken safety tool now belongs to a trial that produced no verdict, no findings, and no public transcript. The jury that heard it was sent home. That is not a neutral outcome for the question this site exists to ask, and it is recorded here as what it is: the last live American proceeding positioned to produce a contested ruling on a safety control's integrity ended without one.

The money, and the thing worth more than money

• Requested: civil penalties of up to $1,000 per violation, per defendant, with each instance pleaded as a separate violation. No source states the State's aggregate demand, and the per-violation figure alone badly understates the arithmetic.
• Requested, and this is the part that matters here: a permanent injunction "prohibiting Defendants from using platform features that cause compulsive use among Young Users", and an order that Meta "meaningfully disclose, on a regular basis, the risks posed by Instagram to Young Users".

Both of those were design remedies rather than prices, and both would have been decided by the Chancellor. Neither will be: the settlement resolved the case first. Until August 26 this was the last live American proceeding positioned to order a company to change the product rather than to pay for having sold it, which is precisely why how it ended matters.

New Mexico is also the closest thing to a preview, and it is a sobering one. That court ordered three changes to how minors' accounts work, and granted no relief at all against the recommendation algorithm, on the reasoning that push notifications and like counts sit furthest from platform content while the feed does not. A Tennessee order of the same shape would reach the notifications and stop short of the feed.

The connection you will not find in the coverage

Much of the sworn record this site relies on came out of this case.

Tennessee was never folded into the federal MDL; it stayed in Nashville. But it is a named "Related Action" under the MDL's deposition protocol, which let parties cross-notice each other's depositions. A federal discovery order records a dispute "presently limited to roughly thirty-two cross-noticed depositions that were originally noticed by the Tennessee Attorney General."

So the depositions of Mark Zuckerberg, Antigone Davis, Alison Lee, Margaret Gould Stewart, Nick Clegg and Arturo Bejar that are now public as unsealed federal exhibits were taken under a joint caption that names Tennessee. State it that way, not as "taken in the Tennessee case": the transcripts carry a three-forum caption, not a Tennessee-only one.

The traffic runs both ways. The only reason the public can read Chancellor Perkins's motion-to-dismiss order at all is that the California attorney general filed it as an exhibit in the federal case. Tennessee's own court charges for its documents.

What this page cannot tell you

Worth stating plainly, because it bounds everything above.

The operative complaint is a 2024 amended version that has never been made public, so every quotation here comes from the original 2023 complaint, one generation behind. Five substantive orders exist and none of their text is public, including the summary-judgment ruling and the jury-demand ruling. Davidson County Chancery puts its filings behind a paid subscription, which is a real limit on how well any public account of this case can be sourced.

And now the trial itself is the least verifiable part of the case, which is worth sitting with. No public transcript exists, and the only gavel-to-gavel record is a paid video service. So the richest source in this entire proceeding, weeks of sworn testimony about the very tools this site exists to ask about, is the part this page can verify least. A paywalled order is at least a fixed document someone could buy; live testimony leaves no free artifact at all.

And a complaint is an advocacy document. The allegations above are what the State said it would prove. A jury heard five weeks of that proof and was dismissed before deciding anything, so the allegations remain exactly that: alleged, never found, and now never to be found in this case.

The full evidence ledger behind this page, every claim tiered and traced, is at the Tennessee v. Meta distillation.

Sources

Primary, the settlement: the executed settlement agreement, MDL Dkt 572-1 (its Satellite AG Actions list names this case; its Exhibits B and E carry Tennessee's numbers); the federal consent judgment, Dkt 576; the Tennessee AG's settlement release, pr26-33 (2026-08-26). All cached 2026-08-28. Secondary, for the jury's dismissal: Nashville Banner, WSMV, WKRN (all 2026-08-26).

Primary, the case: the unredacted complaint published by the Tennessee AG (2024-01-10) and its announcement; the AG's filing announcement (2023-10-24); the motion-to-dismiss order in full (via the federal MDL docket); the Davidson County Chancery register (case 23-1364-IV); the Tennessee appellate case history for all five interlocutory denials; and the federal deposition-protocol orders. Secondary, for trial status and the week-one section only: Reuters, JURIST, WSMV, The Tennessean, MLex, and Courtroom View Network (whose gavel-to-gavel video of this trial is a paid product, which is why no testimony is quoted here).

Provenance: this page is derived from the project's evidence-tiered claim ledger for this case, built 2026-07-25 from the State's published pleading, one obtained court order, the court's own register, and five appellate orders, re-seeded 2026-08-02 after the first week of evidence, and again 2026-08-28 after the settlement ended the trial, with the settlement section quoted from the cached agreement and the Tennessee AG's release. Corrections flow ledger-first. Everything in the week-one section is secondary reporting and is tiered that way in the ledger; the rest of the page rests on documents. The trial ended before this page could ever be live coverage of it; the as-of line is the honesty backstop. Legal characterizations are directional and for counsel to confirm.