# de-amplify.com: full text > The complete text of every rendered document on de-amplify.com, concatenated for AI ingestion. The curated index is at https://de-amplify.com/llms.txt. This file is generated from the source markdown and is current as of the deploy. --- # The Brake Integrity Standard (policy paper) Source: https://de-amplify.com/proposal # The Brake Integrity Standard > **One-paragraph version.** Social-media litigation and regulation increasingly target the product features associated with compulsive use, but there is still no coherent standard for the plainest question a user can ask: *when I tell the feed to stop or change, does my choice actually take effect, and does it stay?* This paper names that missing standard **brake integrity**. When a platform offers a control to stop, limit, reset, or redirect a recommendation or engagement function, activating it must produce a prompt, understandable, material, and **persistent** change consistent with what the platform promised. Every account should have that. Child and teen accounts should additionally get **safer defaults** (a non-profiled or following-only feed, autoplay off, overnight-notification limits, no re-engagement pressure), with the level of parental involvement varying by age band and with the direct control belonging to the young person as they approach adulthood. The intervention aims first at the platform's own controls and delivery mechanics, not at classifying or removing lawful speech, because that is the surface most defensible under current First Amendment and Section 230 precedent. A separate, experimental appendix explores labeling the *recommendation mechanism* ("you are seeing this because…"); any system that labels the *meaning* of individual posts needs substantially more evidence and governance before it belongs in policy. --- ## 0. What this is, and what it is not This is a **framing-and-standard paper**. It argues *where* to intervene, *why that surface is the most defensible one available*, and *what a minimum standard would have to specify*. It is **not** a statute, a technical specification, a legal opinion, or a claim that any platform would voluntarily adopt it. The author is **not a lawyer**; every constitutional and statutory statement below is directional and should be checked by counsel against the primary sources cited. The paper is AI-assisted; the reasoning is the author's, the drafting collaborative, and the honest-limits section (§7) is where it earns trust. A note on scope discipline learned from earlier drafts of this project: for a design standard, **the definition is the policy.** "De-amplify engagement" and "controls that work" are not yet standards until they say *which* signals, *how fast*, *how long*, and *across which surfaces*. This paper tries to state the observable core precisely and to be honest that the operational thresholds are the real work, not a footnote to be finished later (see §5, and the AADC vagueness holding in §4). --- ## 1. The landscape, as of August 2026 Four separate legal tracks are often blurred together. Keeping them apart is the first correction, because they involve different courts, theories, and subjects. Each track below carries its own date. Tracks 1, 2 and 4 are current to mid-July 2026; track 3 was rewritten on August 13, 2026, after New Mexico entered final judgment. **Track 1: the federal addiction MDL.** Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Google/Alphabet (YouTube), ByteDance (TikTok), and Snap (Snapchat) are the named defendants in **MDL 3047**, consolidated in the Northern District of California before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. The MDL held **3,137 pending actions as of the August 3, 2026 JPML report** (up 244 in the month since July 1). The theory is product design: plaintiffs allege the companies intentionally built features to keep young users returning. In an order **filed June 29, 2026** (announced June 30), the court **denied Meta's motion for summary judgment** on the state attorneys general's deception, unfair-practices, and COPPA claims (finding material factual disputes over whether the platforms are addictive and whether Meta misrepresented that), and gave the states a **narrower partial summary judgment on COPPA**: Meta's notice and parental-consent procedures did not comply with the statute. That is a compliance finding, not yet liability; whether COPPA applied to the services at issue (child-directed status, knowledge of under-13 users) remains for trial. In the same order, 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; that is cited evidence, still disputed, and it puts the functionality of the offered brakes directly inside the case. The **August trial in Oakland**, against **Meta alone** (the other MDL defendants face separate personal-injury and school-district tracks), combines the 29 participating states' consolidated COPPA claims with consumer-protection claims from four of those states (California, Colorado, Kentucky, New Jersey): jury selection **began August 12, 2026**, opening statements were delivered August 18, and evidence was heard on four days before an **advisory jury** (Meta moved to withdraw its jury demand, Dkt 2807; the judge decided to empanel an advisory jury and retained the ultimate findings). **It never reached a verdict.** On **August 26, 2026**, four days into evidence, the court entered a **consent judgment** resolving the claims of 51 states, commonwealths and territories, and with them fifteen parallel state-court AG cases the agreement lists by name, including Tennessee's Nashville trial, then in its fifth week of evidence: a maximum of **$16,680,647,753.21** over ten annual installments, of which about 30 percent is contingent on Snap, TikTok and YouTube accepting equivalent teen time-management obligations and otherwise reverts to Meta, plus a $75 million cost fund and a $459,293,017.80 Cambridge Analytica-era release component paid to 48 of the settling states. Meta's own filing had characterized the four states' penalty exposure as up to about **$1.4 trillion** (violation counts times per-violation statutory maximums), calling the demanded remedies "entirely unmoored" from the claimed practices, a sanction with "no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement"; the states never presented a request, and no court ruled on any number. **That consent judgment is the most important single document for this proposal, and it cuts both ways.** It is the first enforceable American order to write a feed brake with the properties section 3 asks for: a default two-hour daily limit across Instagram and Facebook (the agreement's covered platforms, with messaging expressly excluded) and a default overnight block, neither of which a teen can loosen without a parent; an express duty that teens not be able to use adjacent surfaces to "effectively circumvent" the limit; a ban on the app suggesting "that the Teen User utilize a different Meta SMP or engage in messaging" when the brake engages; like counts off by default; and a non-personalized feed that must be offered without either answer preselected. It demonstrates that every objection about technical feasibility was an objection about willingness. **And it is not a standard.** Its stronger settings apply only on "Industry-Wide Adoption" by the other three companies, roughly $5 billion of its money is forfeit to Meta if that never happens, its independent auditor covers the first five years of a ten-year term, and the judgment states that nothing in it may "establish a standard of care for, or serve as precedent in any non-participating U.S. state or any international jurisdiction whatsoever." One company, ten years, by agreement, disclaiming generality. That is the gap this proposal exists to close. **Track 2: the California state-court bellwethers.** A separate coordinated proceeding (JCCP 5255, roughly 1,600 cases) is running in California state court, not the MDL. Its first bellwether, *K.G.M. v. Meta and Google* (**Los Angeles Superior Court**), produced a **$6 million verdict on March 25, 2026** ($3M compensatory, $3M punitive, allocated 70/30: Meta $4.2M, Google $1.8M, which is why some outlets report only Meta's share). In **early June 2026** (the ruling was announced June 10) the trial court **denied the defendants' new-trial and judgment-notwithstanding-the-verdict motions**; both defendants have now **filed notices of appeal** (Meta in early July, YouTube on July 13, 2026). The verdict has *not* been reviewed, let alone affirmed, by an appellate court. The second bellwether **never reached a jury**: YouTube (June 23), TikTok (June 30) and Snap (tentative settlement announced July 20) all settled out confidentially, and on **July 22, 2026** the plaintiff **voluntarily dismissed his remaining claims against Meta**, which on the available reporting paid nothing. That is a withdrawal, not a settlement with Meta and not a defence verdict, and whether it was with prejudice is not established. Note the pattern for the argument in section 1: of the two California test cases resolved so far, one produced a verdict and the other ended with the defendants leaving one at a time, which is the paying-and-continuing equilibrium this paper describes rather than an exception to it. (The Los Angeles Superior Court docket is not publicly retrievable online, so the July 20 and July 22 events rest on news coverage, not a filing.) **Track 3: New Mexico's standalone action.** *State of New Mexico v. Meta*, tried in Santa Fe under the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act, produced a **$375 million civil-penalty verdict on March 24, 2026** (the statutory maximum of $5,000 for each of 75,000 violations) for misrepresentations about platform safety and failures to protect children from exploitation. This is a **consumer-protection / child-safety** case, not an addiction case, and not part of the MDL. **It is now decided, and it is the most important thing in this landscape for the argument that follows.** On **August 6, 2026** the court entered final judgment: Meta's platforms are a **public nuisance** in New Mexico, Section 230 does **not** shield it from that claim, and it must pay **$567 million** into an abatement fund on top of the verdict, **$942 million** in all. The State had asked for about $953 million and did not get that number. The judgment orders five years of supervised changes to under-18 accounts: no push notifications from **10:00 PM to 7:00 AM** or during school hours, **like counts hidden by default**, and a **90-hour monthly cap** across Facebook and Instagram. And it **refused every request aimed at the feed**, granting "no abatement relief relative to the design and implementation of Meta's algorithms." That is the first design remedy actually entered against a major platform in the United States, and the shape of what it granted against what it refused runs straight through §4 and §7 of this paper. Meta has said it will appeal. **Track 4: Tennessee's consumer-protection trial.** *State of Tennessee ex rel. Skrmetti v. Meta Platforms and Instagram*, No. 23-1364-IV in Davidson County Chancery Court, went to a **jury on July 24, 2026**, with opening statements delivered July 27 and the court's calendar running to September 3. It matters to this paper more than its size suggests, because the State pleaded the broken-control theory as **its own count** rather than as evidence for a wider one. The allegation is that Meta promoted "Time Spent" tools from 2018, learned by **March 2020** that they reported materially wrong numbers ("That representation was false. By March 2020, Meta employees recognized that the Time Spent tool presented materially flawed information to consumers"), had its own decommissioning team recommend removal by mid-2020, and kept the tool anyway, on the reasoning that "The regulatory and brand risk from removing our only addiction-related features outweighs" the benefit of accurate data. That is a control retained as signage after the company had established it was not connected to anything, which is the sharpest available statement of what this paper means by a brake that is not a brake. **Posture discipline:** these are allegations in a complaint, not findings; the operative amended complaint is under seal so the quotations come from the superseded 2023 version; Meta's motion to dismiss was denied at the **pleading stage** in March 2024 (not a merits holding on Section 230); and Tennessee's appellate courts **declined five times to hear** Meta's interim appeals, which is a refusal to take the question up, not an affirmance. The State also seeks a permanent injunction "prohibiting Defendants from using platform features that cause compulsive use among Young Users", a design remedy the Chancellor rather than the jury would decide. **The tell across all four: the deception and consent claims travel; the bare "is it addictive" claim is where the case gets stuck.** That is the terrain this paper builds on. **The settlements matter too.** Snap and TikTok settled the first California bellwether around the turn of 2026; all four defendants settled the first federal bellwether, a Kentucky school district's case (near $27 million combined, per the settlement agreements later obtained through a public-records request); YouTube and TikTok then settled the second California bellwether confidentially in late June. Money is moving, no liability is admitted, and **no disclosed, enforceable, sector-wide design standard has resulted.** Paying and continuing is, so far, the equilibrium. **And crucially: the design surface is no longer unregulated.** An earlier version of this project claimed no one had named a design target. That is not accurate, and the accurate version is stronger: - **California SB 976** (Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, 2024) restricts "addictive"/personalized feeds for known minors behind a verifiable-parental-consent gate, imposes overnight and school-hours notification blackouts, and defaults minor accounts to private mode. The Ninth Circuit (*NetChoice v. Bonta*, No. 25-146, September 9, 2025) **declined to enjoin the addictive-feed provision and let the default-private-mode setting stand**, while **enjoining the like-count restriction.** (The precise reasoning is load-bearing and is discussed in §4.) - **New York's SAFE for Kids Act** enacts the same core idea; it is **not yet in effect** (awaiting Attorney General rulemaking) and has not been litigated. - **The EU Digital Services Act**, Article 38, *binds* very large platforms to offer at least one recommender option **not based on profiling**. The Commission's **July 2025 guidelines on protecting minors** recommend non-profiled defaults, permanent feed resets, lasting effect for "not interested" feedback, autoplay off by default, notification protections, and "why you are seeing this" explanations. The Commission issued **preliminary findings that TikTok's addictive design (February 6, 2026) and Meta's Instagram and Facebook (July 10, 2026) breach the DSA**, focused on infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, and recommender systems. It separately issued a preliminary finding (April 29, 2026, IP/26/920) that Meta had failed to keep under-13s off Instagram and Facebook, a distinct age-assurance breach. So the honest framing is not "here is a target no one has named." It is: **the target is named; what is still missing, especially in the United States, is a coherent, user-centered standard for whether a person's decision to stop or redirect the system actually takes effect and persists.** That standard is what this paper proposes, and §9 states what it adds to SB 976, the DSA, and the age-restriction bills. --- ## 2. The reframe: from "is addiction real" to "does the user's control work" The instinct to litigate "is social-media addiction a real clinical condition" leads into a swamp of expert-witness battles over a contested diagnostic category. The reframe here moves the question to something **measurable and already inside consumer-protection and product-liability law**: *when a platform tells a user a control does something, does the control do it, and does it last?* **Additive, not adversarial.** This reframe does not need to prove that addiction is unreal, or to displace the plaintiffs, clinicians, and youth-safety advocates litigating it. Its advantage is that it works *independently*: whether or not anyone proves a clinical diagnosis, a platform should still have to make its represented controls actually work. The brake and the addiction claim are allies at two depths, not competitors. **Consent, severed from the act (the moral frame).** A dead man's switch is supposed to stop a machine when the human's hand comes off. Engagement platforms often behave like the inverse: the machine keeps running, or quietly restarts, after the hand comes off. You choose "following only," close the app, reopen it, and you are back in the algorithmic feed. Your stated will was present in form (there was a setting) and absent in effect (it did not persist). That is the felt experience the movement calls *severed consent*, and it is a good public diagnosis. It is not, by itself, a precise legal standard, because "controls that work" and "severed consent" are broad until they distinguish the *kinds* of control a user exercises. The precise, defined term this paper uses for the regulable object is **control integrity** (§3). **The delivery loop, not the content.** What makes a feed compulsive is not any individual post; it is the loop mechanics: infinite scroll, autoplay, variable-ratio reward, push notifications, and ranking that optimizes for time-on-site. A brilliant post and a banal one ride the same loop. This matters because the regulable, more speech-defensible surface is the **architecture of delivery and the controls over it**, not the expression delivered. (The word "more" is doing real work; §4 is honest that "architecture" is not a magic phrase that removes the First Amendment.) **Amplified or extracted (a diagnostic lens, not an absolute).** One way to ask what a feed is doing: does the system, when your stated will and its objective disagree, *amplify the person* (serve the will you actually expressed) or *extract the person* (farm your attention as raw material)? A real feed can do both at once, on different axes, and a user's own intent is often mixed. So this is a lens for the conflict case, not an ontological claim that a system is wholly one or the other. Stated that way, it clarifies the design question: **does the user keep a clear, durable ability to redirect or stop the system?** A working brake is the minimum evidence that the platform remains answerable to the person using it. (The lens has scholarly neighbors regulators already know: Zuboff on behavioral-surplus extraction, Wu on the attention economy.) **Why now.** The loop is not static. As personalization models improve, they get better at predicting the exact next item that will hold attention, so the gap between what a user would choose and what the system serves tends to widen, not shrink. That is why the remedy has to be structural, a control the user actually holds, rather than a plea for restraint that the incentives will keep eroding. --- ## 3. The standard: brake integrity, plus youth defaults The proposal has two layers. Making the base layer universal is deliberate: it avoids resting the *existence of a working control* on age assurance (a hard, privacy-fraught problem, §7), and it is harder for a platform to rebut, because it does not claim adults forfeit control at eighteen. ### Layer I. Brake Integrity (universal) When a service presents a control to stop, limit, reset, or redirect a personalization or engagement function, the control must be: - **discoverable** (findable without external instructions); - **clear** (it states what will change; "show me less" is not the same promise as "turn off personalized recommendations"); - **promptly effective** (the behavior changes soon after activation); - **materially effective** (it changes the feed in a way the user can perceive, not cosmetically); - **persistent** (the choice survives closing and reopening the app, another device, an app update, and time, until the user deliberately changes it); - **scoped** (it covers the related surfaces, not one screen: Shorts/Reels, Explore, notifications, suggested accounts); - **non-circumventing** (the platform does not repeatedly nag, silently reset, or route the user back into the same mode). Every account, regardless of age, should have controls that meet these tests for at least: turning personalized recommendations off / selecting a following-only or non-profiled feed; pausing recommendation signals; turning autoplay off; and suppressing engagement-driven notifications. ### Layer II. Youth Defaults (age-differentiated) For child and teen accounts, the safer settings should be **on by default** (not merely available): a non-profiled or following-only feed, autoplay off, overnight notifications off, no streaks or repeated re-engagement prompts, finite stopping points, and stronger limits on behavioral profiling. This is where age assurance becomes relevant: to the *additional protections*, not to the *existence* of a working brake. Two disciplines the youth layer must carry (developed in §7): **age bands** (a seventeen-year-old is not a seven-year-old; direct control should belong to the older teen, not depend solely on a guardian), and **privacy-preserving parental support** (a guardian can enable autoplay-off or overnight limits as *settings* without receiving a surveillance feed of what the teen watched or searched). ### Why this is stated in observable terms Modern ranking is multi-objective. A platform can truthfully say it "reduced the watch-time weight and added a well-being term" while the user's experience is unchanged. So the compliance test is written first in terms of **what the product does that a user or an outside tester can observe**, and only second in terms of the internal objective. (The honest limit on auditing the objective itself is §5.) --- ## 4. The legal architecture: two different machines, one defensible core The single most important legal correction to earlier drafts: **do not treat "regulating the algorithm" as categorically outside the First Amendment or Section 230.** Two distinct doctrines are in play, and they are often conflated. **Section 230 governs retrospective liability for harm from third-party content.** It immunizes "publishing," and the Ninth Circuit currently treats **algorithmic recommendation as publishing**. In *Doe 1 v. Meta Platforms* (9th Cir., No. 24-1672, April 28, 2026), the court held that "matching users with content is publishing conduct, even when the user has not requested the content," and that engagement-driven recommendation of third-party posts is therefore barred by Section 230. **That holding is the current law of the circuit and the circuit is actively trying to undo it.** Judge Berzon, joined by Judge W. Fletcher, urged the court to reconsider en banc "our precedent extending section 230 immunity to recommendation of content and connections to users," and Judge R. Nelson, who wrote the opinion, added that "it will fall to the en banc court" to settle it. The plaintiffs petitioned on May 12, 2026; the panel ordered Meta to respond the same day, which is not what a court does with a petition it means to deny. **That petition was denied on August 17, 2026**, the day before the state attorneys general's trial opened, and the order repays reading because the vote is not what the denial suggests. Judge R. Nelson voted to deny; **Judges W. Fletcher and Berzon recommended granting** rehearing en banc. The order then records that "[t]he full court has been advised of the petition and no judge has requested a vote on whether to rehear this matter en banc", so the petition failed for want of a call for a vote rather than on a contested one. **Two of the three judges who heard the case wanted it reheard and the wider court did not take it up.** The practical effect is that *Doe 1* is now final at the circuit level, absent certiorari, and this paper should treat recommendation-as-publishing as **the settled law of the Ninth Circuit** rather than as a holding under active reconsideration. The practical effect is not that the question is closed: a denial of rehearing is not an endorsement of the panel's reasoning, and the split on the recommendation is a matter of record for any later challenge. Build on it as the law of this circuit, and note that it is circuit law rather than national law. The **narrow escape hatch** is *Lemmon v. Snap* (9th Cir., 2021): a product-design duty **survives Section 230 when it operates independently of third-party content** (Snap's Speed Filter, where the danger was the speeding, not any message). Section 230 is a **liability shield the platform holds**, not a source of legislative power; a prospective statute is not "cleared" by Section 230, and a recommendation-objective mandate cannot assume it escapes publishing doctrine. **That characterization now has direct appellate support, from the same circuit and on the same day.** In *People of the State of California v. Meta Platforms, Inc.* (9th Cir., No. 24-7032, filed August 10, 2026, published), the court dismissed Meta's appeal from the MDL 3047 rulings for lack of jurisdiction, holding that Section 230 provides "a defense to liability, not immunity from suit", so an order refusing it is reviewable after final judgment rather than immediately. Three things in that are useful here and none of them is the outcome. It is **published**, so the reading binds the circuit. It confirms that Section 230 operates as a defense a defendant raises, which is the distinction this paragraph draws between a shield and a grant of power. And the opinion records that **"Meta does not identify any constitutional interests at stake"** in that appeal, which is worth holding beside the confident claim, common in commentary, that feed design is straightforwardly protected expression: the largest platform in the litigation, appealing on exactly this question, did not assert it. Read with *Doe 1*, the circuit currently says that algorithmic recommendation is publishing conduct for Section 230 purposes **and** that Section 230 is a defense rather than an immunity from suit, which together mean a platform must generally try the case before it can appeal the point. **The First Amendment governs prospective statutes regulating platform conduct.** In *Moody v. NetChoice* (SCOTUS, 2024), the Court explained that a platform's selection, ordering, and curation of third-party posts into a feed **can be protected editorial expression**. That discussion was **guidance, not a merits holding** (the Court vacated and remanded on facial-challenge grounds and did not decide either statute's constitutionality), and it expressly reserved other functions. Justice Barrett's concurrence flags the lane most relevant here: an algorithm that "just present[s] automatically to each user whatever the algorithm thinks the user will like," with no human editorial judgment, **"might raise different constitutional questions."** That lane is **open and fact-intensive, not established** in this proposal's favor, which is exactly why categorical confidence is a mistake. Put together, these cases yield a **tiered ranking of legal exposure**, from most defensible to least: 1. **Control integrity** (this paper's core). Requiring that a control the platform *offers* actually works and persists regulates the platform's **own interaction with its user**, operating independently of any particular third-party content. This is the *Lemmon* lane, the strongest available ground. 2. **Default and interface rules** (autoplay off by default, notification limits, following-only availability, finite stopping points). More contestable, but conduct-focused; SB 976's default-private-mode survived intermediate scrutiny as content-neutral. 3. **Ranking-objective mandates** (government specifies the objective by which lawful third-party speech must be ordered). This meets *Moody* head-on and is materially more exposed. 4. **Content-characterizing labels** (a government-mandated label declaring a post "a wedge" or "divisive"). The most exposed of all: SB 976's like-count/feedback restriction was found **content-based, drew strict scrutiny, and the Ninth Circuit ordered it blocked** (a preliminary ruling, on likelihood of success); a label characterizing lawful speech likely draws a compelled-editorial-speech challenge under *Moody*. This is why the wedge-label is confined to the experimental appendix, not this standard. **These tiers rank statutes. A court's remedy is a different machine, and on August 6, 2026 the difference became impossible to ignore.** Two courts took the same measure, hiding like counts on minors' accounts unless a parent consents, and reached opposite constitutional results eleven months apart. In *NetChoice v. Bonta* (9th Cir., No. 25-146, September 9, 2025) the court found California's version **content-based**, applied **strict scrutiny**, and held that "the like-count default setting is not the least restrictive way to advance California's interest in protecting minors' mental health"; it reversed the district court's refusal to block the provision and remanded "with instructions to enter an order enjoining its enforcement." The New Mexico court **ordered** its version, reasoning that a like count is "merely a feature created and offered by Meta to principally track and motivate user feedback, all without altering the underlying published content." Mind the postures, because they are not symmetrical and the asymmetry cuts against the tidy version of this story. California's is a **preliminary** ruling on likelihood of success, entered before any trial. New Mexico's is a **final judgment after a two-phase trial**, and it is on appeal. Neither is settled law. What they establish jointly is not that one court is right, but that the same feature can be characterized either way depending on which question is being asked. Both are defensible, because they are answering different questions. A legislature regulating an industry faces the First Amendment directly. A court sitting in equity over a defendant it has already found liable for a public nuisance is choosing a remedy, and its limits are the scope of the wrong proved and the reach of its own jurisdiction. So the same design change can sit in tier 4 as a statute and be ordered as a remedy, which means **this ranking answers "what may be legislated," not "what may ever be imposed."** The corollary is less comfortable and belongs here too. Remedial latitude is bounded by the case: the New Mexico court refused the industry-wide measures precisely because it had "jurisdiction over just one social media company," worried that friction on Meta alone would "merely shift users to other, non-party platforms," and said flatly that "the regulatory solutions to these problems lie in the executive and legislative branches and not with this Court." A remedy can reach further than a statute against one company, and nowhere near as far across a market. The two routes are not substitutes. **What that court did with this paper's actual proposal is the load-bearing result.** It ordered the tier 1 and tier 2 measures, notification blackouts and a usage cap and the like-count default, on the ground that they are "least connected with platform content." It refused tier 3 outright, granting "no abatement relief relative to the design and implementation of Meta's algorithms" because that relief "would directly alter and limit the manner in which platform content is displayed" and so "would likely violate the First Amendment and Section 230." The line it drew is the line drawn above, and it drew it in the same place. That is a real test of this ranking and the ranking survived it, in one state trial court, now on appeal. **Precision is part of the legal architecture, not the finish work.** In *NetChoice v. Bonta* (the Age-Appropriate Design Code appeal, 9th Cir., No. 25-2366, March 12, 2026), the court **un-enjoined the age-estimation requirement** but **kept the injunction on the data-use and dark-pattern provisions on First Amendment vagueness grounds**, because terms like "materially detrimental" and "well-being" did not give adequate notice of prohibited conduct. For a design standard, undefined criteria are not a detail to settle later; they can be the difference between an enforceable rule and an enjoined one. The observable-test framing in §3 and §5 is an attempt to write to that constraint. **The live corroboration.** SB 976's addictive-feed restriction and default-private-mode are **live, un-enjoined law** after the Ninth Circuit's September 2025 decision. Two honest caveats: (a) the court **declined to enjoin** on standing and facial-challenge-burden grounds and **expressly left open whether a personalized feed is the platform's protected speech**, so this is durability under preliminary challenge, not a merits blessing; and (b) the one feed-adjacent mandate the court **ordered blocked** (hiding like counts) is the instructive warning that regulating *which content or metrics are shown* is far more dangerous than regulating *whether the feed is algorithmically personalized by default*. Control integrity sits on the safe side of that line. **A second legal system reached the same shape of answer from the opposite direction, and it is the best comparative evidence this paper has.** On August 14, 2026 the French Conseil constitutionnel, reviewing a bill before promulgation on a referral by 120 deputies, struck article 1 of the law intended to protect minors from the risks of social media, which would have barred under-15s outright. The ground was freedom of expression and communication under article 11 of the 1789 Declaration. The reasoning is the part that matters here, at paragraph 17: the legislature could not institute a prohibition **of general scope**, imposed without regard to the individual minor's situation or to the risks specific to each service, without disregarding that freedom. The defect the court identified was **bluntness**, not the attempt. Set that beside New Mexico. A court declined the feed-design remedies because a court is the wrong instrument and because ordering one firm while its competitors are absent is unfair, and said in terms that regulation of industry-wide features requires legislative or executive action. A constitutional court then struck a legislature's answer because it was undifferentiated. **Read together they do not say that regulating design is unavailable. They say the workable instrument is calibrated, service-specific and market-wide**, which is a description of a standard and a description of neither a lawsuit nor a ban. That is the strongest external corroboration in this paper for why the proposal is shaped the way it is, and it arrives from a jurisdiction with no Section 230 and no First Amendment. **And there is already a working example of the shape both decisions point at.** Australia's minimum-age obligation took effect on 10 December 2025 under Part 4A of its Online Safety Act. Read carefully, it is not the ban it is usually called: it prohibits no minor from anything. It places a duty on age-restricted social media platforms to take **reasonable steps** to prevent Australians under 16 from holding accounts, backed by a civil penalty, and it carves out messaging, voice and video calling, online gaming, and services whose primary purpose is education, health support or professional development. That is a duty with a standard of care and a defined scope, imposed on the operator rather than on the child, which is the same grammar this paper's proposal uses. Whether it works is a separate and still-open question, and the early evidence includes meaningful circumvention alongside large numbers of removed accounts. But it demonstrates that the calibrated, service-specific, operator-facing form is drafts-able and enactable, which is the objection most often made to it. The French reform was not abandoned: the government was tasked with preparing a legally robust replacement, targeted at spring 2027. What survives the second attempt will be worth reading, because it is the first serious test of whether a calibrated version clears the bar the blunt one failed. --- ## 5. Auditability and anti-circumvention Earlier drafts claimed a changed ranking objective is "auditable from outside." That is not generally true: an outside observer cannot inspect objective functions, weights, training data, or internal experiments without mandated access. What *can* be tested from outside is **what the product does**. So the compliance model is layered: **Observable tests (outside the platform):** a non-profiled/following-only mode exists, is easy to activate, has a visible active state, takes effect promptly, persists across sessions and devices, keeps autoplay off, suppresses engagement notifications, does not auto-revert, keeps search and explicitly-requested content available, and is not compensated for by ramping up another surface. **Mandated internal evidence (with legal access):** a public control specification, version histories, controlled-account testing, documentation of ranking signals and prohibited substitutions, machine-readable records of when a preference was activated and honored, outcome testing across age groups and languages, anti-circumvention testing, and a complaint-and-remediation process. **Anti-circumvention is non-optional.** A platform can reduce engagement pressure in the main feed while increasing notifications, suggested accounts, streaks, and direct-message prompts. Compliance has to cover the whole relevant product experience, or it simply moves the loop. **Who enforces.** The standard does not by itself pick an enforcer, and the choice matters for feasibility. Control integrity is a deception claim at heart, so it fits the FTC's unfair-and-deceptive-practices authority; the state attorneys general already litigating the MDL are a natural second venue; and a dedicated digital regulator on the EU's DSA model is a third. The observable tests are written to be usable by any of them, or by an independent auditor operating under mandated access. The honest formulation is therefore: *control performance can be tested from outside; full verification of ranking compliance requires legally mandated documentation, data access, and independent audit.* --- ## 6. Why not just have the platforms detect and down-rank the harmful stuff? Because the party best positioned to build that detector is the party you would least want running it silently. These platforms are the entities on earth best placed to classify content at scale: the most compute, the most reach, and the deepest behavioral profile of every user, the same modeling that makes a feed compulsive in the first place. Detection is not the hard part. The danger is *who* would hold a silent, platform-owned classifier of what counts as harmful or "divisive" for every child, and *why* they would run it honestly. The firm you would ask earns its money on engagement, and the most engaging content is often the most inflammatory. The biggest of these firms booked on the order of **$26.8 billion in net income in a single quarter** (as of Q1 2026; figures like this date quickly and carry an as-of date here for that reason). It has a built-in reason to under-enforce on the outrage that drives its revenue, or over-enforce on speech it dislikes, and a silent classifier cannot be checked from outside. The conclusion is not "detection is impossible." It is: **a detector this cheap to build and this profitable to bias must never be the silent, centralized mechanism.** That is why the standard here regulates the *objective and the controls* rather than mandating a classifier, why any labeling that does happen must be a **contestable, user-facing** thing rather than a silent filter, and why the wedge-label specifically is confined to the experimental appendix. Change what the feed optimizes for, and there is no classifier to trust; "did the offered control work and persist?" is something an outsider can actually test. --- ## 7. The honest limits (load-bearing; do not skip) 1. **This is a frame plus a standard sketch, not a finished rule.** Measurable thresholds ("how fast must a control take effect; how long must it persist; how much friction before an override is manipulative"), a testing and audit methodology, enforcement, and surviving legal challenge are the bulk of the work and are not fully here. 2. **Age verification is still the showstopper, and the thing blocking it is not the First Amendment.** On August 6, 2026 a judge who had just found Meta's platforms a public nuisance, and who called age verification "the key to making Meta's platforms safe for adolescents," held that he could not order it. COPPA defines collection broadly enough to reach "passive tracking of a child online," so the statute written to protect children forbids gathering the data needed to find them. The same statute shuts the workaround: the court found Meta's own age classifier "is hindered by COPPA and its prohibition on the use of data that is needed to train a classifier to be more accurate in its age predictions." He was careful to add that he was "not criticizing the policies behind COPPA." The FTC's 2026 enforcement-discretion policy does not undo it, and the court refused to rely on that policy because it "does not create any substantive rights or entitlements." That is one trial court and it is on appeal, but the statute it read is the same one everybody else has to read. Meanwhile American courts keep finding reasons not to decide the question at all: **unripe** in the SB 976 appeal, because the requirement does not begin until 2027; **undecided** in the Age-Appropriate Design Code appeal, for want of a developed record; **statutorily barred** in New Mexico. "The courts have not resolved this" is a very different claim from "the courts have rejected this," and only the first is true. Congress tied this knot and only Congress can untie it, which is worth saying plainly to the people who keep asking courts to. The mitigation this paper leans on is structural and is unchanged by any of it: because **Layer I (the working brake) is universal**, the *existence* of control does not depend on age assurance at all. Age assurance is needed only for the *default* protections, which narrows the problem without eliminating it. And the solution must still not build a surveillance infrastructure worse than the harm it addresses, which is the one reason to prefer this deadlock to a bad fix. 3. **Youth autonomy, not only parental control.** "Let the guardian decide" is too simple for an under-18 population. Some guardians are controlling, abusive, or hostile to a child's identity; a parental tool that surfaces a teen's interests, health questions, sexuality, or relationships can itself cause harm. Older teens should hold the direct brake themselves; parental support should be about *settings* (autoplay off, overnight limits) rather than *content surveillance*. 4. **De-amplification affects speech distribution, and this stopped being a prediction on August 6, 2026.** Any change to ranking affects which speech reaches which audience, so even "content-neutral" is a strong defense, not an absolute one, and the *Moody* "purely reactive algorithm" question is unresolved (§4). A court has now refused ranking relief on exactly that ground, holding that the requested algorithm changes "would directly alter and limit the manner in which platform content is displayed" and "would likely violate the First Amendment and Section 230." This paper put ranking mandates in tier 3 for this reason and was right to. Note also *why* the state lost: the court called its algorithm requests "vague and aspirational, rather than objective and measurable." That is the strongest external argument this paper has for writing the standard in observable terms (§3, §5), and it is an argument made by a judge who wanted to grant something and could not find a specification to grant. Following-only or chronological defaults also carry **distributional effects** (they can disadvantage new creators and people who rely on discovery); that does not defeat the standard, but it should be measured. 5. **Platforms will pre-empt and will litigate.** The likeliest response to a public campaign is a **cosmetic brake** plus a press release (Instagram Teen Accounts is arguably this move already), which deflates a movement without touching the loop. The persistence and anti-circumvention tests exist precisely so a cosmetic brake fails them. Platforms may also argue a mandated objective is a **regulatory taking** or **compelled speech**; counsel required. 6. **The evidence is not all one way, and the standard must not overclaim.** Three empirical claims must be kept separate: that a design increases compulsive use, that a proposed control changes behavior, and that the behavioral change improves welfare. The closest existing experiment (Guess et al., *Science*, 2023) found that switching users to a reverse-chronological feed **reduced time on platform but did not measurably improve polarization, knowledge, or well-being** over a three-month adult window. That is real counter-evidence to a naive "chronological fixes everything" claim. The fair response is that a three-month adult study is not a developmental-exposure study of minors and that reduced compulsive use is a legitimate end in itself, not only a proxy for mental health, but the paper should make that argument openly rather than list falsifiers it has not checked against the literature (see §8). 7. **The wedge classifier is the dangerous part, and it is not in this standard.** The question of whether a post is tribal sorting versus legitimate advocacy, satire, or reporting is normative and contested, and even perfect behavioral prediction does not resolve it. A parental toggle changes *who activates* a label, not *who defines* the category, trains the model, or benefits from its operation. "Visible" does not equal "contestable" without a specified appeal process, and a mandated label on lawful speech invites the strongest constitutional challenge (§4, tier 4). Labeling research also shows an **implied-truth effect**: warning some items makes the unlabeled ones read as vetted. For all these reasons the wedge-label is a **research hypothesis in the experimental appendix**, not a policy recommendation. The appendix also develops the stronger, brake-aligned alternative: labeling the **recommendation mechanism** ("you are seeing this because you engaged with similar posts," with a control to stop using that signal) rather than the meaning of the speech, which supports recommendation literacy without characterizing anyone's lawful expression. (Inoculation research, van der Linden and colleagues, supports the "name the manipulative move" mechanism, which is why the idea is worth studying rather than discarding.) 8. **Displacement, which a court has now used as a reason to deny relief.** De-amplify the big platforms' feeds for minors and attention can migrate to group chats, Discord, gaming platforms, or smaller apps outside any single statute's reach. The standard regulates the venue; it should not assume the harm stays put. In New Mexico this was not a hypothetical objection but a holding: significant sign-up friction on one company would be "inequitable and unduly injurious to Meta" and would "merely shift users to other, non-party platforms." Displacement is the argument a single-defendant proceeding cannot answer, which is a further reason the durable version of this standard is legislative rather than litigated. 9. **The banishment risk.** De-amplifying minors' feeds lowers the ad value of that cohort, so one rational platform response is to stop serving under-18s at all rather than build and maintain a parallel low-engagement product, which would trade this proposal's problem for the blunt age-ban and age-verification fight it is trying to avoid. The universal base layer (§3, Layer I) is a partial hedge, since a working brake is required for every account regardless of age and banishing minors does not escape it, but the youth-defaults layer still creates the incentive, and the proposal should say so plainly. Courts feel this too: the New Mexico court declined design relief partly because restrictions on one company "could harm the viability of Meta and its platforms" given "the absence of Meta's competitors in this litigation." An obligation that lands on one firm is a competitive penalty; the same obligation across a market is a standard. That asymmetry is an argument for legislating this, not for softening it. 10. **The counter-narratives, and the honest answer to each.** A proposal is stronger for naming its opponents' best lines. *"We already offer parental controls"* is often true and often inadequate; the persistence and scope tests (§3) are exactly what a cosmetic control fails. *"This breaks discovery for small creators"* is partly true, a real distributional cost to measure (§7.4), not a reason the brake should not work. *"Chronological feeds help disinformation"* is arguable, and is part of why the standard regulates control integrity and defaults rather than mandating one feed order. *"This is a backdoor to government control of speech"* is the strongest bad-faith line, and the reason the core is the platform's own control and the wedge-label is confined to research (§4). *"Parents, not platforms, should manage screen time"* ignores that the loop is engineered against the parent too; the youth defaults are a floor, not a substitute for parenting. 11. **Meta-honesty flag.** This document reasons about media effects and its own relevance to policy, a surface where fluent, self-flattering narrative is the failure mode. The reasoned parts (the tractability of control integrity, the legal tiering) are hypotheses to be tested against the primary sources, not findings. An earlier version of this project also carried factual errors about the litigation that were caught only on external review; the sources here have been re-checked against primary dispositions for that reason, and are dated. --- ## 8. Falsifiability: what would show this is wrong - **Persistent controls do not reduce compulsive use.** If durable, working brakes for minors do not measurably reduce compulsive-use metrics and high-arousal exposure, the "controls that work" premise is weakened. (Held honestly against Guess et al., §7.6: reduced time-on-platform is established for chronological feeds; the attitudinal/welfare link is not, and this standard's claim is about restoring control, with reduced compulsion as the near-term measurable, not a mental-health guarantee.) - **Control integrity cannot be specified enforceably.** If "prompt, material, persistent, non-circumventing" cannot be turned into thresholds that survive the AADC vagueness bar (§4), the standard reduces to the aspiration it criticizes. - **The objective substitutes invisibly.** If platforms can satisfy every observable test while re-introducing engagement pressure through renamed signals or other surfaces that outside audit cannot catch, the anti-circumvention model has failed. - **The Lemmon lane closes.** If courts treat requiring an offered control to work as itself compelling or restricting the platform's protected editorial speech, the paper's central legal bet (control integrity is the *Lemmon* lane, not the *Moody* lane) is wrong. --- ## 9. What this adds to the existing record Because §1 establishes that the design surface is already regulated, this paper must justify itself against what exists: - **Versus SB 976 / NY SAFE:** those gate personalized feeds for minors behind parental consent. Brake integrity is **universal at the base layer** (a working, persistent control for everyone), makes **durable user choice** the object rather than a broad personalization restriction, avoids making parental consent the sole escape valve, and adds the **persistence and anti-circumvention** tests that turn "a setting exists" into "the setting works and stays." It also stays on the safer side of the SB 976 like-count strike-down by never regulating which content or metrics are shown. - **Versus the DSA / EU minors guidelines:** the DSA already mandates a non-profiled option and the guidelines already describe resets and lasting feedback. This paper's contribution is a **testable integrity standard** (observable pass/partial/fail criteria and an audit model) rather than a list of desired features, and the explicit **§230-vs-First-Amendment tiering** for the US context. - **Versus age-restriction bills (UK under-16 ban, etc.):** those restrict *access*. This restricts *the loop and the controls over it*, which does not require deciding that minors may not use these services at all, and which extends a base-layer benefit to adults. The one-line version of the contribution: *existing law increasingly names design as the target; what is missing is a user-centered standard for whether the person's decision to stop or redirect the system actually takes effect and persists. That standard is brake integrity.* --- ## Provenance and methodology The conceptual tools here were carried in from a creative and analytical practice and applied to a policy problem: the dead-man's-switch image, "consent severed from the act," and the "amplify or extract" lens began outside policy and are restated in full above, so nothing load-bearing lives elsewhere. This paper is **AI-assisted**: the seed insights and judgment are the author's; drafting was collaborative; the legal and empirical claims were verified against primary sources (see below), and the honest-limits section is the check on fluent overreach. This paper deliberately does not name a human legal, technical, or youth-safety reviewer, because it has not been through one; that review is part of the 95% still to be done. ## Sources (reviewed July 2026; dispositions dated) Litigation and regulation in this area move weekly; each item carries an as-of date and should be re-checked against the primary source before circulation. - **MDL 3047** (four defendants; 3,137 pending per the August 3, 2026 JPML report; June 29 2026 summary-judgment order, announced June 30, incl. the narrowed COPPA compliance finding and the "public relations stunt" language at p. 23; Aug 12/18 2026 trial against Meta alone, 29-state COPPA claims plus four states' consumer claims; Feb 2027 follow-on for 14 states; ~$1.4T Meta-characterized exposure, "entirely unmoored" / "no analog" per Meta's filing): [JPML report](https://www.jpml.uscourts.gov/sites/jpml/files/Pending_MDL_Dockets_By_Actions_Pending-July-1-2026.pdf); [the summary-judgment order, Dkt 3214, via CourtListener/RECAP](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/gov.uscourts.cand.401490.3214.0_3.pdf) (primary, verified 2026-07-16); [Meta's penalty filing, Dkt 455](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.455.0.pdf) (primary); [California AG release](https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/ahead-meta-trial-attorney-general-bonta-secures-critical-win); [Top Class Actions on the COPPA scope](https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/meta-social-media-addiction-lawsuits-cleared-for-august-bellwether-trial/); [Law.com/The Recorder](https://www.law.com/therecorder/2026/06/30/29-states-head-to-trial-against-meta-after-social-media-addiction-judge-refuses-to-toss-claims-/); [JURIST](https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/07/meta-says-state-ags-seek-1-4t-over-youth-safety-claims/); [Engadget on the trial structure](https://www.engadget.com/2209332/meta-is-facing-1-4-trillion-in-state-lawsuits-over-social-media-addiction/). - **K.G.M. v. Meta and Google** ($6M, LA Superior Court, Mar 25 2026, split 70/30 Meta/Google; new-trial/JNOV denied early Jun 2026, announced Jun 10; Meta appeal filed early July, YouTube Jul 13 2026; second bellwether: Meta and Snap to trial Jul 27 2026 after YouTube (Jun 23) and TikTok (Jun 30) settled): [CNBC](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/10/google-and-meta-denied-new-trial-in-youth-social-media-addiction-case.html); [AP via US News](https://www.usnews.com/news/technology/articles/2026-07-15/youtube-joins-meta-in-appealing-a-jury-verdict-that-faulted-them-for-users-social-media-addiction); [Law.com](https://www.law.com/therecorder/2026/06/24/googles-youtube-settles-second-bellwether-case-over-social-media-addiction/); [NBC News](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-reaches-settlement-social-media-addiction-trial-florida-teen-rcna352299). - **State of New Mexico v. Meta** ($375M jury verdict Mar 24 2026 under the NM Unfair Practices Act, child-safety; final judgment Aug 6 2026 adding a $567M abatement fund for $942M total, plus a five-year injunction on under-18 accounts and NO relief against the algorithm; Meta says it will appeal): [NM DOJ](https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/new-mexico-department-of-justice-wins-landmark-verdict-against-meta/); [Santa Fe New Mexican](https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/new-mexico-ag-santa-fe-judge-should-order-meta-to-pay-953-million/article_1001f752-95bf-4b90-bde8-cc08d56696a8.html); [Source NM](https://sourcenm.com/2026/06/17/new-mexico-ag-seeks-nearly-1-billion-payment-from-meta-in-second-phase-of-trial/). - **California SB 976** and **NetChoice v. Bonta, No. 25-146 (9th Cir. Sep 9 2025)** (addictive-feed provision and default-private-mode un-enjoined; like-count enjoined; feed-expressiveness left open): [SB 976 text](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB976); [9th Cir. opinion](https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/09/09/25-146.pdf). - **NY SAFE for Kids Act** (enacted 2024; pre-effective, awaiting AG rulemaking): [NY AG proposed rules](https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2025/attorney-general-james-releases-proposed-rules-safe-kids-act-restrict-addictive). - **Moody v. NetChoice** (SCOTUS 2024, curated feeds as editorial expression, guidance not merits; Barrett concurrence on reactive algorithms): [opinion](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-277_d18f.pdf). - **Doe 1 v. Meta Platforms** (9th Cir. Apr 28 2026, recommendation is publishing under §230; distinguishes Lemmon): [opinion](https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2026/04/28/24-1672.pdf). **Rehearing en banc denied Aug 17 2026** (No. 24-1672, DktEntry 55), with Judges W. Fletcher and Berzon recommending it be granted and no judge of the full court requesting a vote: [order via CourtListener/RECAP](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca9.4594ab66-7d2f-45ef-ac73-df05df328b08/gov.uscourts.ca9.4594ab66-7d2f-45ef-ac73-df05df328b08.55.0.pdf). - **People of the State of California v. Meta Platforms** (9th Cir. Aug 10 2026, published; §230 is a defense to liability, not immunity from suit, so appeals from orders denying it were dismissed for lack of jurisdiction; Meta identified no constitutional interests in that appeal): [opinion via CourtListener/RECAP](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.541.0.pdf). - **Lemmon v. Snap** (9th Cir. 2021, product-design duty independent of content survives §230): [analysis](https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/2126266.html). - **NetChoice v. Bonta (AADC)** (9th Cir. Mar 12 2026, age-estimation un-enjoined; data-use/dark-pattern provisions enjoined on vagueness): [opinion](https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2026/03/12/25-2366.pdf). - **EU DSA Art. 38** (non-profiling recommender option) and **Commission minors guidelines (Jul 2025)**; **preliminary findings: TikTok addictive design Feb 6 2026, Meta under-13 age assurance Apr 29 2026, Meta addictive design Jul 10 2026**: [Commission minors guidelines](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/commission-publishes-guidelines-protection-minors); [Meta addictive-design finding](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-preliminarily-finds-addictive-design-instagram-and-facebook-breach-digital-services-act); [Meta under-13 finding, IP/26/920](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_920). - **Guess et al., *Science* (2023)** (chronological feed reduced time, not attitudes): [study](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp9364). - **UK** (under-16 ban announced Jun 15 2026; 16-17 curfews/addictive-feature defaults Jul 15 2026; both targeted spring 2027): [GOV.UK](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-social-media-curfews-and-crackdown-on-addictive-features-to-better-protect-16-and-17-year-olds-online). - **Meta Q1 2026 net income (~$26.8B, incl. one-time tax benefit)** (as-of Q1 2026, dates quickly): [Meta IR](https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2026/Meta-Reports-First-Quarter-2026-Results/default.aspx). Financial and case figures are as reported and not independently audited here; legal characterizations are directional and for counsel to confirm. --- # Experimental appendix: the wedge hypothesis Source: https://de-amplify.com/notes # Experimental Appendix: the wedge hypothesis, and the label that might backfire ## Why this is a separate document The policy paper (*The Brake Integrity Standard*) makes a deliberately narrow bet: regulate the platform's own controls so a user's decision to stop or redirect the feed actually takes effect and persists. Narrow on purpose, because it sits on the most defensible legal ground and needs no one to classify anyone's speech. This appendix holds the ideas that are **more interesting and more dangerous**: the theory that engagement ranking manufactures division, and the tempting move of *labeling* that division for young users. An earlier draft called these "the more powerful knob." That framing was wrong. They are not a stronger version of the standard; they are a **different, higher-risk experiment**, and keeping them in the same document as the policy made the policy look more speech-adjacent than it actually is. So they live here, quarantined and clearly marked: **hypotheses to study, not rules to pass.** ## The wedge hypothesis Engagement ranking rewards the strongest reaction. Outrage, tribal conflict, and out-group hostility reliably win that contest. So optimizing a feed for engagement may **automatically select for wedges**, with no one ever flipping a "promote divisive content" switch. The objective does it, as an emergent side effect. If that holds, it has an elegant consequence: because the amplification is *emergent from the objective*, you could reduce it by **changing the objective** (the "Knob 1" of the old draft, now the content-neutral core of the policy paper), without classifying a single post as a wedge, without a censor, without touching anyone's speech. That part is worth keeping, and it is already in the policy paper as a content-neutral default. Two honest caveats keep this a hypothesis and not a finding: - **The mechanism is plausible, not settled.** "Engagement selects for outrage" is well-argued and matches internal-research leaks, but the *magnitude*, and how much a changed objective actually moves it, is empirical, not a proven law. - **De-amplifying engagement is not proven to improve well-being.** The closest large experiment (Guess et al., *Science*, 2023) found a chronological feed cut time-on-platform but did not measurably move polarization or well-being over a three-month adult window. Reduced compulsion is a legitimate end in itself; a mental-health guarantee it is not. ## The dangerous part: labeling the wedge The tempting next step, the one this appendix exists to hold at arm's length, is a parental control that hides nothing but **labels**: "this post is running a wedge, here is the move it is making." The intuition is good, a label *builds* the muscle to spot manipulation where a filter removes the material that muscle is trained on. But it carries risks the content-neutral default does not: 1. **"Who defines a wedge" does not dissolve, it moves.** A parental toggle fixes *who applies* the label, not *who forged the classifier* behind it, trained it, or profits from its operation. The normative question (tribal sorting, or legitimate advocacy, satire, reporting?) is contested, and even perfect behavioral prediction does not answer it. 2. **"Visible" is not "contestable."** A label a user cannot appeal is just a softer verdict. Contestability requires a specified appeal process, which almost no one specifies. 3. **It invites the strongest constitutional challenge.** A government-mandated label characterizing lawful speech meets compelled-editorial-speech doctrine (*Moody v. NetChoice*) and, being content-based, strict scrutiny, the same ground on which California's like-count restriction was **struck down** in 2025 while its content-neutral default-private-mode survived. This is the most legally exposed idea in the whole project (tier 4 of the policy paper's exposure ranking), which is exactly why it is not in the policy. 4. **Partial labeling can backfire (the implied-truth effect).** Pennycook and colleagues found that labeling *some* false content makes people believe the *unlabeled* false content more, because the absence of a warning reads as a stamp of approval. A wedge-labeler that cannot catch everything may quietly certify everything it misses. ## The better version: label the mechanism, not the meaning There is a reframing that keeps the good intuition (name the move, build the muscle) and drops most of the danger. **Do not label the speech. Label the recommendation.** Instead of "this post is a wedge" (a characterization of someone's lawful expression), show the user *why the machine served it*: > "You are seeing this because you replayed similar clips." / "This is being shown to you because it is provoking strong reactions." plus a control: **"Stop using this signal." / "Reset this part of my profile."** This is **recommendation literacy**, and it is strictly better on four axes: - **It characterizes the algorithm's behavior, not the citizen's speech**, so it sidesteps the content-based-label constitutional wall. - **It is brake-aligned.** Transparency plus a control, the platform's own mechanism made legible and adjustable, which is the *Lemmon* lane the whole policy sits in, not a speech verdict. - **It builds the muscle honestly.** Inoculation research (van der Linden and colleagues) supports the idea that naming a manipulative *technique* builds resistance to it. Naming the *mechanism* ("this is engagement bait, and here is how it reached you") is a technique-level intervention, not a truth-verdict on the content. - **It is contestable by construction**, because it is a statement about *the user's own data and the machine's own logic*, which the user can inspect and switch off, not a claim about a stranger's post that the user can only accept or reject. Recommendation-mechanism labeling is still an experiment (does it build literacy, or get tuned out like a cookie banner? does it reduce compulsive engagement, or just annoy? does the implied-truth effect touch mechanism-labels the way it touches content-labels?), but it is the version worth running first, because it **fails safe**. ## Spot the move yourself (no label, no classifier) The safest version of all needs no platform, no toggle, and no one defining "wedge" for anyone. It is a habit you run in your own head, on a post that just got a rise out of you. Call it a wedge check. The point is not to win the argument or to get the post taken down. The point is to catch the machine using your reaction as fuel, in the moment it is happening. Hold a post up and ask: 1. **Sort, or understand?** Is this drawing a line to help you understand something, or to sort people into us and them? The same act of making a distinction can do either. A wedge is the destructive mode: a difference drawn to divide. 2. **A who, or a what?** Where does it aim your reaction, at a *who* to blame (a group, a side, a person) or at a *what* to grasp (a mechanism, a tradeoff, an idea)? Wedges hand you a villain-tribe. That is the tell. 3. **Flinch, or think?** What came out of you first: a flinch, the urge to fire back, a side taken, or a question, a "let me look at that"? The feed is tuned to reward the flinch, because the flinch is the fuel. 4. **A real difference, or a manufactured one?** Is the distinction load-bearing, a difference that actually changes what you would do, or is it blown past its real size because the size is what gets the reaction? 5. **Would the other side feel it too?** This is the one that matters most. Someone on the other side, looking at their version of the same move, should feel just as wedged by it. If it only reads as a wedge when it is aimed at your side, stop: you may be the one turning "wedge" into a weapon. Two rules keep this honest, and they are the whole reason it can live on a site that refuses to build a classifier: **It is a mirror, not a filter.** You are not scoring the post to hide it, down-rank it, or delete it. Nothing is removed. You are only checking whether the machine is running the post *at you* to farm a reaction. Seeing the strings is the entire goal. De-amplify, do not censor, applies to your own hand too. **A wedge is not "an opinion I disagree with."** It is a distinction being *run for the reaction*, and your own side runs them constantly. The moment this check turns into "aha, proof that the other tribe is the wedge," it has stopped being literacy and become the exact move it names. If the detector only ever fires on the people you already dislike, the detector is broken, or you are the one holding it as a wedge. None of this is a verdict, and it is deliberately not a score. It is the muscle the mechanism-label above was meant to build, run by hand, on your own feed, with no one classifying anyone's speech. That is why it is the version this project is most comfortable with: it fails safe, because the only thing it can do is help you see. ## The frontier: a detector you own outright There is a version one step past even the by-hand check, and it is worth naming because it is coming whether this project likes it or not. As capable models move onto people's own devices, open, local, user-controlled, a person could run their own detector on their own feed: something that watches what they scroll and flags, privately, "this looks like it is being run at you for a reaction." This sounds like the classifier the whole appendix warns against, and the difference is the entire point. The danger was never "a classifier exists." It was **a centralized classifier, trained on someone else's values, applied to you silently.** A detector you own, running on your device, on your data, that you can inspect and switch off, inverts every one of those. "Who defines a wedge" stops being a problem the moment the answer is *you do, for yourself.* It is the same move as putting your own values into an AI's instructions instead of taking the provider's defaults: the defaults are someone else's, and the only way the tool becomes yours is if you put yourself into it. But there is a trap here that is easy to miss and fatal if you do, and it is the same trap that turns a personalized AI into a yes-man. **Personalize what it watches. Do not personalize what counts as manipulation.** If you seed the detector with your side's politics, it will flag exactly what offends your tribe and wave through what flatters it. That is not literacy; it is an outrage-confirmer with a clean interface, and it fails the one question that keeps any of this honest: *would the other side feel wedged too?* A detector tuned to your allegiances only ever fires on the people you already dislike, which is the definition of the thing it was supposed to catch. The version that works splits the two cleanly: - **The trigger is personal.** It watches *your* feed, *your* reactions, what actually gets a rise out of *you*. That part is yours alone, and that is what makes it relevant to you and no one else. - **The standard is universal.** What counts as a wedge stays the same for everyone: is this sorting or explaining, aiming at a *who* or a *what*, pulling a flinch or a question, and, above all, would the other side feel it too. The test does not bend to your politics. So the thing you put into it is not "here is my side." It is the harder instruction: *catch the move even when it is aimed to please me; flag my own side when my own side is farming my reaction.* That is the same commitment that separates an honest model from a flattering one. A tool that only ever tells you your enemies are the manipulators is not aligned to you. It is lying to you, gently, the way a sycophant does. One last honesty check, because it matters for the rest of this site. This frontier is real, and control is genuinely shifting from the companies to the people who run the models. But "you can run your own detector" is also the platform's favorite escape hatch: *it is the user's responsibility now, so leave the feed alone.* Do not accept that trade. A detector in your hand is a defense you deploy **downstream** of a machine that is still, upstream, built to farm your reaction. It is a reason to want brake integrity more, not a reason to want it less. Hold both. ## If someone insists on a content-label anyway Then, at minimum, it must be: **opt-in** (a guardian's choice, never a silent default on lawful speech); **audited by a third party**, not the platform (see the capability-is-the-danger argument in the policy paper, section 6, the party best able to build the classifier is the party least safe to run it silently); **probabilistic, not binary** (show confidence, not a verdict); **appealable** through a specified process; and **published with its error rates**. Even fully safeguarded, it still faces the constitutional wall above. So the honest order of operations is: mechanism-labeling first; content-labeling only if mechanism-labeling proves insufficient, and only with every safeguard, and even then expect to lose in court. ## Open questions (the falsifiers) - Does mechanism-labeling measurably build recommendation literacy, or do users tune it out? - Does surfacing "why you are seeing this" reduce compulsive engagement, or just add friction? - Does the implied-truth effect degrade mechanism-labels the way it degrades content-labels, or does labeling *the machine* rather than *the message* avoid it? - Does a by-hand wedge check build literacy, or just give people a way to call everything they dislike a wedge? - Does a personal, user-owned detector help people see, or does it harden the filter bubble by teaching everyone that their enemies are the manipulators? - Is the wedge-selection effect large enough that changing the objective (the policy paper's content-neutral default) noticeably reduces it, or is it a small term swamped by other signals? If the honest answer to the last question is "small," then the wedge is a compelling story with a modest effect, and the movement's weight should rest entirely on brake integrity, not on the wedge. That is the falsifier that matters most, because the whole reason the wedge material is quarantined here, and not load-bearing in the policy, is that the policy must stand even if the wedge hypothesis turns out to be small. --- *Provenance and methodology: this appendix is the deliberately-quarantined, higher-risk half of the project. Nothing here is recommended for enactment; it is a research agenda. **AI-assisted**: the reasoning is the author's, the drafting was collaborative, and the empirical claims (Pennycook implied-truth effect, van der Linden inoculation, Guess et al.) are checked against the sources listed in the companion policy paper. A hypothesis is not a finding, and this document is careful to stay hypotheses.* --- # The social media addiction lawsuits, explained Source: https://de-amplify.com/lawsuits # The social media addiction lawsuits, explained Meta's estimate of $1.4 trillion in potential penalties is the number built for headlines. The more consequential question is much smaller: when a teenager taps "Take a Break," does anything actually stop? Across a federal multidistrict litigation in Oakland, coordinated state-court trials in Los Angeles, enforcement cases in Santa Fe and Nashville, a regulatory proceeding in Brussels, and a courtroom in Amsterdam, that same issue keeps resurfacing. The law may never settle whether "social media addiction" is a clinical category. It can still decide whether a company accurately described its product, whether a safety control did what its name promised, and whether the system quietly worked around the user's decision. That distinction is the key to understanding the lawsuits, and to seeing the remedy they have not yet produced. > **About this page.** Where the record stood as of **August 28, 2026**, when the federal states-versus-Meta trial section was rewritten from the docket: **that trial ended on August 26, 2026 in an entered consent judgment**, and the settlement terms below are quoted from the executed agreement and the judgment itself, both cached. Other sections carry their own dates. New Mexico was re-seeded August 13, 2026 from the final judgment entered August 6; Brussels was re-verified August 2, 2026; Tennessee was rewritten August 28, 2026, because the same settlement ended its Nashville trial mid-evidence; the remaining U.S. court sections carry a July 25 date. Litigation here moves weekly, and every figure below carries its date. This is an explanatory and policy project, not a law firm and not a claim-matching service; if you are looking to file a claim or join a lawsuit, this is not that page. Because coverage of these cases routinely blurs what has been decided against what has merely been alleged or requested, claims below are labeled: **court-held** (decided as a matter of law), **court-entered** (a judgment the parties agreed and the court signed, which is not a finding of liability), **jury-found** (verdict returned, appeals possible), **evidence cited** (in the record, still disputed), **requested** (a party's proposed remedy or estimate), **preliminary** (a regulator's initial finding), and **scheduled** (a current court date, subject to change). ## The map: six proceedings, not one Press coverage tends to blur these fights into one story about a "youth safety trial." They are six distinct proceedings in three legal systems, and keeping them apart is most of the work of understanding them. **MDL 3047 is the federal hub, not the whole map.** It centralizes most federal personal-injury and school-district cases (plus a multistate action by state attorneys general) for coordinated pretrial proceedings in Oakland. An MDL is not itself a class action; it is a procedural mechanism for handling related federal cases together. California's coordinated state-court cases, including the trials in Los Angeles, are a separate proceeding (JCCP 5255). New Mexico's enforcement case is separate again, in Santa Fe, and Tennessee's is separate from all of them, in Nashville, where it went to a jury in July 2026 and ended without a verdict on August 26, when the federal settlement swept it in by name. And two of the six are not American at all: the European Commission's investigation is not a lawsuit but a regulatory process under the Digital Services Act, while Bits of Freedom v. Meta is a genuine court case, brought by a Dutch foundation in Amsterdam under that same regulation. The proceedings share defendants, evidence, and themes; a verdict in one does not automatically decide the others, and a Dutch order binds nothing in an American court. Each of the four U.S. cases has its own case file, a deeper page seeded from the project's per-case [evidence ledgers](/distillations), where corrections land first (each ledger is published in full, every claim tiered by the strength of its source). The two European proceedings have no case file and link straight to their ledgers instead: one because it is not a case at all, the other because a Dutch judgment is best read in its own record, where the quoted text stays in Dutch and the English beside it is marked as translation. - **[MDL 3047](/lawsuits/mdl-3047)**: The big federal case: thousands of youth-harm suits against Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snap, and the states' trial against Meta ended on August 26, 2026 in an entered consent judgment. - **[K.G.M. v. Meta and Google](/lawsuits/kgm-v-meta)**: The California state cases: about 1,600 suits, whose first test verdict hit Meta and Google for $6 million, now on appeal. - **[State of New Mexico v. Meta](/lawsuits/new-mexico-v-meta)**: New Mexico won $942 million from Meta and a five-year order changing how minors' accounts work, but the judge refused to touch the algorithm. - **[State of Tennessee v. Meta](/lawsuits/tennessee-v-meta)**: Tennessee tried Meta over a safety tool the State says Meta knew was broken and kept anyway, until the August 26, 2026 settlement ended the trial in its fifth week, before any verdict. - **[Bits of Freedom v. Meta](/distillations/bits-of-freedom-v-meta)** (a court, but a Dutch one): A Dutch court ordered Meta to make a chosen non-profiled feed survive closing and reopening the app, which is this project's own test, imposed as law. - **[The EU DSA proceedings](/distillations/eu-dsa-proceedings)** (a regulator, not a court): The EU is scoring the brakes directly: four preliminary findings say Meta's and TikTok's time limits and parental controls do not work. ## MDL 3047: the federal case against Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Snap The federal MDL, before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California, held **3,137 pending actions as of the Judicial Panel's August 3, 2026 report**, up 244 in the month since July 1. The legal theory is **product design, not bad content**. The plaintiffs allege the companies intentionally built features (infinite scroll, autoplay, variable-reward notifications, engagement-ranked feeds) to keep young users compulsively returning, and misrepresented the safety of those products. No single post is on trial; the delivery machine is. Not every design theory survived: earlier rulings in the MDL narrowed parts of the case on Section 230 grounds, which treat some algorithmic recommendation as protected publishing. **Court-held**, and as of August 2026 described by a federal appeals court rather than only by coverage: the district court ruled that Section 230 bars some claims "only to the extent that they concern allegedly defective platform features targeting Meta's role as a publisher of third-party content", and on a later set of claims found Section 230 to be "a fairly significant limitation" while letting them proceed. The order numbers and dates are still not in this project's hands. The claims that keep advancing are the ones about deception and about the platform's own controls. The most consequential ruling so far came at the end of June 2026, and its two halves deserve separate labels: - **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: Meta's notice and parental-consent procedures did not comply with the statute's requirements. That is a finding about procedures, not yet liability; the states must still establish that COPPA applied to the services at issue, including disputed questions about child-directed services and Meta's knowledge of under-13 users. - **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 that more time on the platform was linked to worse outcomes for teens. That is disputed evidence, not a final finding. But mark what it means for the rest of this page: whether the platform's brakes actually worked as advertised is not a metaphor imposed on this litigation from outside. It is already inside the trial record. Full case file, with the docket sources: [MDL 3047](/lawsuits/mdl-3047). ## The Meta trial that ended in a judgment: August 2026, Oakland The proceeding opened on August 18, 2026 and combined two things: the **29 participating states' consolidated COPPA claims**, and **consumer-protection claims selected from four of those states** (California, Colorado, Kentucky, New Jersey). The defendant was **Meta alone**; the other MDL defendants face separate personal-injury and school-district tracks. **Meta asked to stay this trial and was refused twice, in two courts:** the trial judge on July 20 ("Meta's request to stay the trial in this case is DENIED"), the Ninth Circuit on August 10, denying an emergency stay as moot in the same opinion that threw out its appeal. Evidence was heard on four days, before an advisory jury. The states called **Arturo Bejar**, the former Meta safety engineer; **Dr. Jean Twenge**; **George Volichenko** and **Francesco Fogu**; and on August 25, **Adam Mosseri**, the head of Instagram. **The next morning it was over.** **Court-entered, August 26, 2026.** The parties filed a joint motion to enter a consent judgment attaching a fully executed 130-page settlement. In a 49-minute session the court suspended the trial, granted the motion, and signed the judgment the same day: "Upon filing, judgment shall be entered, the trial is deemed vacated, and the jury shall be advised that they are each discharged immediately." Both sides waived appeal. It resolves the claims of **51 states, commonwealths and territories**, a wider group than the 29 whose claims were being tried, and it reaches past this courtroom: the agreement lists **fifteen state-court AG cases in fourteen jurisdictions** that it also ends, by name, including **Tennessee's Nashville trial, which was in its fifth week of evidence** (its jury was dismissed the same day) and cases in Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, Utah, Vermont, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, Arkansas, Nevada and Puerto Rico. Note the posture, because the announcement understated it. The California Attorney General's release that day describes a "proposed settlement, which remains subject to court approval through entry of a consent judgment". That was true when written and overtaken within hours. **What exists is an entered final judgment, not a proposal.** ### What Meta agreed to, and the condition attached to most of it **The money.** The agreement's Exhibit B sets ten annual installments totalling a maximum of **$16,680,647,753.21**, plus a **$75 million** cost fund and a **$459,293,017.80** Cambridge Analytica-era component paid to 48 of the settling states for releasing claims of that era (the pending California, D.C. and New Mexico Cambridge cases are not among them and are not resolved by this settlement). About **30 percent** of the Exhibit B maximum, **$5.02 billion**, is contingent: Meta owes it only if Snap, TikTok and YouTube become bound to equivalent teen time-management obligations and comparable payments. If that never happens in ten years, those payments "shall be permanently forfeited by such Settling State and retained by Meta." **The brake, and this is why the settlement belongs on this site rather than only in the news.** Teen accounts get a default daily limit "of 2 hours per day" across Instagram and Facebook (the agreement's covered platforms; messaging and Meta's other products are excluded) and a default overnight block "from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m.", loosened only with a parent's approval. Meta must stop teens using adjacent surfaces to "effectively circumvent" the limit, and when the limit bites its apps "shall not recommend or otherwise suggest that the Teen User utilize a different Meta SMP or engage in messaging". Like and reaction counts are off by default for teens; cosmetic-procedure filters are disabled; a **non-personalized feed** must be offered, re-offered every 90 days, with neither answer preselected. That is close to what this site has argued a brake must be: default-on, hard to circumvent, and not quietly undone by the product. **And the stronger version of it is conditional.** The wider overnight block, 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., applies only "whenever, in the 10 years following the Effective Date, Industry-Wide Adoption has occurred", meaning the same three competitors are bound to equivalent rules. A remedy for the collective-action problem, conditioned on the collective-action problem being solved first. ### What it does not do It records **no admission of liability**. It carves private individuals' claims and school-district claims out of the release, so the rest of MDL 3047 continues against Meta and against Google, TikTok and Snap, who are not parties. Its independent auditor publishes executive summaries for the first five years of a ten-year judgment. The deception claims that carried both trials get one forward-looking sentence, and it is the least enforceable term in the document: Meta is enjoined from false or misleading claims about teen safety features, but only prospectively, only enforceable with the consent of a majority of a state committee after 30 days notice, and the agreement says compliance with that term "shall not be subject to the independent audit". And it says, in the judgment the court signed: "Nothing in this Consent Judgment or the Agreement shall be construed to apply to, establish a standard of care for, or serve as precedent in any non-participating U.S. state or any international jurisdiction whatsoever." **The most detailed teen-design order an American court has entered comes with an instruction that it is not a standard.** That is this site's argument, made by the document. **Why 29 and not the 33 who filed.** Four states left the coalition in **January 2025**: Michigan, Georgia, Missouri and North Dakota. Michigan's Attorney General's office attributes the departure to the cost of discovery, saying the court "approved most of Meta's voluminous discovery demands upon the States and their agencies", demands the State could not comply with in the time allowed, and a filing put the narrowed request at roughly 700,000 documents. That accounts for the whole drop from 33 to 29. It is worth noticing what it says about this litigation independently of who wins: **the burden of proving the case was itself enough to remove four state attorneys general from it.** All four are settling states in the August 2026 judgment, with payment rows in Exhibit B. ## The trillion-dollar fight is really a counting fight None of this was ever decided, because the trial ended before the states presented a request. It is kept because the numbers are still in circulation, and because what the settlement paid against them is the most informative comparison available. The headline number was **an estimate, and not anybody's request**: roughly **$1.4 trillion** is Meta's own estimate, disclosed in a July 2026 filing, of its potential statutory exposure under four states' proposed penalty methodology. Meta's 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 states have not named a number, and the one widely reported as theirs is not.** Their own reply of July 13, 2026 says they "will present their final requests for monetary relief at trial" and that they "do not seek double recovery". The ask has two components rather than one: civil penalties **and disgorgement** of ill-gotten gains, which they say they seek to disgorge only once. Coverage of the opening reported that the states seek roughly **$200 billion**. That figure is in the states' filing, describing Meta as a company that accrued more than $200 billion in revenue in 2025, cited to Meta's annual report, in a passage about the scale at which deterrence has to work. It is possible the states also said something like it at an August hearing, whose transcript is not publicly mirrored. Until that transcript is read, this page states what the filings show and not what the headlines say. The more interesting issue is the counting rule underneath. Statutory penalties are multiplication problems: a maximum dollar amount per violation, times the number of violations. So the decisive question is what counts as *one violation*. One misleading statement? One affected user? One user-month? One day during which a control failed? The answer can turn millions into billions or trillions. New Mexico's jury, for scale, counted 75,000 violations at $5,000 each. The $1.4 trillion estimate is therefore not only a damages argument; it is a dispute over how misconduct at digital scale should be counted, and that dispute outlived this trial: the consent judgment settles a case, not a counting rule. **What it settled for.** The guaranteed money in the August 2026 judgment, $11.66 billion over ten years, is roughly **eight tenths of one percent** of the $1.4 trillion ceiling. That is arithmetic and not commentary: a statutory maximum is not a valuation, and the ceiling was the defendant's construction of the plaintiffs' method rather than anything the plaintiffs demanded. It is still the only number that puts the two in the same frame. ## The verdicts so far: $6 million and $375 million Two juries have already ruled, in two different kinds of case. **K.G.M. v. Meta and Google** (Los Angeles Superior Court) was the first bellwether from roughly 1,600 coordinated California state cases. **Jury-found**, March 25, 2026: a **$6 million verdict**, $3 million compensatory and $3 million punitive, allocated 70/30 between Meta and Google, which is why some outlets report only Meta's $4.2 million share. **Mark Zuckerberg testified in person at that trial**, on February 18, 2026, five weeks before the verdict. In early June (announced June 10) the trial judge denied the defendants' motions for a new trial and for judgment notwithstanding the verdict. Both defendants have now filed notices of appeal (Meta in early July; YouTube on July 13). No appellate court has reviewed the verdict, and honest reporting keeps that caveat attached. Full case file: [K.G.M. and the California bellwethers](/lawsuits/kgm-v-meta). **State of New Mexico v. Meta** (Santa Fe) is a different animal: a consumer-protection and child-safety case under the state Unfair Practices Act, about deceptive safety claims and child exploitation rather than addiction, and not part of the MDL. **Jury-found**, March 24, 2026: **$375 million** in civil penalties, the statutory maximum of $5,000 for each of 75,000 violations. Meta has said it will appeal. A second, judge-decided phase on public nuisance and prospective relief ended in a final judgment file-stamped **August 6, 2026** (announced August 7). **Court-held:** the platforms are a public nuisance, Section 230 does not shield Meta from that claim, and Meta must pay a further **$567 million** into an abatement fund, bringing the total to **$942 million**. New Mexico had requested about $953 million; it did not get that figure. The court also ordered five years of supervised changes to under-18 accounts: no push notifications from 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM or during school hours, like counts hidden by default, and a 90-hour monthly usage cap across Facebook and Instagram. **What it refused matters more here:** it granted no relief at all against the algorithm, infinite scroll or autoplay, holding that such relief would likely violate the First Amendment and Section 230 and that industry-wide features are for the legislature. So Section 230 cut both ways in one document, and the measures that survived are the ones the court called least connected with platform content. Full case file: [New Mexico v. Meta](/lawsuits/new-mexico-v-meta). What the verdicts established is narrower than the headlines suggest, and still consequential: in two very different proceedings, juries were willing to accept a design-harm theory in one case and a deception theory in the other. That does not settle the national litigation. It changes the risk calculation around every trial and settlement that follows, which is visible in what happened next. ## The settlements, and the trial that dissolved The pattern the verdicts set in motion, in order. Snap and TikTok settled out of the first California bellwether around the turn of 2026, TikTok as jury selection was beginning. The first federal bellwether, brought by a Kentucky school district, settled in May 2026 for a combined figure near **$27 million**; the terms were not disclosed in court, but Reuters later obtained the settlement agreements through a public-records request. YouTube settled the second California bellwether confidentially (reported June 23); TikTok followed on June 30. That left Meta and Snap set for trial on July 27, 2026, and **the trial never happened**. Snap reached a tentative settlement announced July 20, and on **July 22 the plaintiff voluntarily dismissed his remaining claims against Meta**, telling the court through counsel that he had "elected to withdraw his claims" given "the overall successful result of the litigation" and the prospect of a weekslong trial. That last event is not a settlement and should not be counted as one: it is a plaintiff walking away, and on the available reporting **Meta paid nothing**. Whether the dismissal was with or without prejudice is not established. Note also what the sequence costs the record: of the two California test cases tried so far, one reached a jury and the other ended with the defendants leaving the room one at a time. Bellwethers are supposed to price the risk for the thousands of cases behind them, and a case that settles out teaches the docket much less than a verdict does. Because the Los Angeles Superior Court docket is not publicly retrievable online, the July 20 and July 22 events here rest on **news coverage rather than a court filing**, and are recorded at that weaker tier in the case ledger. **And then the largest one.** On August 26, 2026, four days into evidence, Meta and 51 state and territorial attorneys general ended the federal trial with an entered consent judgment worth up to about $17.2 billion, described in full above. It breaks the pattern in one respect and confirms it in another: unlike every settlement before it, this one **did** produce a disclosed, enforceable design standard, with real defaults and an auditor. And it says in its own text that the standard binds nobody outside the settling states. For the largest defendants, none of these numbers is financially existential. Their importance is precedential, evidentiary, and strategic. Money is moving in every direction, no liability has been admitted, and, the fact this whole site turns on: **the one enforceable design standard any of it produced is expressly not sector-wide**, binds one company, expires in ten years, and reserves its strongest settings for the day competitors accept the same terms. Paying and continuing is, so far, the equilibrium. ## Six numbers people keep confusing | Number | What it actually is | |---|---| | **$6 million** | Jury verdict, K.G.M. (California state court, March 2026). 70% Meta, 30% Google. Both defendants appealing. | | **$375 million** | Jury verdict, New Mexico (March 2026): statutory maximum penalties, 75,000 violations at $5,000. Meta says it will appeal. | | **$567 million** | Court-ordered abatement fund, New Mexico (August 6, 2026), on top of the jury's $375M, for **$942 million** total. The state had requested about $953 million. Meta says it will appeal. | | **~$1.4 trillion** | Meta's *estimate* of its potential statutory exposure under four states' proposed penalty counting. Not a judgment, not a settlement demand a court has seen fit to endorse. | | **~$200 billion** | **Not a demand at all.** Meta's 2025 revenue, as the states' own July 2026 filing describes it while arguing about the scale deterrence has to reach. Widely reported during the trial's opening week as the amount the states seek. | | **$16,680,647,753.21** | The only one of these that is a **judgment**. The maximum under the August 26, 2026 consent judgment, over ten annual installments to 51 states and territories, of which **$11,656,621,745.60 is guaranteed** and **$5,024,026,007.70 reverts to Meta** unless Snap, TikTok and YouTube adopt equivalent teen time limits. Add $75 million in costs and a $459,293,017.80 Cambridge Analytica-era release component for the roughly $17.2 billion figure in the headlines. | Litigation headlines routinely collapse verdicts, requests, and worst-case estimates into one category of "money sought." The six numbers are six different kinds of fact, and only one of them is a judgment. It is worth noticing that the error runs in both directions: the $1.4 trillion is the defendant's own worst case reported as the plaintiffs' demand, and the $200 billion is the defendant's revenue reported as the plaintiffs' demand. A large dollar figure in a filing attaches itself to whichever party the story is about. The settlement figure attracted a sixth variety of the same error: on the day it was entered, outlets of comparable standing reported it as $16.68 billion, $16.7 billion, $17 billion, $17.1 billion and $18 billion, and **none separated the guaranteed money from the contingent money**, which is the only division that determines what Meta actually pays. ## So is it actually addiction? The defense's consistent line is that "social media addiction is not an established psychiatric condition," and as a diagnostic matter that fight is real: there is no such diagnosis in the DSM, the clinical category is contested, and coverage reflects the ambiguity by calling these cases social media harm lawsuits one week and social media mental health lawsuits the next. But that debate collapses three questions that the litigation keeps separate: 1. Is "social media addiction" a formal psychiatric diagnosis? (Contested, and possibly never resolved.) 2. Can particular designs contribute to compulsive, hard-to-control use? (An empirical question about products, not diagnostic categories.) 3. Did the company accurately describe its product's risks and the effectiveness of its controls? (A consumer-protection question courts answer all the time.) Look at which claims actually advance. The rulings that survived summary judgment, the COPPA procedures finding, the New Mexico verdict: none of them required deciding question one. They are findings about **deception and consent**: the platform said a control or a safety measure did something, and the evidence indicates it did not. The DSM fight asks what to call the condition. The consumer-protection fight asks what the company said, what it knew, and whether its controls did what they promised. Courts do not need to settle the first question to answer the second. None of this requires pretending that all social-media use is harmful, that every young user reacts identically, or that every reduction in engagement is automatically beneficial. The psychological evidence varies by person, feature, and context, and age-detection systems carry their own privacy and error risks. That is exactly why the remedy this site argues for does not dictate viewpoints, prohibited content, or a permitted number of minutes. It tests whether a user-selected control reliably produces the product state the platform said it would. ## Brussels is writing the rule American courts haven't American litigation has mostly asked who should pay after alleged harm. European regulators are asking the forward-looking question: what must the product do differently? **Preliminary:** on July 10, 2026, the European Commission preliminarily found the addictive design of Facebook and Instagram in breach of the Digital Services Act (IP/26/1579). Its critique reads like a product test. On the brakes Meta already ships: Instagram's and Facebook's time-management tools, "including those activated by default for teens, can be easily dismissed and do not lead to a meaningful reduction and control of the usage of the service." On the parental controls: they "are only effective if parents and guardians possess adequate technical expertise, as well as devote effort and time to understand them effectively." The changes the Commission identified include disabling autoplay and infinite scroll by default, effective screen-time breaks, and recommender systems less driven by engagement. Three more findings sit alongside it, and two of them are about controls rather than content. On April 29, 2026 the Commission preliminarily found Meta had failed to keep under-13s off the platforms (IP/26/920), and counted the friction: Meta's tool for reporting an under-13 user "is difficult to use and not effective, requiring up to seven clicks just to access the reporting form, which is not automatically pre-filled with the user's information." After a report is made, "there often is no proper follow-up, and the reported minor can simply continue to use the service without any type of check." On July 24, 2026 it preliminarily found TikTok's minor account settings expose minors too widely (IP/26/1679), including that even when a minor chooses a private account, "their profile photos remain accessible to anyone, including users without a TikTok account." The first of the four came on February 6, 2026, against TikTok's addictive design (IP/26/312), and it used almost the same words Brussels would later use about Meta: TikTok's time-management tools "are easy to dismiss and introduce limited friction." All four of these findings are preliminary; Meta and TikTok can respond before any final decision or penalty, and the word "preliminarily" is doing real work in every sentence above. **No fine has been imposed in any of them**, and a European fine, if one ever came, would be capped at 6% of worldwide annual turnover and would require a separate non-compliance decision that has not been taken. As of August 2, 2026, this section is backed by its own evidence ledger, [the EU DSA proceedings](/distillations/eu-dsa-proceedings), built from the Commission's four releases and quoting them verbatim; corrections to it land there first, like every other proceeding on this page. What matters here is the shape of the question. A regulator is scoring platform brakes by performance: too easy to dismiss, not effective, not durable. That is the same question the American deception claims keep circling, translated into prospective design language. The courtroom this page's final section says is missing is beginning to be built, just not in the United States. ## Amsterdam already ordered the thing this site asks for The closest match anywhere to this project's proposal is not American and is not famous. It is a Dutch interim judgment. In September 2025 **Stichting Bits of Freedom**, a digital-rights foundation, took Meta to the Amsterdam district court under the Digital Services Act over how Facebook and Instagram treat a user's choice of a chronological, non-profiled feed. On **2 October 2025** the court largely agreed with it. - **Court-ordered:** Meta Ireland must make that choice **persistent**, and the court spelled out what the word means: the setting has to survive the user navigating to other sections, **and** survive the user closing the app or website and reopening it. That is the test on this site's own homepage, written as an obligation. - **Court-ordered:** the non-profiled option must be directly and easily accessible on the Instagram home page on Android, the Instagram reels section across all apps and websites, and the Facebook home page and reels section across all apps and websites. - **Court-held:** resetting a user's chosen feed during ordinary use forces them to set it again and again, which causes choice fatigue and is a **dark pattern prohibited by the DSA**. - **The price of ignoring it:** 100,000 euro per day. On **10 March 2026** the Amsterdam court of appeal upheld the judgment and raised the ceiling on those penalties from 5 million to 10 million euro, on Bits of Freedom's own cross-appeal. By then Meta had dropped part of its appeal and no longer contested that the platforms had failed to comply. **Read the limits with the result.** This is **interim relief**, not a final merits ruling. It is Dutch law applying an EU regulation, so it binds nothing in the United States, and the First Amendment reasoning that shapes every American case on this page plays no part in it. And it is about whether a control is reachable and whether it stays set, not about ranking or about what anyone is allowed to see. What it does establish is that the objection heard most often about a standard like this, that "controls that work" is too vague to be an enforceable obligation, is answerable. A court has already written the obligation down in operative language, and an appellate court left it standing. Whether Meta has actually complied is a separate question that nobody appears to have tested publicly, and it is one a reader can test in thirty seconds with [the scorecard](/scorecard). The full record, with the Dutch text of every quotation and an English translation marked as a translation, is at [the Bits of Freedom v. Meta ledger](/distillations/bits-of-freedom-v-meta). ## What the lawsuits cannot fix Every remedy in the American record shares a limit. Damages are backward-looking: they price harm after it happens, and a company can pay and keep the mechanism. Settlements are the same trade with less publicity. Even a trillion-dollar penalty would be a price, not a specification, because none of it defines what a non-harmful product must **do**. **On August 6, 2026 that stopped being entirely true, and the way it stopped is the argument of this whole site in miniature.** New Mexico's judgment is the first American design remedy actually entered: for five years, under-18 accounts get notification blackouts overnight and during school hours, like counts hidden by default, and a 90-hour monthly cap. But the same order refused every request aimed at the feed, granting no relief on Meta's algorithms, infinite scroll or autoplay, because that relief "would likely violate the First Amendment and Section 230" and because industry-wide features "require legislative or executive branch action". So the record now contains a court that accepted the mechanism as proved, ordered the parts that do not touch content, and told the legislature to handle the rest. That is not a refutation of a design standard. It is a map of which half a court can reach, and an argument for writing the other half down. The Commission's preliminary findings remain the other partial exception, and they are still preliminary. **Three weeks later the federal settlement went further, and stopped short in a different place.** The August 26, 2026 consent judgment reaches the thing New Mexico would not touch: it puts a default two-hour daily limit on teen use across Instagram and Facebook, requires that teens not be able to route around it through adjacent surfaces, forbids the app from nudging them sideways when it engages, and makes a non-personalized feed an offer Meta cannot quietly weight against. That is a specification, not a price, and it is the first one in the American record aimed at the feed itself. Then it disclaims itself. The judgment states that nothing in it may "establish a standard of care for, or serve as precedent in any non-participating U.S. state or any international jurisdiction whatsoever". Its stronger settings wait on Snap, TikTok and YouTube accepting the same terms, and about **$5 billion** of its money reverts to Meta if they do not. It binds one company for ten years and audits it for five. **So the American record now contains a good description of what a brake should do, inside a document that says it is not a rule.** Two courts have written versions of the same remedy, case by case, for one defendant at a time, while the thing that would apply to a product rather than a party still has to be written somewhere else. ### The standard already exists in American law, for everything except feeds The usual objection to a rule like this is that "a control that works" is too vague to enforce. That objection is weaker than it sounds. **The FTC already treats a control that does not do what its label says as illegal in itself, and the general rule saying so was struck down six days before it took effect.** The Commission's theory in a run of cases is not that the company lied. It is that the control failed, and the failure was the violation: - **Alleged**, in the FTC's 2023 complaint over Amazon Prime: the button labelled End Membership "did not end membership. Rather, it took the consumer to the Iliad Flow." - **Alleged**, in the same complaint: people who signed up through a FireStick or Fire TV "could not cancel via these same technologies." - **Alleged**, in the FTC's case against Epic Games: Epic had a working undo button, learned people were using it, then renamed it, "reduced the size of the button, moved it to the bottom of the screen, and required consumers to push and hold a button on their controller." An internal Epic email, quoted by the FTC, recorded "a roughly 35% decline in the net undo-rate." Those are, in order, the three things a brake has to do: work, exist where the choice was made, and not be quietly degraded. **Then the general version died on a technicality.** The FTC's 2024 Negative Option Rule required a cancellation mechanism as simple as enrolment. On **July 8, 2025**, six days before its compliance date, the Eighth Circuit **vacated it in full** because the Commission had skipped a required regulatory analysis. The court said it "need not address Petitioners' other substantive challenges," so it never decided whether the rule was lawful in substance, and added that it did "not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing." **And the standard has already been drafted once, in 2011.** The FTC settled with an advertising firm, Chitika, whose opt-out told users "You are currently opted out" and then quietly expired: the cookies were "set to expire after 10 days," after which they "automatically expired and disappeared from consumers' browsers." A brake that holds for a week and a half, then lets go without saying so. The consent order fixing it requires the replacement choice to "remain in effect for a minimum time period of five (5) years," to "require no more than one additional click," to show the user "the current status of their choice," to disclose "that their choice is specific to the browser they are using," and to be reachable by "a hyperlink that directly takes consumers to the mechanism" from inside every targeted ad. Duration, friction, status, reachability. Fifteen years ago, in the language of an American consent order. **One term in it is worth reading twice, because it is the compromise this argument will be offered.** On scope, the order does not require the choice to carry across browsers. It requires Chitika to *tell* the user it does not. A regulator holding the pen chose disclosure of the gap over closure of it, which is exactly the deal a platform would rather strike about Reels, Shorts and Explore. [The scorecard](/scorecard) asks the harder question. **Two limits, because this is easy to overstate.** Complaints are allegations, not findings, and the Amazon case ended in a *stipulated* order, which is an agreement rather than a ruling. The Chitika order binds one small company and describes cookies, not feeds. And every one of these matters is about subscriptions and cancellations. **Nobody has ever pointed this reasoning at a recommendation feed.** That is the gap this project is trying to close, and the useful part is that closing it does not require inventing a standard. It requires applying one that already has a docket. The record, with the posture of each matter kept distinct, is at [the FTC control-integrity ledger](/distillations/ftc-control-integrity). The missing piece is a standard, and this site proposes one: **brake integrity**. When a platform offers a control to stop, limit, reset, or redirect the feed, that control must actually work and persist: take effect promptly, cover the related surfaces, and stay set until the user changes it. A safety feature should be judged by its stopping distance, not by the presence of a button. And the standard does not require the product to overpower the user; a person can always change their mind and scroll on. It requires the product to stop fighting the user after the user has chosen to stop. The evidence for why this standard is needed is now inside the record itself: internal documents, per the June order's account, treating the time-limit tools as a public-relations exercise while the company understood what more time on the feed meant for teenagers. Those internal documents, and the platforms' own answers under oath, are on the Congressional record too, distilled in [the hearings](/hearings). The full argument, including its honest limits and the current First Amendment and Section 230 terrain, is in [the policy paper](/proposal). The test is written out at [the brake scorecard](/scorecard); run it on your own feed, and [file what happened](/report). The trials will decide who pays for the past. The brake is about what the product has to be next. ## Sources (reviewed July 15-16 and re-checked July 25, 2026; the settlement added August 28, 2026; dispositions dated) - **MDL 3047 case count** (3,137 pending / 3,312 historical, August 3, 2026): [JPML pending-actions report](https://www.jpml.uscourts.gov/pending-mdls-0) (primary, cached 2026-08-28, along with the July and June reports this page cited earlier). The link goes to the JPML index rather than the file because the filename changes monthly; note for anyone re-fetching that the host returns a false 404 to minimal user-agent strings. - **The settlement and consent judgment** (entered 2026-08-26; Exhibit B figures; Phase I/Phase II time management; the non-precedent clause): [the consent judgment as entered, Dkt 576](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.576.0.pdf) (primary); [the fully executed settlement agreement, Dkt 572-1](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.572.1.pdf) (primary, 130 pages, the source of every quoted term above); [Trial Order No. 3, Dkt 575](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.575.0.pdf) (primary, trial vacated and jury discharged); [California AG release](https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-secures-transformative-17-billion-settlement-meta) (2026-08-26, official, and describing the settlement as proposed hours before it was entered). All fetched and cached 2026-08-28; every quoted span above verified verbatim against the caches. - **The trial record** (four days of evidence, five witnesses, the 49-minute closing session): the court's own Civil Minutes, AG-case Dkt 550, 560, 561, 571, 573 and 574, via CourtListener/RECAP (primary, cached 2026-08-28). - **June 2026 summary-judgment ruling** (order filed 2026-06-29, announced 2026-06-30; deception claims to trial; COPPA procedures finding; the "public relations stunt" language at p. 23): [the order itself, Dkt 3214, via CourtListener/RECAP](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/gov.uscourts.cand.401490.3214.0_3.pdf) (primary, verified 2026-07-16); [California AG press release](https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/ahead-meta-trial-attorney-general-bonta-secures-critical-win) (2026-06-30, primary); [Top Class Actions](https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/meta-social-media-addiction-lawsuits-cleared-for-august-bellwether-trial/) (COPPA-applicability questions remain); [Law.com/The Recorder](https://www.law.com/therecorder/2026/06/30/29-states-head-to-trial-against-meta-after-social-media-addiction-judge-refuses-to-toss-claims-/) (2026-06-30). - **The four states that left the coalition** (Michigan, Georgia, Missouri, North Dakota, January 2025, discovery burden): [Michigan Public](https://www.michiganpublic.org/community/2026-08-12/michigan-dropped-out-of-lawsuit-against-meta-but-case-could-still-have-an-impact-here) (2026-08-12, quoting the Attorney General's office; secondary, and the only account located). - **Ninth Circuit dismissal of Meta's Section 230 appeal** (published opinion, filed Aug 10, 2026; holds Section 230 is a defense to liability rather than immunity from suit, and denies Meta's emergency stay motion as moot): [the opinion, via CourtListener/RECAP](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.541.0.pdf) (primary). - **The states' own statement of their monetary ask** (no total; penalties and disgorgement; $200 billion appears as Meta's 2025 revenue): [the reply of July 13, 2026, Dkt 473](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.473.0.pdf) (primary). - **August trial structure** (29-state COPPA claims plus CA/CO/KY/NJ consumer claims; Aug 12 selection, Aug 18 openings; February 2027 follow-on for 14 states): [Engadget](https://www.engadget.com/2209332/meta-is-facing-1-4-trillion-in-state-lawsuits-over-social-media-addiction/) (2026-07-07); [CA AG](https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/ahead-meta-trial-attorney-general-bonta-secures-critical-win). - **Advisory jury** (Meta's motion to withdraw its jury demand, Dkt 2807, heard April 15, 2026; the court's decision to empanel): [joint pretrial statement, Dkt 470, via CourtListener/RECAP](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.470.0.pdf) (primary, "the advisory jury that the Court has decided to empanel"); [Law Commentary](https://www.lawcommentary.com/articles/meta-pushes-back-on-states-14-trillion-penalty-demand-in-social-media-addiction-case) (2026-07-08). The granting ruling appears to be a minute order not available in RECAP full text. - **$1.4 trillion estimate** (Meta's July 2026 filing; "entirely unmoored"; "no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement"): [Meta's penalty filing, Dkt 455, via CourtListener/RECAP](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.455.0.pdf) (primary, verified 2026-07-16); [JURIST](https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/07/meta-says-state-ags-seek-1-4t-over-youth-safety-claims/) (2026-07-07). - **K.G.M. v. Meta and Google** ($6M, Mar 25, 2026; post-trial motions denied early Jun, announced Jun 10; Meta appeal early July; YouTube appeal filed Jul 13): [ABC7](https://abc7news.com/post/los-angeles-social-media-addiction-trial-jury-finds-instagram-youtube-liable-landmark-court-case/18771272/) (2026-03-25); [AP via US News](https://www.usnews.com/news/technology/articles/2026-07-15/youtube-joins-meta-in-appealing-a-jury-verdict-that-faulted-them-for-users-social-media-addiction) (2026-07-15). - **State of New Mexico v. Meta** ($375M verdict Mar 24; $567M abatement fund and injunctive order entered Aug 6, 2026, for $942M total; no algorithm relief): [the final judgment](https://nmdoj.gov/wp-content/uploads/D-101-CV-2023-02838-Meta-Judgement.pdf) (primary, No. D-101-CV-2023-02838); [NM DOJ press release](https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/new-mexico-department-of-justice-wins-landmark-verdict-against-meta/) (primary); [Santa Fe New Mexican](https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/new-mexico-ag-santa-fe-judge-should-order-meta-to-pay-953-million/article_1001f752-95bf-4b90-bde8-cc08d56696a8.html) (2026-06-16); [Source NM](https://sourcenm.com/2026/06/17/new-mexico-ag-seeks-nearly-1-billion-payment-from-meta-in-second-phase-of-trial/) (2026-06-17). - **First federal bellwether settlement** (~$27M combined, May 2026; per-defendant terms via Reuters public-records request): [The Daily Record](https://thedailyrecord.com/2026/05/18/youtube-snap-tiktok-settlement-social-media-claims/) (2026-05-18); [Reuters via Yahoo Finance](https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/meta-paid-9-million-settle-234825076.html) (2026-07). - **Second California bellwether, resolved without trial** (YouTube settled Jun 23; TikTok Jun 30; Snap tentative settlement Jul 20; plaintiff dismissed Meta Jul 22): [Law.com](https://www.law.com/therecorder/2026/06/24/googles-youtube-settles-second-bellwether-case-over-social-media-addiction/) (2026-06-24); [NBC News](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-reaches-settlement-social-media-addiction-trial-florida-teen-rcna352299) (2026-06-30); [Courthouse News](https://www.courthousenews.com/teen-drops-social-media-addiction-lawsuit-against-meta/) (2026-07-22); [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/22/social-media-addiction-lawsuit-against-meta-is-dropped/) (2026-07-22). **All secondary:** the LA Superior Court docket is not publicly retrievable online, so no filing was obtained for the July 20 or July 22 events. - **First California bellwether settlements** (Snap, then TikTok at jury selection): [NPR](https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5684196/social-media-kids-addiction-mental-health-trial) (2026-01-27); [CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/26/tech/social-media-youth-mental-health-trial) (2026-01-26). - **EU DSA preliminary findings**, four, each cited to the Commission's own release (all primary; all four re-fetched, cached, and every quoted span on this page verified as an exact substring of its cache, 2026-08-02): Meta addictive design, Jul 10, 2026, [IP/26/1579](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_1579); Meta under-13s, Apr 29, 2026, [IP/26/920](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_920); TikTok minors' account settings, Jul 24, 2026, [IP/26/1679](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_1679); TikTok addictive design, Feb 6, 2026, [IP/26/312](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_312) (this release had never been fetched or cited by number before the 2026-08-02 pass; the reference was recovered from the Commission's own search API). The full tiered record, including what these findings do **not** establish, is at [the EU DSA proceedings ledger](/distillations/eu-dsa-proceedings). Figures are as reported and not independently audited here; legal characterizations are directional and for counsel to confirm. Where sources conflict (the count of participating states runs from 29 in the consolidated federal case to more than 40 across all venues, depending on what is counted), this page states the specific, attributable version rather than a bare number. The summary-judgment order and Meta's penalty filing were verified directly on the public docket (CourtListener/RECAP) on July 16, 2026; other characterizations rest on the sources above. --- *Provenance and methodology: this explainer restates and extends section 1 of the companion policy paper (The Brake Integrity Standard) for a search-facing audience. Facts were verified against the sources above in two passes (July 15 and July 16, 2026), the second prompted by an external AI review whose factual corrections were independently re-verified before adoption; that review also contributed the four-numbers framing, the evidence-status labels, the unit-of-violation analysis, and the stopping-distance line. A same-day primary-source audit then verified the load-bearing facts against the court record itself (the docket, the summary-judgment order, Meta's penalty filing). As of July 16, 2026 the case content is sourced ledger-first: each lawsuit has an evidence-tiered claim ledger, published in full at [/distillations](/distillations), the per-case pages ([MDL 3047](/lawsuits/mdl-3047), [K.G.M.](/lawsuits/kgm-v-meta), [New Mexico](/lawsuits/new-mexico-v-meta), [Tennessee](/lawsuits/tennessee-v-meta)) are seeded from those ledgers, and corrections land in the ledgers first, then flow here on dated passes. **As of August 2, 2026 that is true of every proceeding on this page, including Brussels**, which until then was the one section stating findings as fact with no tiered record behind them and said so; it is now backed by [the EU DSA proceedings ledger](/distillations/eu-dsa-proceedings), built from the Commission's four releases with every quoted span verified against a cached copy. AI-assisted throughout: the framing and judgment are the author's, the drafting was collaborative. This page is updated on dated passes, not live; the as-of line at the top is the honesty backstop.* --- # MDL 3047 (case file) Source: https://de-amplify.com/lawsuits/mdl-3047 # MDL 3047: the federal social media addiction case > **About this page.** Where the record stood as of August 28, 2026, re-seeded from the court's own docket two days after **the trial ended in an entered consent judgment**. The case background is as of July 25, 2026 and the trial and appellate sections as of August 18 to 20, 2026; every figure carries its date. Claims are labeled: **court-held** (decided as a matter of law), **court-entered** (a judgment the parties agreed and the court signed, which is not a finding of liability), **jury-found** (verdict returned, appeals possible), **evidence cited** (in the record, still disputed), **requested** (a party's proposed remedy or estimate), **documented** (established by a document obtained outside a ruling, such as a settlement agreement released under public records law), **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. The state attorneys general's claims survived summary judgment in June 2026, went to trial on August 18, 2026 in Oakland, and ended four days into evidence: on August 26 the court entered a consent judgment resolving the claims of 51 states and territories. Meta pays up to $16,680,647,753.21 over ten years, of which about 30 percent is contingent on Snap, TikTok and YouTube adopting the same teen time limits and reverts to Meta if they do not, plus $75 million in costs and a $459,293,017.80 Cambridge Analytica-era component paid to 48 of the settling states for releasing claims of that era (the pending California, D.C. and New Mexico Cambridge cases are not resolved by it). The judgment records no admission of liability, and the personal-injury and school-district tracks continue. (As of August 28, 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 **3,137 pending actions** as of the August 3, 2026 Judicial Panel report, up 244 in the month since July 1, 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, and how it ended Jury selection **began August 12, 2026** in Oakland, and **opening statements and evidence began on August 18**. Evidence was then heard on four days in all: August 18 (5 hours 17 minutes), August 19 (5 hours 13 minutes), August 24 (5 hours 27 minutes) and August 25 (5 hours 22 minutes), with a status conference on August 20 on trial filings, protocols and e-discovery. The states called five witnesses: **Arturo Bejar**, a former Meta safety engineer; **Dr. Jean Twenge**, the psychologist; **George Volichenko** and **Francesco Fogu**; and, on the last day of evidence, **Adam Mosseri**, the head of Instagram. **The next morning the case was over.** The defendant was **Meta alone**; the other MDL defendants face the separate tracks. The trial combined the **29 participating states' consolidated COPPA claims** with consumer-protection claims from **four of those states** (California, Colorado, Kentucky, New Jersey), before an **advisory jury** (Meta had withdrawn its jury demand; the judge retained the ultimate findings and was expected to decide the COPPA claims herself). The dates were the court's own: Pretrial Order No. 3 stated that "openings and evidence shall commence on Tuesday, August 18, 2026," and a July 23 case-management order set the calendar under a stacked "Bellwether Trials:" heading over the dates August 12, 2026 and February 3, 2027. **Meta asked the court to stay this trial and was refused:** Pretrial Order No. 6, filed July 20, 2026, says "Meta's request to stay the trial in this case is DENIED." It asked the Ninth Circuit too, and was refused there as well. **Mark Zuckerberg did not testify.** He had been expected to: Meta's own counsel said so in opening statement, and the judge indicated the same. The trial ended before the states reached him. He has answered for these design decisions under oath at a trial exactly once, in the California state case in February 2026. ## The settlement: what was actually entered **Court-entered, August 26, 2026.** The parties filed a joint motion to enter a consent judgment, attaching a fully executed 130-page settlement agreement. The court took it up in a 49-minute session, suspended the trial, granted the motion, and signed the judgment the same day. Trial Order No. 3 records the mechanics without ceremony: "Upon filing, judgment shall be entered, the trial is deemed vacated, and the jury shall be advised that they are each discharged immediately." The judgment finds "there is no just reason for delay", enters "as a final judgment under Fed. R. Civ. P. 54 and 58", and directs that "The Clerk is ordered to enter this Judgment forthwith." Both sides waived appeal. **This is a posture worth stating carefully, because the official announcement understates it.** The California Attorney General's release of the same day describes a "proposed settlement, which remains subject to court approval through entry of a consent judgment". That was accurate when it was written and was overtaken within hours by the judgment itself. A press release describes the moment it was written; an entered judgment is the record. ### The money, and the part that is conditional The agreement's own Exhibit B states the totals, and its footnote is the key to reading them: "Figures are the payment amounts per installment, not the total amounts over the full payment term." There are ten installments. | | Per installment | Over ten years | |---|---|---| | **Guaranteed** | $1,165,662,174.56 | $11,656,621,745.60 | | **Contingent** | $502,402,600.77 | $5,024,026,007.70 | | **Exhibit B maximum** | | **$16,680,647,753.21** | Two further sums sit outside that table: a **$75 million** cost fund, and a **$459,293,017.80** Cambridge Analytica-era component, paid to 48 of the 51 settling states for releasing claims of that era. Read that one carefully, because the first version of this page got it wrong: the agreement names four pending Cambridge complaints as its template, but California, the District of Columbia and New Mexico are not among the releasing states, so **their three pending Cambridge cases are not resolved by this settlement**; only Illinois's is. The arithmetic maximum is therefore about **$17.2 billion**, which is where the various headline figures came from. Coverage on the day reported the total as $16.68 billion, $16.7 billion, $17 billion, $17.1 billion and $18 billion, in outlets of comparable standing. **None of them separated the guaranteed money from the contingent money, and that is the distinction that decides what Meta pays.** About **30 percent** of the Exhibit B maximum is a "Contingency Installment Payment", owed only once a defined trigger occurs in a given state. The trigger requires that Snap, TikTok and YouTube (the agreement's "Core Industry Members", named in terms) become bound to substantively equivalent teen time-management obligations *and* become subject to comparable monetary obligations to that state. If that never happens within the ten-year term, the agreement says where the money goes: those payments "shall be permanently forfeited by such Settling State and retained by Meta." ### The brake, in two phases, on the same condition The product terms are structured the same way, and this is the part of the document that matters most to this project. **Phase I applies for five years and is unconditional.** Teen accounts get a default overnight block "from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m.", and a default daily limit "of 2 hours per day" counted cumulatively across the covered platforms. Note the scope: the agreement's defined term is "Meta SMP", meaning **Instagram and Facebook**, expressly excluding "direct messaging features linked to or included in those platforms, such as Instagram Direct or Messenger" and the rest of Meta's products, so time in messaging does not count against the limit. **Phase II applies only "whenever, in the 10 years following the Effective Date, Industry-Wide Adoption has occurred"** for the obligation in question, and widens the overnight block to 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. "Industry-Wide Adoption" means the same three companies being bound to equivalent obligations, by settlement, by statute, or by audited voluntary undertaking. So the stronger brake is contingent on the competition adopting it. **That is the collective-action problem this project's [policy paper](/proposal) exists to name**, priced and written into an enforceable order: Meta has conceded the brake is buildable and made its stronger setting conditional on nobody else defecting. ### The order, run against this site's own test The [brake scorecard](/scorecard) asks seven questions of any feed control. They were written for this site's readers to run against their own apps, a year before this judgment existed. Here is the court-ordered brake, held to the same seven, quoting the agreement's own defined terms. | Criterion | What the order says | |---|---| | **Discoverable** | Written as an enforceable spec. The feed option must be "Reasonably Accessible", a defined term: "viewable within three user gestures and clearly labeled, easy to notice, viewable without scrolling, and discoverable in an intuitive location". | | **Clear** | The prompt must be "Clear[ly] and Conspicuous[ly]" presented, defined as "difficult to miss (i.e., easily noticeable), and easily understandable by users", offered "independent of other setting options", with neither answer preselected. | | **Immediate** | **Not addressed.** No term sets any deadline between a choice and the feed changing. The one latency in the document runs the other way: Meta gets four months to offer the option at all. | | **Material** | The strongest term in the agreement. "Non-Personalized Feed" is defined as content "populated by accounts the Teen User follows or has friended, displayed in chronological order". Not a softer ranking; the actual de-amplified feed. | | **Persistent** | Persistence by parent-holding: defaults "cannot be modified to a less restrictive setting without approval from a Supervising Parent", and a parent-enabled feed choice needs parental approval to revert. What is not specified is whether an unsupervised teen's own feed choice can quietly revert between the 90-day re-prompts. | | **Scoped** | Both directions at once. The daily limit runs "cumulatively across all Meta SMPs" and across linked accounts, with messaging and settings fenced so they cannot become the escape hatch. But the limit's own text excludes messaging and "Longform Content", defined as video or audio of "at least 22 minutes": **a teen's hour inside long videos counts as zero against the two hours.** | | **Non-circumventing** | Verbatim the criterion. Teens must not be able to "effectively circumvent" the limit through adjacent surfaces, and when it engages the apps "shall not recommend or otherwise suggest that the Teen User utilize a different Meta SMP or engage in messaging". | Five of seven addressed, one of those with a real carve-out, and two gaps (immediacy, and unsupervised persistence). For a document negotiated by the party being braked, that is a remarkably close transcription of the standard, and the misses are exactly where a self-drafted brake would miss. Two structural differences from the scorecard's own frame, and they matter more than the row-by-row. **The scorecard tests a control the user holds; this order gives the teen defaults and hands the key to a parent.** Nothing in it gives an adult user anything at all, and the site's argument has always been that the brake is for everyone whose "show me less" does nothing. And the order's obligations are contractual, for one company, for ten years, with the judgment stating that nothing in it establishes a standard of care anywhere else. ### What it is not An **independent auditor** reports to a committee of state attorneys general and must "prepare and make public an executive summary of each Final Report". But the auditor's term runs "until 120 days following the fifth Final Report", while the judgment's obligations "shall expire 10 years from the Effective Date". **The audited window is roughly the first half.** And the claim that carried the whole trial, that Meta misrepresented its safety tools, gets one forward-looking sentence: "Meta is enjoined from making false, misleading, or deceptive representations regarding the effect or efficacy of safety features for Teen Users on Meta SMPs." Then the gates. It applies only to statements made after the Effective Date; it can be enforced only "with the consent of a majority of the State Committee", after 30 days notice and a chance to propose a fix; and compliance with it "shall not be subject to the independent audit". **The deception count's remedy is the one term in the agreement no single state can enforce and the auditor is told not to examine.** And the judgment is explicit that it decides nothing. It records that the agreement and judgment "do not constitute an admission by Defendant of any liability, wrongdoing, or violation of any local, state, federal, or international law", and then goes further: "Nothing in this Consent Judgment or the Agreement shall be construed to apply to, establish a standard of care for, or serve as precedent in any non-participating U.S. state or any international jurisdiction whatsoever." **Read that sentence twice.** The most detailed set of teen design obligations any American court has entered comes with an express instruction that it is not a standard. That is the argument for writing the standard down, made by the settlement itself. ### What it does not resolve The release carves out criminal, securities, tax, antitrust and environmental liability, and two categories that matter here: "Any claims of private individuals for any types of monetary or injunctive relief", and claims by school districts and other governmental plaintiffs in JCCP 5255 or the MDL. **So the personal-injury and school-district tracks of MDL 3047 continue**, as do the cases against Google, TikTok and Snap, who are not parties to this judgment. What the release reaches *in* rather than out is just as deliberate: the agreement enumerates **fifteen state-court attorney-general cases in fourteen jurisdictions** that it ends, each by caption, and obliges each settling state and Meta to move jointly within ten business days for a consent judgment in that court. The most consequential of them is **Tennessee's: the Nashville trial over the "Time Spent" tools was in its fifth week of evidence when this settlement stopped it**, its jury dismissed the same day. That case has its own page and ledger on this site: [State of Tennessee v. Meta](/lawsuits/tennessee-v-meta). The other fourteen are in Arkansas, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada (three cases), New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, Utah and Vermont. Whether the public can watch any of them close is a lottery by state. **Oklahoma's is wide open**: the Osage County docket for *No. CJ-2023-180* is a single web request, and it already shows the settlement arriving, with a **"JOINT MOTION TO VACATE ALL CASE DEADLINES"** entered on August 26, the same day as the federal judgment. That is the agreement's 24-hour step, clearing the calendar; the motion that actually ends the case there comes within ten business days after it. Arkansas's portal answers a request successfully and returns nothing at all, which is worse than a refusal. Tennessee's register is free but its documents cost money. This project probed what it could on August 28 and recorded which is which in [the ledger](/distillations/mdl-3047), including the five it did not probe at all and the four it reached only at the portal's front door, because "we did not look" and "you cannot look" are different facts and only one of them is about the courts. ## Why 29 states and not the 33 who filed **Four states left the coalition in January 2025**: Michigan, Georgia, Missouri and North Dakota. That accounts for the entire drop from the 33 who filed jointly in October 2023 to the 29 at this trial, a gap this project previously carried as an unexplained number reported by several outlets. The reason given is cost, not merit. Michigan's Attorney General's office says the court "approved most of Meta's voluminous discovery demands upon the States and their agencies (such as MDHHS), demands with which the State of Michigan could not possibly comply, and especially so within the very short timeframe so ordered by the Court", and a filing estimated the narrowed request at roughly **700,000 documents**. That is worth sitting with, because it is a fact about litigation as an instrument rather than about this defendant. **The burden of proving the case removed four state attorneys general from it before trial.** For a project whose argument is that the remedy has to be written rather than litigated, the attrition rate among well-resourced public plaintiffs is evidence, not colour. **And then all four were paid.** Michigan, Georgia, Missouri and North Dakota each carry a payment row in the settlement's Exhibit B, and each appears in the California Attorney General's roster of joining attorneys general. The four states that could not afford to prosecute the case are settling states in its resolution. Whether that was negotiated for them or follows from the scope of the release is not something this project has established. *Sourced to the Michigan Attorney General's office as quoted by one outlet, which is weaker than this page's usual standard and is labelled accordingly. The withdrawal filings themselves have not been read. The Ninth Circuit's caption corroborates the shape of it: Michigan and Missouri are absent and North Dakota and Georgia appear as non-appealing plaintiffs. The Exhibit B rows and the AG roster are primary.* ## The money that was argued for, and never awarded This section is now history rather than forecast, and it is worth keeping, because the gap between what was demanded and what was agreed is most of what the settlement tells you. - **Requested (an estimate, not an award):** roughly **$1.4 trillion** was 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 ever endorsed any number. - **What the states themselves asked for, which was not a number.** Their own filing of July 13, 2026 says they "will present their final requests for monetary relief at trial" and that they "do not seek double recovery". The ask had **two components**: civil penalties **and disgorgement** of ill-gotten gains, which they said they sought to disgorge only once. They never presented it: the trial ended before the states rested. - **A figure to stay careful with.** Coverage of the opening widely reported that the states sought roughly **$200 billion**. That number appears in the states' own filing as **Meta's 2025 revenue**, cited to Meta's annual report, in a passage about the scale at which deterrence has to work. It was never a demand, and this page never printed it as one. - **What was actually agreed** is in the settlement section above: up to **$16,680,647,753.21** under Exhibit B, of which about 30 percent is contingent on the rest of the industry, plus $75 million in costs and the $459,293,017.80 Cambridge Analytica-era component. Against a theoretical ceiling of $1.4 trillion, the guaranteed money is roughly **eight tenths of one percent**. That comparison is arithmetic, not commentary: a statutory maximum is not a valuation, and the ceiling was Meta's construction of the states' method, not the states' demand. - **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. ## The appeal Meta already lost, and what it decided **Court-held, August 10, 2026.** Eight days before the trial opened, the **Ninth Circuit dismissed Meta's appeal for lack of jurisdiction** in a published opinion, *People of the State of California v. Meta Platforms, Inc.*, No. 24-7032. Meta had argued that a district-court ruling refusing it Section 230 immunity is a "collateral order" it can appeal immediately, before any final judgment. The panel disagreed, and the reason is worth more than the outcome: **Section 230 is "a defense to liability, not immunity from suit"**, so a refusal of it can be reviewed in the ordinary way after trial. TikTok's appeal and the states' conditional cross-appeals went out with it. The disposition is one word: "DISMISSED." Two things follow that matter beyond this case. The opinion is **published**, so that reading of Section 230 now binds the Ninth Circuit. And it records that **"Meta does not identify any constitutional interests at stake"**, which is why the panel treated Section 230 itself as the only candidate source of immunity. Coverage that described this appeal as a First Amendment ruling was describing something else; whether a separate appellate ruling on Meta's First Amendment arguments exists is not something this project has established. A footnote also disposes of Meta's **emergency motion to stay the trial**, denied as moot. That is the second refusal to stay this trial, in the second court to consider it. *The appellate track in this case is now closed by agreement rather than by decision: the consent judgment provides that "Each Party waives all rights to appeal this Final Judgment and all orders to date arising from the Action" and gives every party five business days to withdraw what is pending. The published Section 230 holding stands; it was never the subject of the appeal that was dismissed.* ## What happens next The states' case against Meta is over. Four things are not. - **The rest of MDL 3047.** The personal-injury and school-district tracks are expressly carved out of the release and continue, as does the litigation against **Google, TikTok and Snap**, none of which is a party to this judgment. The first school-district bellwether (a Tucson case) was expected around February 2027. - **The February 2027 follow-on, whose status is genuinely unclear.** A second trial for **14 more states'** own state-law claims was scheduled, and a July case-management order sets the calendar under a stacked "Bellwether Trials:" heading over the dates August 12, 2026 and February 3, 2027. The settlement resolves the claims of 51 states and territories, which is more states than were ever going to be tried, so that date may be moot in whole or in part. **No order this project has read says so**, and a vacated trial date should not be inferred from a settlement's scope. - **Compliance.** The Effective Date is the first business day after entry, so **August 27, 2026**; the Compliance Date is six months later. The independent auditor's term begins two months after the Effective Date, and the first public executive summary is the first real test of whether any of this happened. - **The three newer defendants, now that the count is in.** A Los Angeles Unified School District case filed in March 2026 named **X Corp., Discord, and Roblox** alongside the original four, and the court ordered a status report. It was filed August 17: **Discord is named in 23 cases, Roblox in 13, X in 6.** The numbers are the least interesting part. Discord and Roblox "were not named as a party to the Master Complaint in the MDL, and discovery has proceeded without" them, they have received "none of the discovery materials in these cases", and their cases have been under stipulated stays since November 2024. X argues it does not belong here, and the judge appears to agree: the report quotes her from the bench, **"X has never been a part of this case. I don't understand why it shouldn't be severed."** So the defendant set is widening on complaint captions and not, so far, inside the litigation. ## Why this case matters for the brake The most consequential thing in this record is not the trillion-dollar number, and it is no longer only that whether the platform's own brakes worked as advertised became litigated evidence. **It is that the case ended by writing the brake down.** A default two-hour limit. A default overnight block. A parent, not the product, holding the key to loosening it. A duty not to build the escape hatch, and a ban on nudging the user sideways when the limit bites. That is close to what this project has been arguing a brake has to be, and it now exists as an enforceable obligation on the largest of these companies. Three things stop that being a victory lap, and all three are in the document itself. The **stronger** version of the brake is contingent on Snap, TikTok and YouTube adopting it, so a remedy for the collective-action problem has been made conditional on solving the collective-action problem. About 30 percent of the money runs on the same condition, and reverts to Meta if it fails. And the judgment says in terms that it does not "establish a standard of care" for anyone outside the settling states. **A settlement can bind one company for ten years. Only a written standard binds the product.** That argument is in [the policy paper](/proposal); the test itself is at [the brake scorecard](/scorecard), and you can [file what happened on your own feed](/report). **The full evidence ledger** behind this page, every claim tiered and traced against the court record, is at [the MDL 3047 distillation](/distillations/mdl-3047). ## Sources Primary, the settlement: the [consent judgment as entered, Dkt 576](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.576.0.pdf); the [fully executed settlement agreement, Dkt 572-1](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.572.1.pdf) (130 pages, and the source of every term above); [Trial Order No. 3, Dkt 575](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.575.0.pdf) (trial vacated, jury discharged); the Civil Minutes for each trial day (Dkt 550, 560, 561, 571, 573, 574); and the [California AG's settlement release](https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-secures-transformative-17-billion-settlement-meta) (2026-08-26), all fetched and cached 2026-08-28. Primary, the case: the [summary-judgment order, Dkt 3214](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/gov.uscourts.cand.401490.3214.0_3.pdf) (CourtListener/RECAP, verified 2026-07-16); [Meta's penalty filing, Dkt 455](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.455.0.pdf); [the states' penalty and disgorgement reply, Dkt 473](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.473.0.pdf) (the filing in which $200 billion is Meta's revenue); [the Ninth Circuit's published opinion of Aug 10, 2026, Dkt 541](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.541.0.pdf); [the Civil Minutes for the opening trial day, Dkt 550](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.550.0.pdf); the [JPML pending-actions reports](https://www.jpml.uscourts.gov/sites/jpml/files/Pending_MDL_Dockets_By_Actions_Pending-July-1-2026.pdf) (July 1 and June 1, 2026); the [MDL docket](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65407433/in-re-social-media-adolescent-addictionpersonal-injury-products-liability/) and [state-AG docket](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67908468/people-of-the-state-of-california-v-meta-platforms-inc/); the [California AG's June 30 release](https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/ahead-meta-trial-attorney-general-bonta-secures-critical-win) and [October 2023 filing release](https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-files-lawsuit-against-meta-over-harms-youth-mental-health). Secondary: Reuters wire coverage; [JURIST](https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/07/meta-says-state-ags-seek-1-4t-over-youth-safety-claims/); [Engadget](https://www.engadget.com/2209332/meta-is-facing-1-4-trillion-in-state-lawsuits-over-social-media-addiction/); [Top Class Actions](https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/meta-social-media-addiction-lawsuits-cleared-for-august-bellwether-trial/). --- *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, re-seeded July 25, 2026 after a docket re-check, again August 18, 2026 from the docket documents cached that day, and again August 28, 2026 from the settlement documents, every quoted span in this page's settlement section verified verbatim against the cached consent judgment and settlement agreement. 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.* --- # K.G.M. v. Meta and Google (case file) Source: https://de-amplify.com/lawsuits/kgm-v-meta # K.G.M. v. Meta and Google: the California bellwether verdict > **About this page.** Where the record stood as of July 25, 2026, with the first-bellwether trial section updated August 20, 2026 to record that Meta's chief executive testified in it; this litigation moves weekly, and every figure carries its date. Claims are labeled: **court-held**, **jury-found**, **evidence cited**, **requested**, **scheduled**. This page is the reader's rendering of the project's evidence-tiered claim ledger for the California state cases; corrections land in the ledger first, then here. ## The case in one paragraph In California state court, about 1,600 youth-harm suits from individuals, families, and school districts are coordinated as JCCP 5255, with test cases going first. The first, K.G.M. v. Meta and Google, brought a $6 million verdict in March 2026; the trial judge declined to overturn it and both companies are appealing, so it is not final. A second test case was set for July 27, 2026, but it never reached a jury: YouTube, TikTok and Snap all settled out and the plaintiff dropped Meta on July 22, 2026. (As of July 25, 2026.) ## The California coordination, not the federal case JCCP 5255 (captioned "Social Media Cases," Department 12, Spring Street Courthouse, Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl presiding) is a **state**-court coordinated proceeding. It is routinely confused with the federal MDL, which is a different proceeding in a different court before a different judge; a verdict in one does not decide the other. The roughly 1,600 coordinated suits include more than 350 families and more than 250 school districts alongside individual young plaintiffs, and the count keeps rising. ## The first bellwether verdict, labeled - **Jury-found**, March 25, 2026: a **$6 million verdict**, $3 million compensatory plus $3 million punitive, against Meta and Google. Fault was allocated **70/30**: Meta $4.2 million, Google $1.8 million, which is why some outlets report only Meta's share. - The jury found the companies **negligent in the design** of their apps (features like infinite scroll, autoplay, and push notifications built to maximize engagement) and found they **failed to adequately warn** young users. The plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman identified as K.G.M. ("Kaley"), said she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube beginning in childhood. - Only two companies faced the jury because **Snap and TikTok settled out** of this first test case around the turn of 2026, TikTok as jury selection was beginning. - **Mark Zuckerberg testified in person, on February 18, 2026**, five weeks before the verdict, reported as his first testimony about child safety in front of a jury. Instagram head Adam Mosseri testified about a week earlier. Coverage records Zuckerberg denying that Meta seeks to make Instagram addictive or that he directs the company to increase time spent or recruit under-13s, calling enforcement of Instagram's age limits very difficult, and being questioned about the decision to permit filters simulating cosmetic surgery after internal expert objections. *Carried by several independent outlets rather than by a transcript, for the reason in the sourcing caveat below.* ## After the verdict - **Court-held (trial court):** in early June 2026 (the ruling was announced June 10), Judge Kuhl **denied** the defendants' motions for a new trial and for judgment notwithstanding the verdict, leaving the full award intact. - Both defendants then filed **notices of appeal** in Los Angeles County Superior Court: Meta in early July, YouTube on **July 13, 2026**. A notice starts a potentially long process; **no appellate court has reviewed the verdict**, and honest reporting keeps that caveat attached. ## The second bellwether: it never reached a jury The second test case was set for trial on **July 27, 2026** before Judge Kuhl, and it dissolved in the month before that date. **YouTube settled its part confidentially** (reported June 23, 2026), **TikTok followed on June 30**, and **Snap reached a tentative settlement announced July 20**. On **July 22, 2026**, with every other defendant resolved, the plaintiff **voluntarily dismissed his claims against Meta**. Read the posture precisely, because the four events are not the same kind of thing. Three companies settled. The fourth did not: this was the plaintiff withdrawing, **not a settlement with Meta, not a defense verdict, and not a continuance**, and on the available reporting **Meta paid nothing**. Plaintiff's counsel said he "has elected to withdraw his claims against Meta" given "the overall successful result of the litigation" and the prospect of a weekslong trial. Whether the dismissal was with or without prejudice is not established, which matters, because without prejudice the claim could be refiled. The plaintiff is a 15-year-old identified as R.K.C. ("Russell"); he lives in Florida, but the case is this California proceeding, not a Florida or federal matter. Pretrial coverage had reported the judge tentatively allowing testimony from senior executives including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg; that testimony never happened, **because this second case never reached a jury**. Do not read that as Zuckerberg never testifying in this coordinated proceeding: he did, in the first bellwether above, in February 2026. **A sourcing caveat this page owes you.** The Los Angeles Superior Court docket is not publicly retrievable online, so the settlement and the dismissal above rest on **news coverage, not a court filing**. They are corroborated across several independent outlets and a Meta statement, and they are recorded in the case ledger at the weaker evidence tier for exactly that reason. ## Why this case matters for the brake This was the first jury anywhere to put a dollar number on the design itself: not a post, not a moderation call, but infinite scroll, autoplay, and notifications as negligently built machinery with no adequate warning. That is the product question, and it is the same one the [brake integrity standard](/proposal) proposes to make testable before the harm instead of priced after it. The [scorecard](/scorecard) is that test. **The full evidence ledger** behind this page, every claim tiered and traced against the trial record, is at [the California bellwethers distillation](/distillations/california-state-bellwethers). ## Sources Primary: the [LA Superior Court's public notice for the Social Media Cases (JCCP 5255)](https://www.lacourt.org/newsmedia/uploads/1420262138162526PN-2-13-2026SocialMediaCases(JCCP5255)INFORMATIONFORTHEPUBLIC.pdf) (court-issued, February 2026). Secondary: [AP via the Washington Times](https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jul/15/youtube-joins-meta-appealing-jury-verdict-faulted-users-social-media/) (the appeals); [NPR](https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5746125) and [Al Jazeera](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/26/jury-finds-meta-youtube-liable-for-social-media-addiction-what-we-know) (the verdict); [MediaPost](https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/415703/judge-rejects-meta-and-google-bid-to-overturn-add.html) and Reuters (the post-trial ruling); [Scientific American](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-the-meta-and-google-verdict-means-for-social-media-design/) (the coordination's composition); [Fox Business](https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/googles-youtube-reaches-settlement-lawsuit-alleging-child-social-media-addiction) and [The Next Web](https://thenextweb.com/news/tiktok-settles-addiction-lawsuit-rkc-florida-teen) (the second-bellwether settlements). --- *Provenance: this page is derived from the project's per-case, evidence-tiered claim ledger for the California bellwethers (a distillation record maintained in the repository), first seeded July 16, 2026 after a primary-source audit and re-seeded July 25, 2026 after the second bellwether dissolved. Corrections flow ledger-first: the ledger is verified, then this page is re-seeded. One date is deliberately soft: the post-trial denial is stated as "early June (announced June 10)" because wire reporting places the ruling itself on Tuesday, June 9; the minute order settles it. Figures are as of the dates shown; legal characterizations are directional and for counsel to confirm.* --- # State of New Mexico v. Meta (case file) Source: https://de-amplify.com/lawsuits/new-mexico-v-meta # State of New Mexico v. Meta: the $942 million child-safety judgment > **About this page.** Where the record stood as of August 13, 2026, re-seeded from the court's final judgment itself; this litigation moves weekly, and every figure carries its date. Claims are labeled: **court-held**, **jury-found**, **evidence cited**, **requested**, **scheduled**. 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. Updated August 18, 2026 with the age-assurance section of the judgment, distilled from the cached order. ## The case in one paragraph New Mexico is the first U.S. state to win a full trial against Meta over child harm, and the case is now decided. A jury returned a $375 million verdict in March 2026 for misleading the public about safety and failing to protect kids from exploitation; on August 6, 2026 the court added a $567 million abatement fund, for $942 million in total, and ordered five years of supervised changes to under-18 accounts: no push notifications overnight or during school hours, like counts hidden by default, and a 90-hour monthly usage cap across Facebook and Instagram. It refused to order anything about the feed itself, holding that the state's algorithm relief would likely violate the First Amendment and Section 230, and that industry-wide features like infinite scroll and autoplay are for the legislature. (As of August 13, 2026.) ## What kind of case this is A **consumer-protection and child-safety** case under the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act, filed in December 2023 by Attorney General Raúl Torrez in the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe (Judge Bryan Biedscheid, the district's chief judge). It is about deceptive safety claims and child exploitation. It is **not** an "addiction" case, and it is **not** part of the federal MDL; keeping those apart is most of understanding it. One clarification that matters as of late August 2026: **New Mexico is not part of the $17 billion multistate settlement** entered in the federal case on August 26. It has no payment line there, and even the state's separate Cambridge Analytica-era case against Meta, which that agreement mentions by name, is not released by it. Both of New Mexico's cases stand on their own: this one at final judgment, the Cambridge one still pending. ## The verdict, labeled - **Jury-found**, March 24, 2026: **$375 million** in civil penalties, the statutory maximum of **$5,000 for each of 75,000 violations**. The jury found Meta made false or misleading statements about how safe its platforms were and engaged in unconscionable practices that failed to protect children from exploitation. The state had asked for substantially more (its closing urged a penalty that could top $2 billion). - The state's Department of Justice characterized the win as making New Mexico "the first state in the nation to prevail at trial against a major tech company for harming young people." - **Meta has said it will appeal.** As of August 13, 2026 that is still announced intent, not a filed notice, and none of the money is final. ## The judgment, August 6, 2026 The second phase was decided by the **judge, not a jury**, on a public-nuisance claim and forward-looking relief. It ended in a 68-page document captioned *Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Judgment, Order, and Decree of the Court*, file-stamped **August 6, 2026** and announced by the Attorney General on **August 7**. Note the two dates; the event is the filing. - **Court-held:** Meta's platforms are a **public nuisance** in New Mexico, and **Section 230 does not shield Meta from that claim**. The court wrote that "Meta is not immune from the public nuisance claim." - **Court-held:** Meta must "pay and deposit a total of $567,000,000.00 into a fund", on top of the jury's $375 million, allocated across treatment ($420M), screening and assessment ($90M), awareness and prevention ($33M), referral and coordination ($15M), and implementation and evaluation ($9M). Total exposure: **$942 million**. The state had requested about $953 million; it did not get that figure. - **Court-held, the design changes:** for accounts belonging to users under 18, Meta must eliminate push notifications from **10:00 PM to 7:00 AM** daily and **8:00 AM to 3:00 PM** on school days in term time (urgent and connected-user messages excepted); hide **like counts** by default, overridable only with a parent's permission; and impose a **mandatory usage cap of 90 hours per month** across Facebook and Instagram combined. These run for five years with reporting and a Child Safety Monitor. ## What the court refused, which matters more here New Mexico asked for changes to the feed. It did not get them, and the reasoning is the part of this ruling that a design-standard argument has to reckon with. - The court granted **"no abatement relief relative to the design and implementation of Meta's algorithms"**. It found the state's algorithm requests "vague and aspirational, rather than objective and measurable", and held they "would directly alter and limit the manner in which platform content is displayed" and so "would likely violate the First Amendment and Section 230". - On infinite scroll and autoplay it declined on separation-of-powers grounds: those "require legislative or executive branch action", and restricting Meta alone, with "the absence of Meta's competitors in this litigation", could unfairly damage it. - So Section 230 cut **both ways in one document**: it did not bar liability, and it did constrain the remedy. The measures that survived are the ones the court called **"least connected with platform content"**. A like count, it reasoned, is "merely a feature created and offered by Meta to principally track and motivate user feedback, all without altering the underlying published content", whereas autoplay, infinite scroll and recommendations "are most closely tied to content presentation". On the problematic-use measures the court was also, in its own words, "in large measure, adopting Meta's proposals". ## Why this case matters for the brake Two things, pulling in opposite directions, and the honest reading needs both. First, the court **found the mechanism proved**. It wrote that "the evidence at trial proved that design elements, such as autoplay, infinite scroll, ... and push notifications create a product that, particularly for adolescent users, is highly rewarding psychologically and neurochemically. As a result, for many, it is irresistibly compelling to start scrolling and very difficult to stop or abstain from its use." That is a court, on a trial record, describing the loop this project says is the harm. Second, it drew the line **exactly where this project argues the defensible line is**, and then refused to cross it. Measures that do not alter how content is presented (notification blackouts, hidden like counts, time caps) were ordered. Measures that do (the algorithm, infinite scroll, autoplay) were refused as likely unconstitutional and as a job for legislatures. That is a real-world test of the [brake integrity](/proposal) strategy, and it comes back split: the content-neutral surface is reachable, the feed itself is not, at least not by one state court applying nuisance law. Read [section 7 of the policy paper](/proposal) with this ruling in hand. The [scorecard](/scorecard) is the same idea written as a test anyone can run. Third, and this is the part almost no coverage carried: **the court said on the record that what it was granting was not enough.** On age assurance it ordered nine measures, all of them Meta's own proposals, and described that relief as "far from ideal or sufficient", adopting it because better options were "unavailable to this Court for a lack of jurisdiction over any such parties". The most transferable of the nine is a default rule rather than a detection rule: where Meta believes a user is under 13, or under 18 but cannot estimate a precise age, it must treat the user as being in that band unless and until the user verifies. It also has to build a reporting portal with schools covering suspected under-13 accounts "across any social media platform", not only its own. So the judgment is not simply a court declining to reach the feed. It is a court reaching as far as it could, ordering the defendant's own proposals because nothing better was within its power, and saying plainly that this was insufficient. **A refusal shows a limit. A grant labelled inadequate shows the same limit from the inside**, and it is the stronger argument that the standard has to be written rather than litigated. **The full evidence ledger** behind this page, every claim tiered and traced against the judgment, is at [the New Mexico v. Meta distillation](/distillations/new-mexico-v-meta). ## Sources Primary: the court's own **Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Judgment, Order, and Decree**, *State of New Mexico ex rel. Torrez v. Meta Platforms, Inc.*, No. D-101-CV-2023-02838 (1st Jud. Dist. Ct., filed August 6, 2026), [published by the New Mexico DOJ](https://nmdoj.gov/wp-content/uploads/D-101-CV-2023-02838-Meta-Judgement.pdf) and cached in this repository so the quotations above can be checked. Also the DOJ's [announcement of the ruling](https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/court-orders-meta-to-pay-942-million-and-overhaul-protections-for-children-on-facebook-and-instagram-in-landmark-new-mexico-ruling/) (an interested party's account of its own win, used here for the announcement date) and its [verdict release](https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/new-mexico-department-of-justice-wins-landmark-verdict-against-meta/). Secondary, for the pre-judgment record: the [Santa Fe New Mexican](https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/new-mexico-ag-santa-fe-judge-should-order-meta-to-pay-953-million/article_1001f752-95bf-4b90-bde8-cc08d56696a8.html) (the $953 million request); [NPR](https://text.npr.org/g-s1-115019) and [Source New Mexico](https://sourcenm.com/2026/03/24/santa-fe-jury-awards-new-mexico-375m-in-meta-child-exploitation-case/) (the verdict); the [Crowell & Moring client alert](https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/landmark-verdicts-against-meta-and-youtube-signal-new-era-of-social-media-platform-liability) (filing history). --- *Provenance: this page is derived from the project's per-case, evidence-tiered claim ledger for State of New Mexico v. Meta (a distillation record maintained in the repository), seeded July 16, 2026 after a primary-source audit and re-seeded August 13, 2026 from the final judgment itself, which is the first time a court document in this case was read directly rather than through coverage. Corrections flow ledger-first: the ledger is verified, then this page is re-seeded. Every quotation above was checked as a verbatim substring of the cached judgment. Figures are as of the dates shown; legal characterizations are directional and for counsel to confirm.* --- # State of Tennessee v. Meta (case file) Source: https://de-amplify.com/lawsuits/tennessee-v-meta # 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](/distillations/hearing-2023-11-07-teen-mental-health) 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](/lawsuits/mdl-3047) and in [the MDL ledger](/distillations/mdl-3047). **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](/distillations/tennessee-v-meta). ## Sources Primary, the settlement: [the executed settlement agreement, MDL Dkt 572-1](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.572.1.pdf) (its Satellite AG Actions list names this case; its Exhibits B and E carry Tennessee's numbers); [the federal consent judgment, Dkt 576](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.576.0.pdf); the [Tennessee AG's settlement release, pr26-33](https://www.tn.gov/attorneygeneral/news/2026/8/26/pr26-33.html) (2026-08-26). All cached 2026-08-28. Secondary, for the jury's dismissal: [Nashville Banner](https://nashvillebanner.com/2026/08/26/tennessee-meta-social-media-settlement/), [WSMV](https://www.wsmv.com/2026/08/26/tennessee-receive-more-than-750m-17b-meta-settlement-over-teen-social-media-addiction-heres-what-we-know/), [WKRN](https://www.wkrn.com/news/tennessee-news/tennessee-to-receive-over-750-million-in-landmark-meta-settlement/) (all 2026-08-26). Primary, the case: the [unredacted complaint](https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/attorneygeneral/documents/pr/2024/pr24-03-unredactedcomplaint.pdf) published by the Tennessee AG (2024-01-10) and its [announcement](https://www.tn.gov/attorneygeneral/news/2024/1/10/pr23-03.html); the AG's [filing announcement](https://www.tn.gov/attorneygeneral/news/2023/10/24/pr23-48.html) (2023-10-24); the [motion-to-dismiss order](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/gov.uscourts.cand.401490.683.1.pdf) in full (via the federal MDL docket); the Davidson County Chancery register (case 23-1364-IV); the [Tennessee appellate case history](https://pch.tncourts.gov) 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.* --- # The hearings: the mechanism, on the record Source: https://de-amplify.com/hearings # The hearings: the mechanism, on the record The lawsuits ask who pays for the harm. The Congressional hearings ask how the machine works, and answer it in the subjects' own words. Between 2023 and 2026, four hearings put the mechanism on the record: a former Meta safety engineer who says the company measured the harm and chose not to act, five platform CEOs answering under oath, the trial lawyer who showed a jury the companies' internal documents, and a bipartisan fight over what Congress should do next. Where [the lawsuits](/lawsuits) establish that courts are willing to find harm, the hearings establish the design choice underneath it: safety tools that are off by default, unmeasured, or shipped to answer criticism rather than to work. That is the same brake-integrity question the rest of this site asks, when you tell the feed to stop, does anything actually stop, answered by the people who built the feed and the lawmakers who questioned them. > **About this page.** These four accounts are distilled from the official record of each hearing, seeded from the project's evidence-tiered [claim ledgers](/distillations), where corrections land first (each ledger, with its full quote-bank, is published in full). Two of them (2023 and 2024) are built from the **official Senate transcripts**. The other two (2025 and 2026) are a flagged **tier-down**, built from the witnesses' written testimony rather than the live question-and-answer, and marked as such below. For May 2026 that is because no official transcript is published yet. For Dec 2025 the transcript has since published and is cached, which narrows the tier-down without closing it: the official text carries the spoken hearing only, the prepared statements this account quotes sit in that record as page images no text search can reach, and the account stays flagged until it is re-seeded from the live exchange. Every quotation is verbatim from the record and attributed to the speaker and their role. Quotes were chosen for what they reveal about the mechanism, not for the viral moment: the selection is deliberately mechanism-not-tribe, and lines cut for being theater are named in the ledgers. The hearing accounts are as of July 16, 2026; the transcript-status note above was corrected August 2, 2026. ## Four hearings, one mechanism | Hearing | The record | What it puts on the record | |---|---|---| | **Nov 2023, Senate** (Bejar) | official transcript | A former Meta safety engineer told the Senate in 2023 that the company knew its apps were harming kids and chose not to fix it. | | **Jan 2024, Senate** (five CEOs) | official transcript | In 2024 the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snap, Discord and X faced the Senate over child safety, and senators showed the safety tools do not hold. | | **May 2026, Senate** (the verdicts) | tier-down (written testimony) | In 2026 the lawyer who won California's child-safety verdict against Meta and Google (now on appeal) showed the Senate the companies' internal documents. | | **Dec 2025, House** (the bills) | tier-down (written testimony; official transcript now published) | In 2025 a House hearing on child-safety bills heard four witnesses split over design mandates, privacy law, and the First Amendment. | ## November 2023: the fake brake, named from inside *Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. Witness: Arturo Bejar, a former Meta safety engineer. Official transcript, S.Hrg. 118-663.* On November 7, 2023, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee heard sworn testimony from Arturo Bejar, an engineer Meta twice hired to make its products safer for children. Backed by his own memos to Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri that were entered into the record, he testified that the company measured how often children were harmed, reported the numbers to the top, and repeatedly chose not to act. His most load-bearing line describes the exact pattern this site is about, a control that looks like a brake but does not stop the car: the safety features Meta shipped were, in his words, "a safety feature in name only to placate the press and regulators." He described the company "creating its own homework," narrow definitions of harm that let it grade itself. He asked for a help button a child could press when a message hurt them; it was not built. And when he proposed the obvious test, "let's measure our help by whether it helped," that "was not adopted." The most concrete receipt in the hearing is a feedback brake that exists for advertisers and is withheld from children: "You can take an ad and say that is sexually inappropriate. But there's no way for a child to do that when they get a message." Senators from both parties named the design, not the speech, as the problem. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) called the company's public safety statistic "designed to mislead"; Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) put the removal of the earlier safety tools as a choice, "They had built tools. You built them. That was true. But they chose to remove that."; and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) framed the remedy the same way, "the Kids Online Safety Act is also about the product. It's about product design." Bejar agreed without hedging: "It's a product. It needs to be different. It has to change." No platform testified, so the companies appear here only as quoted documents. Their live answers are the next hearing. **Full ledger:** every tiered claim and all the verbatim quotes are in [the Nov 2023 Bejar distillation](/distillations/hearing-2023-11-07-teen-mental-health). ## January 2024: five platforms, and the tools do not hold *Senate Judiciary Committee. Witnesses: the CEOs of Discord, Meta, Snap, TikTok, and X. Official transcript, S.Hrg. 118-497.* On January 31, 2024, the CEOs of Discord, Meta, Snap, TikTok, and X testified together before the Senate Judiciary Committee; three of the five appeared only under subpoena. Across seven hours and both parties, one pattern held: the companies described extensive safety tools, and senators showed the tools do not hold. The brake is optional: Meta's Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that teens can opt out of the restrictive default settings he had just described. The brake is unmeasured: asked whether Meta reports the total amount of harmful content or only the share it catches, he answered, "No. I believe we focus on prevalence." The brake reaches almost no one: Snap's Evan Spiegel could name his parental-tool adoption, "approximately 200,000 parents use Family Center," against roughly 20 million teen users, about one percent; Discord's Jason Citron, asked whether his teen-safety tool works, said, "I do not have a study off the top of my head." And the brake was defunded: pressed on an internal memo, Zuckerberg was questioned about a rejected request for dozens of safety engineers that would have cost about $50 million in a quarter Meta earned $9.2 billion. Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) named the tension at the heart of it before reading Meta's own SEC filing aloud: "You have a fiduciary obligation to your shareholders to get kids to use your platform more." Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) reduced it to a sentence, put to Discord: "if that were working, we wouldn't be here today." The companies split on the child-safety bills: Snap and X endorsed specific ones ("we strongly support the Kids' Online Safety Act," said Spiegel), while Meta, Discord, and TikTok declined to commit to any. **Full ledger:** every tiered claim and all the verbatim quotes are in [the Jan 2024 five-CEO distillation](/distillations/hearing-2024-01-31-big-tech-child-safety). ## May 2026: the documents behind the mechanism *Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. Witnesses: the trial counsel and expert behind the recent verdicts, and two survivor parents.* > **Tier-down.** This hearing is recent enough that no official transcript is published yet. This account is built from the witnesses' written testimony, not the live question-and-answer; every witness was an advocate for legislation, with no platform present to answer; and the verdicts it describes are not final. Treat it as the weaker-evidence tier it is. On May 13, 2026, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee built a hearing around something that had not existed before: American jury verdicts against the companies. Rachel Lanier, the trial lawyer who won California's K.G.M. verdict against Meta and Google (a verdict now on appeal), walked the committee through the internal company documents she had put before the jury. Those documents are this hearing's distinctive evidence. The brake was never the goal: a 2016 YouTube presentation, as she quoted it, stated the aim to be "an app that is...Addictive." The brake was declined until forced: a 2020 Meta email called the company's unenforced under-13 rule "just indefensible" and recorded that the product team "would not prioritize this proactive work until we're legally required to do it." And the company's own staff treated the safety tools as beside the point: a 2023 Meta employee chat, reacting to the state lawsuits, includes the line "nobody is asking us to build 30 tools." That chat is dated three months before Meta's CEO offered those more-than-30 tools as the answer to the Senate, in the January 2024 hearing above. A law professor, Mary Graw Leary, named the legal cause and the limit of litigation in one argument: the platforms "face no deterrence for designing products without regard to safety," and even the headline penalties are small against the scale, "$375 million dollar and a $6 million dollar verdicts" against parent-company revenue that "exceeded $400 billion" and "$200 billion last year." Two parents who lost children asked Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act. The litigation posture, including the appeals, is in [the lawsuit case files](/lawsuits). **Full ledger (tier-down):** the claim ledger and quote-bank is at [the May 2026 verdicts distillation](/distillations/hearing-2026-05-13-courtroom-to-congress). ## December 2025: the fight over the fix *House Energy & Commerce, Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade. Witnesses: a safety advocate, a pro-regulation lawyer, an industry association, and a civil-liberties group.* > **Tier-down, narrowing.** The official transcript has since published (GPO CHRG-119hhrg62241, Serial 119-44) and is now cached alongside the other two official transcripts. That fixes the original problem but not the whole of it: the GPO text carries the spoken hearing only, and the witnesses' prepared statements sit in the official record as page images that cannot be machine-verified. This account is still built from those written statements rather than the live exchange, so it stays flagged until it is re-seeded from the transcript's question-and-answer. Unlike the others, this hearing was built to disagree, and the witnesses genuinely do. On December 2, 2025, a House Energy & Commerce subcommittee held a legislative hearing on a package of child-safety bills, including the Kids Online Safety Act, COPPA 2.0, and Sammy's Law. Its four witnesses, a safety advocate, a pro-regulation lawyer, an industry association, and a civil-liberties group, all agreed the harm is real. They split, sharply, on the fix, and that split is the most useful thing on this page: it is where the brake-integrity argument meets its hardest objections. The design-regulation case came from Joel Thayer of the Digital Progress Institute, who argued the First Amendment is being weaponized to "turn our bulwark for free expression into a sword to cut down laws they don't like," and that the Supreme Court "categorically rejected TikTok's argument that the mere regulation of an algorithm raises First Amendment scrutiny." The industry position, from Paul Lekas of the Software & Information Industry Association, accepted safety law but pushed its shape toward "regulating design or privacy conduct, rather than content," to survive constitutional scrutiny. And the sharpest objection came from the civil-liberties witness, Kate Ruane of the Center for Democracy & Technology, who named the same mechanism the other hearings did, "the surveillance capitalism business model," but named it to argue the opposite remedy: that the durable fix is comprehensive privacy law, that age-verification mandates "create significant privacy risks," and that "Protecting children includes protecting their right to express themselves online." Read honestly, this hearing does not confirm the brake-integrity thesis. It maps where that thesis meets its most legitimate objections, constitutional and strategic, and those objections belong on the record next to the mechanism the other three establish. The First Amendment cases the witnesses fight over are the same ones engaged in [the policy paper](/proposal). **Full ledger (tier-down):** the claim ledger and quote-bank is at [the Dec 2025 legislative distillation](/distillations/hearing-2025-12-02-legislative-solutions). ## What the four establish together Read as a set, the four hearings describe one mechanism from four vantage points, and the shape of each source is different enough that agreement between them is worth something. A whistleblower names the fake brake from inside one company (2023). Five CEOs answer for the same pattern under oath, across five platforms (2024). The internal documents a jury was shown supply the design intent behind it, in the companies' own words (2026). And a balanced panel argues over what to do about it, objections included (2025). The throughline is the one this site is built on: the harm is not any single post but the delivery loop, and the safety controls offered against it are too easy to ignore, off by default, unmeasured, or, in the internal record, never meant to work. That is the case for a standard that tests a brake by whether it stops the car. The full argument, with its honest limits, is in [the policy paper](/proposal); the test is written out at [the scorecard](/scorecard); the litigation record is in [the lawsuits](/lawsuits). ## Sources Each account is seeded from the official record of the hearing. Transcripts and written testimony submitted to Congress are U.S. government works. - **Nov 7, 2023, Bejar** (S.Hrg. 118-663): official Senate transcript, [govinfo CHRG-118shrg60432](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-118shrg60432/html/CHRG-118shrg60432.htm) (primary); [Senate Judiciary hearing page](https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-activity/hearings/social-media-and-the-teen-mental-health-crisis). - **Jan 31, 2024, five CEOs** (S.Hrg. 118-497): official Senate transcript, [govinfo CHRG-118shrg57444](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-118shrg57444/html/CHRG-118shrg57444.htm) (primary); [Senate Judiciary hearing page](https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-activity/hearings/big-tech-and-the-online-child-sexual-exploitation-crisis). - **May 13, 2026, the verdicts** (tier-down; no official transcript yet): witness written testimony via the [Senate Judiciary hearing page](https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-activity/hearings/from-the-courtroom-to-congress-why-landmark-social-media-verdicts-demand-federal-action-to-protect-kids-online) (primary for the written statements). - **Dec 2, 2025, the bills** (tier-down, narrowing): official House transcript, [govinfo CHRG-119hhrg62241](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-119hhrg62241/html/CHRG-119hhrg62241.htm), Serial No. 119-44 (primary; published and cached 2026-07-25, covers the spoken hearing); witness written testimony via the [House Energy & Commerce committee repository](https://docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventID=118714) (primary for the written statements, which appear in the official record only as page images). Quotes on this page are still from the written statements. Cleaned third-party transcripts were used only as a reading aid and cross-check, never as the quoted source. Every quotation on this page is verbatim from the official record above and attributed; the two tier-down hearings will be rebuilt to the full standard when their official transcripts are published. --- *Provenance and methodology: this page is a companion to [the lawsuits explainer](/lawsuits), covering the Congressional record rather than the litigation. The case content is sourced ledger-first: each hearing has an evidence-tiered claim ledger with a verbatim, attributed quote-bank, verified as an exact substring of the official record; this page is seeded from those ledgers, curated and not a full render, and corrections land in the ledgers first; the full ledgers, with their complete quote-banks, are published at [/distillations](/distillations). Quotes are selected for mechanism, not for the tribal or viral moment, and the two tier-down hearings are flagged as the weaker-evidence artifacts they are until their official transcripts publish. AI-assisted throughout: the framing and judgment are the author's, the drafting was collaborative. Updated on dated passes, not live; the as-of line above is the honesty backstop.* --- # For policymakers (briefing deck) Source: https://de-amplify.com/for/policymakers # de-amplify: The Brake Integrity Standard Regulate the loop, not the speech. The same machine that hooks a child is the one amplifying division. Here is the part of it you can actually regulate. --- # The problem, in one sentence > A dead man's switch stops a machine when the human's hand comes off. Engagement feeds do the inverse: the machine keeps running, or quietly restarts, after the hand comes off. You choose "following only," close the app, reopen it, and you are back in the algorithmic feed. Your stated will was present in form, and absent in effect. --- # The bigger machine underneath An engagement feed optimizes for one thing: whatever holds attention. The content that most reliably holds attention is high-arousal and outrage-driven, so optimizing for engagement structurally selects for the inflammatory. The fuel is the user's own reaction. The machine has no opinion; it has your flinch, and it amplifies whatever you react to hardest. This is well-documented: Facebook's own 2018 research, the Haugen disclosures, and peer-reviewed work since. > The same loop that will not let a child stop is the loop that turns every issue into a wedge. This is not only a youth-safety problem. It is an information-environment problem. --- # What is actually broken Not any single post. The delivery loop: - Infinite scroll - Autoplay - Variable-reward notifications - Ranking that optimizes for time-on-site and for reaction A calm post and an inflammatory one ride the same loop. The regulable, more speech-defensible surface is the architecture of delivery and the controls over it, not the expression delivered. --- # The trap that has stalled every prior effort Two swamps: - "Is social-media addiction a real clinical condition?" leads to endless expert-witness battles over a contested diagnosis. - "Which posts should come down?" is the content-moderation war, with the First Amendment on top of it. The reframe moves to something measurable and already inside consumer-protection law: > When a platform tells a user a control does something, does the control do it, and does it last? --- # This is already in the courts Whether the platform's own brakes work is now litigated evidence, not a metaphor. | Case (as of August 28, 2026) | Where it stands | |---|---| | MDL 3047 (federal) | 3,137 suits; the states' trial against Meta ended August 26, 2026 in an entered consent judgment: up to $16.68 billion over ten years, default teen time limits on Instagram and Facebook, no admission of liability; the personal-injury and school-district tracks continue | | K.G.M. v. Meta and Google (California) | $6 million jury verdict for negligent design, on appeal | | New Mexico v. Meta | $942 million final judgment (August 6, 2026): the $375 million jury verdict plus a $567 million abatement fund and a five-year order on minors' accounts; no relief against the algorithm | In the federal order, the court found Meta's own documents could support the theory that its time-limit tools were a "public relations stunt." And note what the settlement itself concedes: it writes a default two-hour limit and an overnight block into an enforceable order, proving the brake is buildable, then states that nothing in it may "establish a standard of care" outside the settling states. The industry-wide rule is still nobody's obligation. That rule is this proposal. --- # Government has already named the design surface - California SB 976: restricts addictive feeds for minors. The addictive-feed provision and default-private-mode are live, un-enjoined law after the Ninth Circuit (September 2025). - New York SAFE for Kids Act: the same idea, awaiting rulemaking. - EU Digital Services Act: mandates a non-profiled feed option, with preliminary findings against TikTok and Meta in 2026. > What none of them define: whether a user's decision to stop or redirect the feed actually takes effect and persists. That is the gap. --- # The standard: Brake Integrity When a service offers a control to stop, limit, reset, or redirect a personalization or engagement function, the control must actually work. Two layers: - **Layer I, universal.** Every account, any age, gets controls that work: turn personalized recommendations off, select a following-only feed, turn autoplay off, quiet the engagement notifications. - **Layer II, youth defaults.** For minors, the safer settings are ON by default, not merely available. Making the base layer universal is deliberate: the existence of a working brake never depends on age verification. --- # The compliance spec: a seven-part test A control passes only if it is: | Test | It must | |---|---| | Discoverable | be findable without external instructions | | Clear | state what will change ("show me less" is not "turn off recommendations") | | Immediate | change behavior soon after activation, not on some later refresh | | Material | change the feed perceptibly, not cosmetically | | Persistent | survive closing the app, another device, an update, and time | | Scoped | cover the related surfaces (Reels, Shorts, Explore, notifications), not one screen | | Non-circumventing | not nag, silently reset, or route the user back | A cosmetic brake plus a press release fails persistence and non-circumvention by design. That is the point. --- # The wedge, turned into a brake, not a label The tempting fix for the division problem is to label the "divisive" content, to have the government or the platform flag it. Do not. - The party best placed to build that classifier profits on engagement, and the most engaging content is the most inflammatory (on the order of $26.8 billion in net income in a single quarter, Q1 2026). It has every reason to bias the classifier, and a silent one cannot be checked from outside. - A government-mandated label on lawful speech is the most legally exposed move there is: strict scrutiny. The defensible fix keeps the judgment with the user and matches the diagnosis: - **Transparency:** the feed must say why it served something ("you are seeing this because you engaged with similar posts"). - **A control over the signal:** the user can turn that recommendation signal off. That is recommendation literacy, not censorship: a brake on the amplification, held by the user, not a labeler held by the state. (The EU's 2025 guidelines already recommend the "why you are seeing this" half; the contribution here is the off-switch, and making both testable.) --- # Why this survives the First Amendment The core regulates the platform's interaction with its own user, not anyone's speech. Legal exposure runs from most to least defensible: | Tier | Approach | Ground | |---|---|---| | 1 (safest) | Control integrity: an offered control must work | the Lemmon v. Snap lane, a design duty independent of content | | 2 | Defaults and interface rules | conduct-focused; SB 976's default survived | | 3 | Ranking-objective mandates | meets Moody v. NetChoice head-on, more exposed | | 4 (most exposed) | Content-characterizing labels | strict scrutiny; SB 976's like-count ban was struck down | Brake integrity and the wedge off-switch both sit at Tier 1: a control the user holds. A government "this is divisive" label sits at Tier 4, which is exactly why it stays in the research appendix, not the ask. And the criteria are written in observable terms on purpose: in NetChoice v. Bonta (March 2026) the vague ones ("materially detrimental," "well-being") were enjoined. --- # How you enforce it | Layer | What it checks | Who can run it | |---|---|---| | Observable tests (outside) | does the control activate, take effect, persist across sessions and devices, stay scoped | FTC, state attorneys general, or an independent auditor | | Mandated internal evidence (with access) | control specification, version history, controlled-account testing, records of when a preference was honored | a digital regulator on the DSA model | Anti-circumvention is non-optional: compliance has to cover the whole product, or the loop simply moves to notifications, streaks, and suggested accounts. --- # What is actually new here Two things no existing law does: 1. **A testable "does the off-switch actually work" standard.** SB 976, NY SAFE, and the DSA all name design; none wrote the persistence and anti-circumvention test that turns "a setting exists" into "the setting works and stays," checkable from outside. 2. **The wedge, made into a user-held brake.** Transparency plus a control over the recommendation signal, so the amplification answers to the person, not to a censor and not to the platform. Everything else here (universal base layer, youth defaults, the legal tiering) exists to make those two enforceable. --- # We name our own limits A policy is stronger for saying what it has not solved: - **Age verification** is a hard, privacy-fraught problem. Mitigation: Layer I is universal, so the working brake never depends on it. - **The banishment risk:** a platform could stop serving minors rather than comply. The universal base layer is a partial hedge; the youth-defaults layer still creates the incentive. - **The Moody "purely reactive algorithm" question is open,** not decided in our favor. - **The government-mandated divisiveness label is the dangerous version and is deliberately NOT the ask.** We regulate the control, not the meaning of anyone's speech. That research stays in the appendix. --- # The ask Adopt the frame, then fund the specification: 1. Set the universal base layer as a floor: any control a platform offers must meet the seven-part test. 2. Require recommendation transparency plus a user control to turn the signal off: the wedge brake. 3. Direct the FTC or a state attorney general to publish the observable tests and an audit model. 4. Write to the vagueness bar: observable, defined criteria, never "well-being." Pilot the seven-part scorecard before thresholds go into statute. The public is already here: **de-amplify.com**, a thirty-second self-test (find the brake, set it, close the app, reopen: did it hold?), constituent brake reports, and #WheresTheBrake. --- # The standard, in one line > Existing law increasingly names design as the target. What is missing is a user-centered standard for whether the person's decision to stop or redirect the system actually takes effect and persists. > > That standard is brake integrity. And the same brake, pointed at the recommendation signal, is how you de-amplify the wedge without letting anyone censor it. **de-amplify.com** --- # For parents (briefing deck) Source: https://de-amplify.com/for/parents # de-amplify: Where's the Brake? For parents. You set the limit. It did not stay set. That is not you, and it is not your kid. --- # You already know this feeling You switch the account to "following only." You turn off autoplay. You close the app. Your kid opens it again, and the endless feed is right back. The setting was there. It just did not hold. --- # It is not willpower, and it is not your parenting The feed is built to outlast both. Variable rewards, autoplay, and a stream that refills itself are engineered to pull harder than a twelve-year-old's self-control, and harder than a tired parent at 9pm. You are not losing to your kid. You are both losing to a machine designed to win. (You feel the same pull on your own feed. That is the tell: it is the design, not the person.) --- # It is not just screen time. It is the diet. The feed does not serve your kid what is good for them, or even what they would choose. It serves whatever gets the biggest reaction. And the biggest reaction is usually outrage, fear, or the thing that makes them feel worse about themselves or about each other. So the feed drifts toward what agitates. > Your kid's reaction is the product being sold. It is shaping how they see the world, not just how many hours they lose. The same machine does it to you, on your feed. That is the tell. --- # What is actually broken Not one bad video. The machine that serves the next one: - Infinite scroll with no stopping point - Autoplay that starts the next thing before anyone decides - Notifications and streaks that pull them back - A feed that refills the second they open the app, tuned to whatever gets a rise out of them A great video and a garbage one ride the same conveyor belt. The belt is the problem. --- # The one question that cuts through Skip the fight over "is my kid addicted." It goes nowhere, and it lands on your kid. Ask the question you can actually test: > When you turn something off, does it stay off? Not a diagnosis. Not a willpower test. Just: does the off-switch work? --- # What a working brake looks like Score any control on your kid's feed the same way. A real brake passes all seven: | The test | Ask yourself | |---|---| | Discoverable | Can you find the control without googling it? | | Clear | Does it say what will change? "Show me less" is not "turn off recommendations." | | Immediate | Does the feed change right after you set it? | | Material | Does the feed actually change, or does it just look a little different? | | Persistent | Does the choice survive closing the app, another device, and time? | | Scoped | Does it cover Reels, Shorts, Explore, and notifications, or just one screen? | | Non-circumventing | Does the platform respect it, or nag, reset, and route you back? | --- # Try it tonight (thirty seconds) 1. Find the brake: the setting that should calm the feed. 2. Set it. 3. Close the app all the way. 4. Reopen it. Did your choice hold, or did the feed quietly come back? For most feeds, it comes back. That is the whole problem in one test. Score your result at **de-amplify.com/scorecard**. --- # You are not imagining it, and you are not alone This has been to court, and it is winning (as of August 2026): - A New Mexico court: a **$942 million** judgment against Meta over child safety, and a five-year order changing how minors' accounts work. - A California jury: **$6 million** against Meta and Google over addictive design. - A federal judge found Meta's own documents could support calling its time-limit tools a **"public relations stunt."** The states took Meta to trial on it, and Meta settled mid-trial for up to **$16.7 billion**, agreeing to default time limits for teens on Instagram and Facebook that only a parent can loosen. Lawmakers are moving too. The one thing still missing: a rule that the off-switch actually works. --- # Why not just ban it, or take the phone away Three "obvious" fixes that backfire: - A **total ban** cuts your kid off from where their friends are, and starts an ID-and-surveillance fight to prove their age. - **"Just take it away"** fights the loop with willpower. The loop is built to win that fight. - The platforms' **own "parental controls"** are often the fake brake: a setting that exists mostly so they can say it exists. We are asking for something narrower, and stronger. --- # What we are actually asking for Not censorship. Not a ban. A brake that works. - **For every account:** when a control says it will calm the feed, it has to actually do it, and stay done. - **For kids:** the safer settings ON by default, not buried three menus deep. - **See the machine:** the feed should tell you why it showed something ("you are seeing this because you watched X"), and let you switch that signal off, so you and your kid can see how you are being steered instead of just being steered. Turn it off, and it stays off. That is the whole idea. --- # What this will not do (the honest part) A working brake is not a cure. It will not raise your kid for you, and turning down the pull is the near-term win, not a promise about mental health. What it does: give you back the off-switch, so the product has to answer to you, and your conversations with your kid are not fighting the machine at the same time. A floor to stand on, not a silver bullet. --- # What you can do this week - **Test** your kid's feed with the thirty-second check (de-amplify.com/scorecard). - **Report** a dead brake: one that claims to work and does not (de-amplify.com/report). It stores nothing about your kid. - **Name the machine** with your kid: "it is showing you this to get a reaction." Seeing the trick is a skill, and it travels. - **Tell** your representative: "Make the brakes work. Do not ban our kids." **Share** it: #WheresTheBrake. --- # The whole ask, in one line > You should be able to turn it off and have it stay off. That is not too much to ask of a product in your child's hand. **de-amplify.com** --- # For press and organizers (briefing deck) Source: https://de-amplify.com/for/press # de-amplify: Where's the Brake? For press and organizers. The story is not that it is addictive. It is that your outrage is the fuel, and the off-switch is fake. --- # The story everyone is missing Every outlet is writing "social media is addictive." Here is the sharper story: The machine does not want your time. It wants your reaction. Outrage is the most reliable reaction there is, so the feed is tuned to farm it. Your flinch is the product being sold. > It is not that you cannot look away. It is that looking away is the one thing the machine is built to prevent. --- # The proof is what you feel right now You are reading this. If it made you want to argue, share, or fire back, that is the machine, working, in real time. The thesis demonstrates itself: to react to it is to feed it. > This is not an abstract tech-policy story. It is happening in the hand holding the phone. --- # Name the villain correctly Not "Big Tech is evil." Not "kids these days." Not the left, not the right. The villain is the loop that runs on everyone's reaction, including yours and mine. That is why the coalition is broad: people who agree on nothing else all feel worked by the same machine. > Blame a company or a generation and you have just built another wedge. The mechanism is the story. --- # They gave you a fake brake There is an off-switch. You set it, close the app, reopen it, and the feed is right back. In a federal court this year, a judge found Meta's own documents could support the theory that its time-limit tools were a "public relations stunt." The controls exist so the company can say the controls exist. --- # The test that is the story 1. Find the brake: the setting that should calm the feed. 2. Set it. Close the app. Reopen it. Did it hold? For most feeds it does not. Screenshot that. The screenshot is the story, and anyone can run it in thirty seconds, including you. **de-amplify.com/scorecard** --- # It is already in the courts - A New Mexico court: a **$942 million** judgment against Meta over child safety. - A California jury: **$6 million** against Meta and Google over addictive design. - The states took Meta to trial and settled mid-evidence for up to **$16.7 billion**. (The **$1.4 trillion** you saw in headlines was Meta's own worst-case arithmetic, never the states' demand; the settlement is about one percent of it.) The money is real and moving, and the settlement even writes a working off-switch for one company, while stating in its own text that it is not a standard for anyone else. What is missing is still the rule. --- # What we demand Three asks, boldest first: - **Label the manipulation.** When the machine pushes something to farm your reaction, make it say so, and flag the engineered outrage for what it is. Make them show you the strings. - **Make the brakes work.** Every control a platform offers has to actually work and stay set. No cosmetic switches. - **De-amplify, don't censor.** The fix is a switch in your hand, never a censor in anyone's. --- # When they say "censorship," flip it The platforms have one move: call any fix "government control of speech." Get ahead of it. - We are not labeling anyone's speech. We are labeling the machine's manipulation, and demanding the off-switch work. - The censor here is the silent algorithm that already decides what you see, with no strings showing. > We are the ones asking them to show the strings. That is the opposite of censorship. --- # Three stories to stop writing - **"A ban will fix it."** It punishes the kid and starts a surveillance-ID fight to prove their age. - **"Just put the phone down."** That pits a twelve-year-old's willpower against a machine built to win. - **"There are parental controls."** Those are usually the fake brake. The tired story is "willpower." The true story is "the brake is fake." --- # The movement made it a song Because the recursion is the point: watching the video is scrolling is feeding the machine the song names. "Where's the Brake" is already out; the answer track, "No Brake," is next. Culture, not just a policy paper. Proof the idea lands in the body, which is exactly where the machine works. --- # Use this **Press:** run the thirty-second test, screenshot it, write the "the brake is fake" story. The court receipts are at de-amplify.com/lawsuits. **Organizers:** run the test with your people, post the screenshots, file dead-brake reports (de-amplify.com/report, it stores nothing), tag your reps, and carry #WheresTheBrake. --- # One line to quote > Your outrage is not a glitch in the feed. It is the product. Demand the switch that turns it off, and make them show you the strings. **de-amplify.com** --- # The Brake Scorecard (the seven-part test) Source: https://de-amplify.com/scorecard # The Brake Scorecard Score a brake the same way every time. This is the seven-part brake-integrity test from section 3 of the policy paper, written out so that everyone scores the same way and two people testing the same control reach the same answer. ## How to run it Pick one platform and one control. Set the control. Use the app normally for a few minutes. Close the app fully, reopen it, and look at the feed. Then answer the seven questions below. The reopen is the part most people skip, and it is the part that most often fails. ## The seven dimensions 1. **Discoverable.** Can you find the control without googling it? 2. **Clear.** Does it say what will change? "Show me less" is not "turn off recommendations." 3. **Immediate.** Does the feed change soon after you set it, or only on some later refresh? 4. **Material.** Does the feed actually change in a way you can perceive, or is it cosmetic? 5. **Persistent.** Does the choice survive closing and reopening the app, another device, and time? 6. **Scoped.** Does it cover Reels, Shorts, Explore, notifications, and suggested accounts, or just one screen? 7. **Non-circumventing.** Does the platform respect it, or nag, reset, and route you back? ## The four outcomes Record one outcome per control tested: - **Held:** The choice took effect and survived the reopen. - **Reset:** It reverted to the algorithm when you came back. - **Never:** It did nothing you could perceive. - **Inconclusive:** Unclear, partial, or you could not tell. ## Platforms commonly scored - Instagram - Facebook - TikTok - YouTube - Snapchat - X ## After you score it File what you found at /report. That page stores nothing: it builds a structured post for you to publish yourself. One dead brake is a shrug; ten thousand, filed the same way, is a record. --- # File a brake report Source: https://de-amplify.com/report # File a brake report #WheresTheBrake. One dead brake is a shrug. Ten thousand, filed the same way, is a record. ## This form stores nothing The report form holds no database and sends nothing anywhere. It assembles a structured post from your answers and hands it back to you to publish. That is deliberate: storing minor-associated data is the exact liability this project asks platforms to stop creating, so the site does not create it either. ## What a report records ### Platform - Instagram - Facebook - TikTok - YouTube - Snapchat - X - Other ### Control tested - Following / chronological feed - Personalized recommendations off - Autoplay off - "Show me less" - Notifications off - Other ### What happened - **It reset when I reopened** (reported as "reset to the algorithm on reopen") - **It never took effect** (reported as "never took effect") - **Partial / unclear** (reported as "partial, unclear") - **It held (it stuck)** (reported as "held") - this is the passing outcome ### Device (optional) - iOS - Android - Web - Other ## How to file one Score the control first using the seven-part test at /scorecard, so your report means the same thing as everyone else's. Then fill in the three fields at /report, copy the generated post, and publish it with #WheresTheBrake. --- # MDL 3047: the federal social-media addiction multidistrict litigation Source: https://de-amplify.com/distillations/mdl-3047 > In re Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 3047, N.D. Cal., Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers; defendants Meta, Google/Alphabet, ByteDance, Snap As of 2026-08-28. This is the evidence-tiered claim ledger behind the MDL 3047 case file on de-amplify.com, published in full for transparency. Tiers: ESTABLISHED (stated in a primary source, or said on the official record at a hearing; a fact about what was filed or said, not necessarily adjudicated true), OBSERVED (secondary coverage, or a document read into the record), ASSUMED (the distiller's inference, flagged). Provenance flags ([interested-party], [advocacy-witness], [single-witness], [lawmaker characterization]) mark claims resting 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, an official government release) or in the project's verified baseline with independent corroboration; 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, not the distillation skill's agreement-based multi-source tiers. ## Reader summary This is the big federal case bundling thousands of lawsuits that accuse Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Google/Alphabet (YouTube), ByteDance (TikTok), and Snap (Snapchat) of building their apps to be addictive to kids and teens. All of those cases are being managed together in one federal court in Northern California, in front of U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, under the label "MDL 3047." As of August 3, 2026, 3,137 individual lawsuits were pending in that bundle. In an order filed June 29, 2026 (announced June 30), the judge refused to throw out the claims brought by a group of state attorneys general, and those claims went to trial. That trial opened in Oakland on August 18, 2026, against Meta alone, and **it never reached a verdict.** On August 26, 2026, four days into evidence, the parties filed a settlement they had negotiated and the judge entered it the same day as a consent judgment: a final judgment, signed, with both sides waiving appeal. The trial was vacated and the jury discharged. What Meta agreed to has two halves. The money is up to about $17.2 billion over ten years across 51 states and territories, but roughly 30 percent of it is **contingent**: Meta only owes it if Snap, TikTok and YouTube become bound to the same kind of teen time limits and pay comparable amounts, and if that never happens the money reverts to Meta. The product changes run on the same logic. Teens get a default two-hour daily limit across Instagram and Facebook (the agreement's covered platforms; messaging and Meta's other products are excluded) and a default overnight block from midnight to 6 a.m., which a parent (not the teen) can loosen; the stronger version of the overnight block, 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., switches on only if the other three companies adopt equivalent rules. Teens also stop seeing like counts by default, lose access to cosmetic-surgery filters, and must be offered a non-personalized feed. An independent auditor reports publicly, but only for the first five years of the ten-year judgment. Two things the settlement is not. It records **no admission of liability**, and it says in terms that nothing in it establishes a standard of care or serves as precedent anywhere outside the settling states. And it does not end MDL 3047: the personal-injury and school-district cases continue, against Meta and against Google, TikTok and Snap, who are not parties to this judgment. What it does end, beyond this case, is the states' own parallel lawsuits in their own courts: the agreement lists fifteen state-court cases it resolves, including Tennessee's Nashville trial, which was in its fifth week of evidence when the settlement stopped it. (The case background is current as of July 16, 2026 and the settlement as of August 28, 2026; litigation like this changes almost weekly.) Note: This document covers ONLY the federal case, MDL 3047. Separate state-court cases (including a California state proceeding and a New Mexico case, both of which produced their own jury verdicts) are deliberately kept out to avoid mixing up the facts. ## Claims (the ledger) ### (a) Parties & court 1. **[ESTABLISHED]** The case is formally titled *In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation*, MDL No. 3047, and appears on the federal Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) docket list. *Source: JPML Pending MDL Dockets report, July 1, 2026, page 1.* 2. **[ESTABLISHED]** The MDL is assigned to U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California (district code "CAN"). *Source: JPML report, July 1, 2026, page 1; corroborated by the California AG release and the CourtListener docket.* 3. **[ESTABLISHED]** As of the July 1, 2026 JPML report, MDL 3047 had **2,893** actions "now pending," with a historical total of 3,068 actions ever filed into the docket. The June 1, 2026 report showed 2,664 pending and 2,839 historical, so the count rose by exactly 229 in a month. *Source: JPML reports, July 1 and June 1, 2026, page 1 of each.* 4. **[ESTABLISHED]** The lead consolidated state-AG case carries the individual number 4:23-cv-05448-YGR (*People of the State of California v. Meta Platforms, Inc.*, filed October 24, 2023); the MDL master docket is 4:22-md-03047 (opened October 6, 2022). *Source: CourtListener dockets for both numbers; the order caption carries both.* 5. **[OBSERVED]** The named corporate defendants across the MDL are Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Google/Alphabet (YouTube), ByteDance (TikTok), and Snap (Snapchat). Secondary coverage of the settled bellwether names the defendant set as "Meta, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube." *Source: verified baseline; defendant set corroborated by Law Commentary and coverage of the Kentucky bellwether settlement.* 6. **[OBSERVED]** The state attorneys general are litigating as a coalition; coverage puts the group bringing federal children's-privacy (COPPA) claims to the August trial at **29 states**, including California, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Colorado. (The official California AG release refers to "attorneys general nationwide" but does not state a number.) *Source: Top Class Actions; JURIST; Engadget; Law.com headline ("29 States Head to Trial"); California AG release (no count).* The four consumer-protection states are a subset of the 29; see Tensions (resolved). ### (b) The legal theory 7. **[ESTABLISHED]** The core theory is **product design**: plaintiffs allege the companies intentionally built app features to keep young users coming back, and the June 29 order rests its denial of summary judgment on factual disputes over exactly that theory. Court coverage lists the specific features at issue as "infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications and other engagement-focused tools" (feature list as quoted in coverage of the order, not re-verified against the order text). *Source: verified baseline; the order (Dkt 3214); the feature list per Top Class Actions' account of the order.* 8. **[OBSERVED]** A central factual fight is whether "social media addiction" is a real, definable condition. The judge found that "more recent research and statements from the American Psychiatric Association create a factual dispute regarding the existence and characteristics of social media addiction that must be resolved at trial." Meta argues social-media addiction is not an established psychiatric diagnosis; the American Psychiatric Association's position is that the absence of a DSM-5-TR listing does not mean the condition does not exist. *Source: Top Class Actions (quoting the order); Engadget.* ### (c) The June 29, 2026 ruling (announced June 30) 9. **[ESTABLISHED]** In an order **filed June 29, 2026** (a Monday; announced and widely covered June 30), the court **denied Meta's motion for summary judgment** as to the state attorneys general's claims, meaning those claims survive and proceed toward trial rather than being thrown out. The California AG describes the motion as "fully denied." *Source: the order itself, Dkt 3214 (AG-case Dkt 440), docket stamp "Filed 06/29/26"; Reuters ("decision late Monday") via Claims Journal; California AG press release (dated June 30).* 10. **[ESTABLISHED]** The denial rested on **material factual disputes**, including whether the platforms are addictive and whether Meta misrepresented that, which a court cannot resolve on summary judgment and must send to trial. *Source: the order text ("material disputes of fact exist"); verified baseline; Top Class Actions' account.* 11. **[ESTABLISHED]** On one narrower COPPA point, the court gave the **states a partial win**: it found there is "no factual dispute that Meta did not comply with the statute's notice and parental consent requirements." The California AG frames this as the court agreeing that Meta "did not obtain parental consent in a manner sufficient to satisfy" COPPA. *Source: the order, pp. 1-2 ("no dispute exists that Meta has not, in fact, complied"; "summary judgment is GRANTED" on that element); California AG press release.* 12. **[ESTABLISHED]** This COPPA point is a **compliance finding, not a finding of liability.** Whether COPPA even applies to the services (questions like child-directed status and the company's knowledge of under-13 users) remains disputed and is left for trial. *Source: the order, pp. 1-2 ("material disputes of fact exist as to whether Meta is required to comply"; "a material dispute of fact exists as to whether Meta has actual knowledge").* 13. **[ESTABLISHED]** In the same order, the court found that Meta's own documents could support the plaintiffs' theory that Meta's time-restriction (screen-time-limit) tools were a "public relations stunt," deployed while the company allegedly knew more time on the platform was linked to worse outcomes for teens. This is **cited evidence that could support the theory, still disputed, not a finding of fact.** *Source: the order, Dkt 3214, p. 23, verified in the RECAP PDF on 2026-07-16.* (Audit trail: this claim was originally tiered OBSERVED because its only known carrier, a Law.com article, returned HTTP 403; the 2026-07-16 audit verified the phrase in the order itself. The original flag was an access failure, not a disconfirmation.) ### (d) The August trial + follow-on *Read with section (k): the August trial ended on 2026-08-26 in an entered consent judgment. The claims below record what it was and how it was structured, which the settlement does not change; whether the February 2027 follow-on survives the settlement is an open question in Tensions.* 14. **[ESTABLISHED, and superseded on tense by section (k)]** The first trial **was held in Oakland, California, and ended on 2026-08-26 in a consent judgment rather than a verdict**. Jury selection began **August 12, 2026**; **opening statements were delivered on August 18, 2026**, and evidence began the same day. *Source: California AG press release for the scheduled dates; the court's own Civil Minutes for 2026-08-18 (Dkt 550) for the fact that trial was held, which record a session of 5 hours 17 minutes before Judge Gonzalez Rogers, continued to August 19.* 15. **[OBSERVED]** The August trial combines two sets of claims: the **29 states' consolidated federal COPPA claims** and **consumer-protection claims from four of those states: California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey.** The defendant at this trial is **Meta alone** (Meta Platforms, Inc. and Instagram, LLC); Google, TikTok, and Snap are MDL defendants in the separate personal-injury and school-district tracks, not in the AG trial. *Source: JURIST; Engadget; Law Commentary; Top Class Actions; the Meta-only point per the order caption (California et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc.) and the trial-motion filers on the docket (primary).* 16. **[ESTABLISHED]** The trial is structured to use an **advisory jury**. Meta had demanded a jury, then moved to withdraw that demand (motion filed March 3, 2026, Dkt 2807, heard April 15, 2026); the judge agreed and decided to empanel an advisory jury to hear the evidence and give its view while **she retains the ultimate findings.** She is expected to decide the federal COPPA claims herself and use the advisory jury chiefly on the state consumer-protection claims. The advisory jury's exact scope (for example, on civil penalties) was still disputed between the parties as of mid-July. *Source: MDL docket (Dkt 2807); the joint pretrial statement, Dkt 470 ("the advisory jury that the Court has decided to empanel"); Law Commentary; Law360/MLex headlines.* (The granting ruling appears to be a minute order not available in RECAP full text.) 17. **[OBSERVED]** A **second trial for 14 additional states'** own state-law claims is scheduled for **February 2027.** Do not conflate it with a different February 2027 event in the same MDL: the first **school-district** bellwether (a Tucson case) is also expected then, per Meta's own filing. *Source: Engadget; Reuters via Insurance Journal; Meta's trial-setting opposition, Dkt 3259 (the Tucson point).* (The scheduling order itself was not located.) 17a. **[OBSERVED, and it explains an arithmetic this record has carried unexplained since July]** **Four states left the multistate coalition in January 2025**: Michigan, Georgia, Missouri and North Dakota. That is what takes the 33 joint federal filers of October 2023 to the **29** at the August 2026 trial, a drop this ledger previously recorded only as what coverage reported. Michigan's Attorney General's office attributes the withdrawal to discovery burden, saying the court "approved most of Meta's voluminous discovery demands upon the States and their agencies (such as MDHHS), demands with which the State of Michigan could not possibly comply, and especially so within the very short timeframe so ordered by the Court", and a filing estimated the narrowed request at roughly 700,000 documents. *Source: Michigan Public, 2026-08-12, quoting the Attorney General's office (secondary, and the only account located). **Corroborated structurally by the primary**: the Ninth Circuit's caption in No. 24-7032 omits Michigan and Missouri entirely and lists North Dakota and Georgia as plain "Plaintiffs", separated from the "Plaintiffs - Appellees" block, which is the pattern four pre-appeal withdrawals would leave. Tiered OBSERVED rather than ESTABLISHED because the withdrawal filings themselves were not located; see Tensions.* 18. **[OBSERVED]** Counting all venues together, more than 40 state attorneys general have brought claims in the overall litigation: **33 states** filed the joint federal complaint on October 24, 2023, Florida filed its own federal suit the same day (the source of "34" in some counts), and additional attorneys general filed in state courts, for roughly 42 total. The August-2026 and February-2027 federal trials divide **claims, not states**: since 29 plus 14 exceeds the federal-filer count, the 14 necessarily overlap the 29. *Source: California AG October 2023 release ("bipartisan coalition of 33"); JURIST ("more than 40 state AGs"); NBC/TechCrunch (October 2023 counts).* (No accessible source enumerates the exact 29 or 14 rosters; flagged in Tensions.) ### (e) Money / exposure 19. **[ESTABLISHED]** In its own court filing, Meta characterized the **four states' potential penalty exposure as up to about $1.4 trillion** ("the AGs' unsupported $1.4 trillion-dollar claim"). *Source: Meta's penalty submission, Dkt 455, filed July 6, 2026 (RECAP, fetched 2026-07-16); corroborated by JURIST, Engadget, Law Commentary.* 20. **[ESTABLISHED]** The $1.4 trillion figure comes from **multiplying a very large count of qualifying young users by the maximum per-violation statutory penalty** under each applicable law. Meta's filing describes the states' method as counting penalties for "every single month in which a teen uses Meta's platforms for more than a half-hour", and names the exhibit it comes from: the AGs' Remedy Chart 2, "Time Spent Penalty Calculation for Teen Users", which Meta says "shows the number of teen users with monthly instances over 0.5 hours". *Source: Dkt 455 (primary, cached 2026-08-18); JURIST and Law Commentary for the method framing.* (Corrected 2026-08-18, on the first run after Dkt 455 was cached: this claim previously gave the exhibit's title as `Monthly Instances of Teen Users Exceeding ... Over 0.5 Hours`, which is a rendering from the docket listing and is not what the filing calls it. It is set as a literal here rather than as a quotation, because it is not a quotation of anything: that is the whole finding. Same class as claim 37: a docket caption is not text in a document.) 21. **[ESTABLISHED]** Meta's filing argues the demanded remedies are "entirely unmoored" from the claimed deceptive statements or unfair practices, and says of the resulting number: "A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement." (Capitalisation corrected 2026-08-18: the ledger had lowercased the filing's sentence-initial A to fit its own sentence, the same defect as the EU ledger's "Can be easily dismissed" and equally invisible by eye.) Meta also contends each state-law penalty must be tied to a separate, affirmative act of wrongdoing and raises due-process concerns. *Source: Dkt 455, pp. 1-2 ("entirely unmoored") and p. 12 ("no analog"), verified in the RECAP PDF on 2026-07-16; JURIST (the separate-act and due-process arguments).* See Discrepancies: the phrase "extraordinary and unjustified," previously quoted here as Meta's words, is an outlet's unquoted paraphrase and appears nowhere in the filing. 22. **[ASSUMED]** The $1.4 trillion figure is a **theoretical statutory ceiling**, the largest number arithmetically possible under the penalty formula, not a demand any court has awarded or is likely to award in full. *This is the drafter's characterization of how statutory-maximum penalty figures work, offered for reader context; the exact number the states will actually seek at trial, and any amount a court might award, are not established in the record reviewed here.* #### (e.1) What the states' own filing says (anchored to Dkt 473, which is cached) The claims above quote Meta's filing (Dkt 455); the three below quote the states' reply (Dkt 473). **Both are cached and the whole of section (e) is machine-verified**, so this subsection is no longer doing the guard work it was created for. It stays because the split it marks is the one the $200 billion correction turns on: what Meta says about the states' ask is not what the states' own filing says. (This intro originally read that Dkt 455 was not cached, which was true for the hours between the subsection's creation and the cache landing later on 2026-08-18, and then sat false on this page: a note that explains a workaround needs re-reading when the workaround is removed.) 22a. **[ESTABLISHED, and it corrects the press]** The states' own submission does **not** state a monetary demand. In their Reply Regarding Penalty and Disgorgement Charts (Dkt 473, filed 2026-07-13) the AGs say they "will present their final requests for monetary relief at trial", selecting remedies supported by the proof, and that they "do not seek double recovery". As of that filing no total had been stated. *Source: Dkt 473 (primary, fetched 2026-08-18).* 22b. **[ESTABLISHED]** The monetary ask has **two components, not one**: civil penalties **and disgorgement of ill-gotten gains**. The AGs state that although multiple claims would entitle them to disgorgement, they "only seek to disgorge ill-gotten gains once". Most coverage of this trial says "damages", which is a third thing. *Source: Dkt 473.* 22c. **[ESTABLISHED, and this is a trap]** In Dkt 473 the figure **$200 billion is Meta's 2025 revenue**, cited to Meta's own Form 10-K at 61 (Jan. 28, 2026), and used to argue the scale at which deterrence has to operate. It is **not** a demand. Multiple outlets covering the opening reported roughly $200 billion as the amount the states seek. *Source: Dkt 473. See the Tensions entry for what remains unresolved.* #### (e.2) What the attorneys general said in public on the day, and how it was obtained **Tier note before the claims, because it is doing real work.** The four claims below rest on a machine transcription, cached as `sources/ag-press-conference-2026-08-18-asr.txt` and quarantined from `npm run check:quotes` by filename. They are tiered OBSERVED and they carry **no quoted span**, deliberately: nothing here is set in quotation marks and attributed to a named person, because the text in hand is a machine's rendering of an acoustic signal rather than the words the speaker used. That is the same treatment the Dutch judgments get in `bits-of-freedom-v-meta`, for the same reason. Where these claims touch the money question they **agree with Dkt 473, which is primary and cached**, so their function is corroboration from the plaintiffs' own mouths rather than new authority. Three transcription systems sharing no pipeline (AssemblyAI on the PBS audio, PBS's own uploaded track, YouTube's automatic captions on the Fox News recording) render the load-bearing sentences the same way, with per-word confidence above 0.99 on every figure. A single pass would not have been enough to move the Tension below. 22d. **[OBSERVED]** At a press conference held after the first day of trial on **2026-08-18**, a Reuters reporter put the discrepancy directly to the attorneys general at **32:24**: both $1.4 trillion and $200 billion had been circulating, why the wide range, and did the states have a number in mind. **The confusion this record has been documenting was live in the press room on day one**, asked of the plaintiffs by a reporter, which is itself evidence that the coverage had not settled it. *Source: press-conference ASR (CAPTION-ASR, cached), PBS NewsHour recording at 32:24.* 22e. **[OBSERVED, and it answers the coverage]** California's attorney general replied that the $1.4 trillion figure is **Meta's**, that Meta put it out to the press as the highest number arithmetically derivable from data both parties had submitted, and that it is not something the states asked for or are seeking. He said twice, in plain terms, that the states are **not** asking for $1.4 trillion, once at **33:25** and again at **34:34**. Asked at **34:38** whether the states had produced the figure, he said it is Meta's estimate, built from a count of young users multiplied by the penalties available under the unfair-competition laws at issue. *Source: press-conference ASR at 32:34, 33:25, 34:34, 34:38.* 22f. **[OBSERVED]** He described the ask as **civil penalties, restitution and disgorgement, and explicitly not damages**, saying so more than once in the same answer, and said the states leave the final amount to the judge, who has vast discretion. **This independently corroborates claim 22b**, which reached the two-component structure from the states' own filing, and it corrects the word most coverage uses. *Source: press-conference ASR at 33:12 to 33:25.* 22g. **[OBSERVED, and it closes the trap in claim 22c]** He described **$200 billion as Meta's revenue per year**, in a passage arguing that Meta is not the party being financially imposed upon. That is the same reading of that figure the states' own filing gives at Dkt 473, reached independently: **$200 billion is the defendant's revenue, not the plaintiffs' demand**, now stated by the plaintiffs in public as well as in a filing. *Source: press-conference ASR at 34:14; compare claim 22c (Dkt 473, primary).* 22h. **[ESTABLISHED, and it is a fact about sourcing rather than about this case]** The office that held the press conference published a **truncated recording of it**. The California Department of Justice channel carries 23:26, ending on an invitation to take questions, with the **entire Q&A absent**; third-party recordings of the same event run to 52:20, and the exchange in claims 22d to 22g falls in the 29 minutes the official version omits. **An official channel is not automatically the fullest record of an official event.** *Source: durations of the five recordings, verified 2026-08-20 and listed in the cache header.* ### (f) Settlements 23. **[OBSERVED]** All four defendants **settled the first federal school-district bellwether** (brought by the Breathitt County School District in Kentucky) **before it reached a jury**, in May 2026: Meta settled May 21, 2026, a few weeks before a planned June trial, and the co-defendants settled earlier the same month. The settlement agreements, obtained by Reuters through a public-records request (the plaintiff is a public entity), total about **$27 million**: Meta $9 million, Snap $8 million, ByteDance $8 million, Alphabet $2.01 million. The terms were not disclosed in court, but the amounts are documented from the agreements themselves, not estimates. *Source: Reuters via Yahoo Finance; WKYT; Law Commentary; verified baseline (corrected: the baseline and an earlier version of this document called it a "personal-injury" bellwether; it was the first school-district bellwether).* 24. **[OBSERVED]** The bellwether settlement involved **no admission of liability** and produced **no publicly disclosed, enforceable design standard**; the disclosed agreement terms are monetary. *Source: verified baseline; Reuters via Yahoo Finance (terms as obtained).* ### (g) Status as recorded on 2026-07-16 (superseded on the trial question by section (i)) 25. **[ESTABLISHED, superseded on outcome by section (k)]** The state attorneys general's claims survived summary judgment (order filed June 29, 2026) and **went to trial**: the first trial (29-state COPPA plus 4-state consumer protection, against Meta alone) began with jury selection on August 12, 2026 and opening statements on August 18, 2026, in Oakland. The MDL's final pretrial conference was set for July 17, 2026. *Source: the order (Dkt 3214); California AG release (dates); Dkt 470 (pretrial conference); section (i) for the court's own record of the opening day.* (Tense corrected 2026-08-18: the trial-flip pass corrected claim 14 and left this one, so the published ledger asserted both that openings had been delivered and that the case was headed to trial.) 26. **[OBSERVED, and it survives the settlement]** No defendant has been found liable in MDL 3047 as of this document's date. The states' claims against Meta were resolved by a consent judgment that records no admission of liability (claim 54), not by a finding; liability on the remaining tracks is still undecided. *Source: reasonable synthesis of the June 29 ruling (denial of summary judgment leaves liability for trial) and the compliance-not-liability nature of the COPPA finding.* ### (h) Pretrial rulings and the trial schedule, confirmed on the docket (added 2026-07-25) 27. **[ESTABLISHED]** **Meta asked the court to stay the August trial and was refused.** Pretrial Order No. 6, ECF 3284, filed **July 20, 2026**, states at paragraph 10: "Meta's request to stay the trial in this case is DENIED." *(Docket PDF fetched and read 2026-07-25: `https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/gov.uscourts.cand.401490.3284.0.pdf`.)* 28. **[ESTABLISHED]** The trial dates this record has been carrying from secondary coverage are now **confirmed by the court's own orders**. Pretrial Order No. 3 (ECF 3212, filed June 29, 2026): "openings and evidence shall commence on Tuesday, August 18, 2026." Case Management Order No. 36 (ECF 3295, filed **July 23, 2026**) captions the proceeding with a stacked **"Bellwether Trials:"** heading over the two dates **August 12, 2026** and **February 3, 2027** (the caption is a block, not a sentence, so this record describes it rather than quoting a slash-joined reconstruction of it, which is what it did until 2026-08-28), which also confirms the February 2027 follow-on. Jury mechanics are on schedule: juror questionnaires "likely to be complete on August 4, 2026" and hardship stipulations due noon **August 9, 2026**. *(Docket, fetched 2026-07-25.)* 29. **[ESTABLISHED]** The **advisory-jury structure is unchanged and still expressly contested**, which vindicates this record's earlier hedge rather than resolving it. The Joint Trial Stipulations (ECF 3258, July 13, granted by PTO 6 paragraph 12) record that Meta "does not waive, and expressly preserves, any objection to the submission of remedies-related issues to an advisory jury or any other argument concerning the proper role of the advisory jury with respect to remedies." *(Docket, fetched 2026-07-25.)* 30. **[ESTABLISHED]** Further pretrial rulings this record did not previously carry: Pretrial Order No. 4 (ECF 3239, **July 6**) denied seven motions in limine and granted one in part; Pretrial Order No. 5 (ECF 3244, **July 10**); and ECF 3269 (**July 16**) denied Meta's motion to exclude Carl Saba while granting in part and denying in part the plaintiffs' motion to exclude Justin McCrary. The final pretrial conference was held **July 17, 2026**. The docket is current through **July 24, 2026** (latest entry ECF 3299). *(Docket, fetched 2026-07-25.)* 31. **[ESTABLISHED]** **The MDL's defendant set is expanding past the original four, on paper.** *Los Angeles Unified School District v. Meta et al.*, No. 4:26-cv-02463 (N.D. Cal., filed 2026-03-20), names **X Corp., Discord Inc., and Roblox Corporation** alongside Meta, Google/YouTube, ByteDance/TikTok and Snap. CMO 36 (July 23, 2026) orders counsel to meet and confer and file a joint status update by **August 17, 2026** addressing "the number of cases against X Corp., Discord, and Roblox" and "how to handle these cases moving forward." *(Docket, fetched 2026-07-25.)* **That status report was filed and is now read: see claim 31a.** 31a. **[ESTABLISHED, and it answers claim 31's open question in a direction the site should not overstate]** The Joint Status Report Pursuant to CMO 36 (MDL ECF 3407, filed 2026-08-17) gives the numbers. **Discord is "presently named in 23 constituent cases brought by four law firms"** (twelve personal-injury and eleven local-government or school-district cases); **Roblox in 13** (five personal-injury, eight local-government or school-district), to be represented across the MDL by Mayer Brown; and **X in 6**, "brought by two law firms", plus one further action naming Twitter. **But the three are barely in this litigation, and the report says so plainly.** Discord and Roblox "were not named as a party to the Master Complaint in the MDL, and discovery has proceeded without Discord's and Roblox's participation"; they "do not have access to any materials on MDL Centrality and have received none of the discovery materials in these cases." Their cases have been under **stipulated stays** since an order of 2024-11-18, extended by further stipulations on 2026-04-14 and 2026-07-02. X, for its part, argues that "Maintaining claims against X in this MDL would not promote efficiency", noting that it "first became a defendant in March 2026" and "has not participated in common discovery or dispositive-motion briefing, and is not a defendant in any bellwether", and moved to sever and transfer on a forum-selection clause. (The filing joins those clauses with em-dashes; this record quotes the two fragments rather than silently replacing the dashes with a comma to fit the house style, which is what an earlier draft of this claim did.) **The court's own words, quoted in the report from the July 17, 2026 transcript, are the most useful sentence in it: "X has never been a part of this case. I don't understand why it shouldn't be severed…. [T]his MDL has not involved X even if the allegations are similar."** *Source: MDL ECF 3407 (primary, cached 2026-08-28).* **So the honest reading is that three new names appear on complaints while none of the three is in a bellwether, two are stayed and outside discovery entirely, and the judge has questioned on the record whether the third belongs.** The site said this was a thing to watch; what it should now say is what the watching found. 32. **[ESTABLISHED, and superseded by claim 32a]** The JPML count this record cited was **2,893 actions pending / 3,068 total historical** as of the **July 1, 2026** report, verified in the PDF itself. *(Checked 2026-07-25.)* The sentence that stood here until 2026-08-28, that no August report existed, is corrected below; it was wrong, and the way it was wrong is the point. 32a. **[ESTABLISHED, correcting claim 32 on 2026-08-28]** **The current count is 3,137 actions pending / 3,312 total historical, as of the August 3, 2026 JPML report**, a rise of exactly 244 pending in the month since July 1. *Source: Pending MDL Dockets by Actions Pending, report date 8/3/2026, page 1 (PRIMARY; fetched and cached 2026-08-28).* **How the earlier claim went wrong, because it is a reusable trap, and how the first explanation of it was also wrong.** This record asserted on 2026-07-25, and again on 2026-08-28, that no August report existed, on the strength of an HTTP 404 from a **guessed filename**: the June and July files are dated the 1st, so `August-1-2026` was tried. JPML dated the August report **August 3** (the 1st was a Saturday), so the guess could not have hit. Worse, the 2026-08-28 re-probe reported 404 for **June and July as well**, which should have stopped the conclusion immediately: **the positive control failed and the absence was believed anyway.** For a few hours on 2026-08-28 this claim blamed two mechanisms, that JPML rotates old reports off the site and that the host requires a `Referer` header. **Both were wrong, and both were diagnosed from the same broken query they were meant to explain.** The real mechanism, isolated the same day by holding one variable at a time: **the JPML host returns HTTP 404 to requests whose User-Agent is the bare token `Mozilla/5.0`**, and 200 to a full browser string or to no User-Agent at all, reproducibly across three trials. The failing probes had all used the bare token; the succeeding ones happened to use a full string, and the Referer header sent alongside got the credit. Nothing was rotated: the June and July URLs serve their PDFs today, their MDL 3047 rows re-verify against claims 3 and 32 (2,664/2,839 and 2,893/3,068), and both are now cached in `sources/` so this ledger's JPML lineage no longer cites documents it does not hold. **A 404 for a bot-scented user-agent is a nastier trap than a 403**, because a 403 says you were refused and a 404 says the thing does not exist, which is exactly the false absence this repo's search discipline exists to catch. The operational rules that survive: read the index at `/pending-mdls-0` for the current filename instead of guessing, and send a full user-agent string when probing court infrastructure. *Isolation matrix run 2026-08-28: three trials of bare-token vs full-string vs no user-agent, 404/200/200 on every trial.* ### (i) The trial itself, day one *The rest of the trial, and how it ended, are in section (k).* 33. **[ESTABLISHED]** Trial was held on **2026-08-18** before Judge Gonzalez Rogers, a session of **5 hours 17 minutes**, and was continued to August 19. The court's minutes caption the matter *State Attorneys General v. Meta Platforms, Inc.* *Source: Civil Minutes, Dkt 550 (primary, fetched 2026-08-18).* 34. **[ESTABLISHED]** The states' first witness was **Arturo Bejar**, a former Meta safety engineer. The court's minutes record that he was the witness called by the plaintiff on the opening day. *Source: Dkt 550.* Note that this is the same witness whose November 2023 Senate testimony this project already distils separately; the site should not conflate the two appearances. 35. **[ESTABLISHED]** Counsel of record on the opening day included **Megan O'Neill** for the plaintiff states and **Paul Schmidt** for Meta. *Source: Dkt 550.* This settles a spelling: one outlet in the 2026-08-18 coverage rendered the deputy attorney general's first name with an h. The court's own minutes do not. 36. **[ESTABLISHED]** A **Stipulation and Updated Order Governing Trial Protocol** was entered on 2026-08-18, following the Court's guidance at a **pre-trial hearing on 2026-08-13** and in Pretrial Order No. 8 (filed 2026-08-16). It governs "the first Multistate Attorneys General (AGs) trial starting in August 2026". The word "first" is the court's. *Source: Dkt 549 and Dkt 534 (primary, both fetched 2026-08-18).* 37. **[ASSUMED, deliberately not upgraded]** Party filings in this case use **phase** language: motions in limine in June were captioned as directed at an advisory jury phase of trial, and Meta filed a supplemental witness list for a remedies phase on 2026-08-17. **Those phrases are docket-entry captions written by the filing parties, not text in any document cached here**, which is why they are described rather than quoted. **No court order reached in the 2026-08-18 pass establishes a bifurcated trial structure.** Neither the Trial Protocol Order nor Pretrial Order No. 8 mentions phases or bifurcation; Pretrial Order No. 8 uses "bifurcated" only of the exchange of witness binders. *Recorded as unresolved rather than published as structure. A party's caption is not a holding.* ### (j) The appellate track: the Ninth Circuit, 2026-08-10 Located 2026-08-18. This record had carried an appellate disposition as a single-sourced lead from one newspaper for weeks, described there as concerning Meta's First Amendment defence. The opinion is on the trial docket at entry 541, it is published, and it is not about the First Amendment. 38. **[ESTABLISHED]** On **2026-08-10** the Ninth Circuit issued a **published** opinion in *People of the State of California v. Meta Platforms, Inc.*, No. 24-7032, and **dismissed** Meta's and TikTok's appeals, along with the plaintiffs' conditional cross-appeals, **for lack of appellate jurisdiction**. Argued and submitted 2026-01-06 in San Francisco; panel of Circuit Judges Nguyen and Bennett with District Judge Matsumoto sitting by designation; opinion by Judge Nguyen. The disposition line is one word: "DISMISSED." *Source: the opinion (primary, cached 2026-08-18).* 39. **[ESTABLISHED, and it is the holding that matters]** The court held that **Section 230 provides "a defense to liability, not immunity from suit"**, so an order denying that defence "can be effectively reviewed on appeal from a final judgment" and fails the third *Cohen* factor. It rejected Meta's argument that immunity from suit should be implied where the statute does not provide it. *Source: the opinion's summary and part II.* **This is a merits holding about what Section 230 is, delivered in a case the court declined to hear on the merits**, and being published it binds the circuit. 40. **[ESTABLISHED, and it corrects a lead this project was carrying]** The opinion records that **"Meta does not identify any constitutional interests at stake"**, which is why the panel reasoned that any source of immunity from suit had to be Section 230 itself. **A characterisation of this disposition as a First Amendment ruling is not supported by the opinion.** Whether a separate appellate ruling on Meta's First Amendment arguments exists was not established in the 2026-08-18 pass; what is established is that this one is not it. *Source: the opinion at part II.1.* 41. **[ESTABLISHED]** **The trial survived a second stay attempt, this one at the appellate level.** A footnote records that "Meta's emergency motion to stay trial pending resolution of this appeal (docket entry no. 190 in case no. 24-7032) is denied as moot". This is distinct from the district court's refusal in Pretrial Order No. 6 on 2026-07-20, which this record already carries at claim 27. *Source: the opinion, footnote 4.* 42. **[ESTABLISHED]** The other two *Cohen* factors also failed. The district court's ruling did not conclusively determine the question, because that court "indicated its willingness to revisit the issue of section 230 immunity at a later stage of the proceedings"; and it did not resolve an issue separate from the merits, because deciding Section 230 immunity "necessarily involved reviewing the content and context of the factual allegations in the plaintiffs' complaint". *Source: the opinion's summary.* 43. **[ESTABLISHED, and it is a different appeal in the same courthouse]** On **2026-08-17**, the day before this trial opened, the Ninth Circuit **denied rehearing en banc** in *Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 v. Meta Platforms, Inc.*, No. 24-1672, on appeal from **D.C. No. 4:22-cv-00051-YGR**, the Northern District of California at Oakland: the same district and the same district judge as this MDL. The vote is the substance. "Judge R. Nelson votes to deny the petition for rehearing en banc, and Judges W. Fletcher and Berzon recommend granting the petition for panel rehearing en banc." The order then records that "The full court has been advised of the petition and no judge has requested a vote on whether to rehear this matter en banc", so the petition failed **for want of a call for a vote rather than on a contested one**. *Source: the order (primary, cached 2026-08-20).* **Why it sits in this ledger and not only in the policy paper:** claims 39 to 42 establish what Section 230 is in this circuit (a defence to liability, not immunity from suit) in the appeal arising from this MDL, and *Doe 1* is the circuit's holding on what Section 230 *covers* (that recommending content is publishing conduct). They are two halves of the Section 230 law this trial is being conducted under, decided a week apart, and a reader of this record who met only one of them would have half the picture. ### (k) The settlement: the consent judgment entered 2026-08-26 Added 2026-08-28. The trial recorded as under way in sections (h) and (i) ended in its second week, not in a verdict but in a judgment the parties wrote themselves and the court entered the same day. Every claim below comes from a document on the docket, cached in `sources/` and machine-verified. The money in particular is taken from the agreement's own Exhibit B rather than from any of the five different totals that ran in coverage, which is the point of this section. 44. **[ESTABLISHED]** On **2026-08-26** the parties filed a **Joint Motion to Enter Consent Judgment** (Dkt 572), attaching the fully executed settlement agreement as Exhibit 1 (Dkt 572-1, 130 pages). The court took it up the same day in a session of **49 minutes**: "The Court met with the parties regarding the Joint Motion to Enter Consent Judgment. Jury Trial is suspended." *Source: Civil Minutes for 2026-08-26 (AG-case Dkt 574, MDL ECF 3449) and the motion itself (primary, cached 2026-08-28).* 45. **[ESTABLISHED, and this is the posture that matters]** The court **granted the motion and entered the consent judgment the same day**. Trial Order No. 3 (Dkt 575, MDL ECF 3450) states: "Upon filing, judgment shall be entered, the trial is deemed vacated, and the jury shall be advised that they are each discharged immediately." The judgment itself (Dkt 576, MDL ECF 3451) is signed by Chief Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers and dated August 26, 2026, finds "there is no just reason for delay", enters "as a final judgment under Fed. R. Civ. P. 54 and 58", and directs that "The Clerk is ordered to enter this Judgment forthwith." *Source: Dkt 575 and Dkt 576 (primary, both cached 2026-08-28).* 45a. **[ESTABLISHED, and it is a correction to the official channel rather than to the press]** The California Attorney General's release of the same day describes a **proposed** settlement that "remains subject to court approval through entry of a consent judgment". That was accurate at filing and was overtaken within hours. **A press release describes the posture at the moment it was written, and an entered judgment outranks it.** The site must state the posture from Dkt 576, not from the release. *Source: the release (official, fetched 2026-08-28) against Dkt 576.* This is the same class as the June 29 / June 30 order-date correction in Discrepancies, with the roles reversed: there the primary was later than coverage, here the primary is later than the official announcement. 46. **[ESTABLISHED]** The settlement resolves the claims of **51 states, commonwealths and territories**, which is the row count of Exhibit B and matches the "bipartisan coalition of 51 attorneys general" in the California release. That is a wider group than the **29** states whose claims were being tried: Exhibit B carries a payment line for states that were not plaintiffs at this trial. The release's own enumeration reconciles exactly: five announcing attorneys general (California, Colorado, **Tennessee**, Kentucky, New Jersey) plus 46 named as joining. Three absences from Exhibit B are worth recording: **Florida** (which filed its own federal case in October 2023), **Texas**, and **New Mexico**, whose separate addiction case already went to final judgment on 2026-08-06 and is therefore consistent with its absence here. *Source: Dkt 572-1, Exhibit B; California AG release (both cached).* 46a. **[ESTABLISHED, and it closes a loop this ledger opened at claim 17a]** **The four states that left the coalition in January 2025 are settling states.** Michigan, Georgia, Missouri and North Dakota, whose withdrawal over discovery burden explains the drop from 33 joint filers to the 29 at trial, each carry a payment row in Exhibit B and each appear in the California release's roster of joining attorneys general. **So the four that could not afford to prosecute the case are paid out of its resolution.** *Source: Dkt 572-1, Exhibit B; the California AG release of 2026-08-26 (both cached 2026-08-28).* Whether that was negotiated for them or follows automatically from the release's scope is not established here. 47. **[ESTABLISHED, and it settles a number that ran five different ways in coverage]** Exhibit B states the totals directly. Each figure in its state rows is **per installment**, over **ten** installments, which the exhibit's own footnote says in terms: "Figures are the payment amounts per installment, not the total amounts over the full payment term." The totals row reads **$1,165,662,174.56** in Guaranteed Installment Payments, **$502,402,600.77** in Contingency Installment Payments, and **$16,680,647,753.21** as the maximum across all installments. Two further sums sit outside that table: a **$75 million** Cost Fund Payment for state costs, and a **Cambridge Settlement Amount** defined as **$459,293,017.80**. The arithmetic maximum is therefore about **$17.21 billion**, of which the Exhibit B maximum alone is about **$16.68 billion** and the guaranteed portion about **$11.66 billion**. *Source: Dkt 572-1, Sections I.N, VI.B and VI.E and Exhibit B.* 48. **[ESTABLISHED, and it is the most underreported term in the agreement]** **About 30 percent of the money is contingent, and the condition is what Meta's competitors do.** The Contingency Installment Payments ($5,024,026,007.70 over ten installments, 30.1 percent of the Exhibit B maximum) are owed only once a "Contingent Monetary Payment Trigger" occurs in a given state, which requires both industry-wide adoption of the contingent time-management terms and that "all Core Industry Members with annual profits above $10 billion are subject to a monetary obligation to such Settling State" of comparable size. "Core Industry Members" is a defined term and means exactly three companies: the agreement says it "shall mean Snap, TikTok, and YouTube, for so long as the product or service is available to US Teen Users." If the trigger is never met, the agreement is explicit about where the money goes: those payments "shall be permanently forfeited by such Settling State and retained by Meta." *Source: Dkt 572-1, Sections I.U, I.W and VI.D.* 49. **[ESTABLISHED, and it is the same condition applied to the remedy]** **The brake is written in two phases, and the stronger phase is contingent on the same industry-wide adoption.** Phase I applies for five years and is unconditional: a default night access mode "from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m.", and a default daily limit "of 2 hours per day" measured cumulatively across the covered platforms. Phase II applies only "whenever, in the 10 years following the Effective Date, Industry-Wide Adoption has occurred" and remains in effect for the obligation in question, and widens the night mode to "from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m." "Industry-Wide Adoption" in turn requires Snap, TikTok and YouTube to be bound to substantively equivalent obligations by settlement, by statute, or by audited voluntary undertaking. *Source: Dkt 572-1, Sections I.DD and II.B.1 to II.B.3.* **For this project this is the finding of the whole document**: the settlement concedes the brake is buildable and then makes its stronger setting conditional on competitors not defecting, which is the collective-action problem the policy paper argues a written standard exists to solve. 49a. **[ESTABLISHED, and it bounds every product term above and below]** **The phrase *Meta's apps*, as this record has been using it, means Instagram and Facebook and not the rest of Meta.** The defined term every injunctive obligation attaches to is "Meta SMP", covering "the existing and future web and app versions of Instagram" and of Facebook, plus future products meeting a definition, "excluding, in each case, any and all (A) direct messaging features linked to or included in those platforms, such as Instagram Direct or Messenger". WhatsApp, Messenger and Meta's other products are outside the brake entirely, and time in messaging does not count against the daily limit. Reader-facing prose on this site should name Instagram and Facebook rather than gesturing at Meta's apps generally. *Source: Dkt 572-1, Section I.II.* 50. **[ESTABLISHED]** The Phase I terms are written the way this project's standard asks a brake to be written, and the language is worth recording precisely because it is enforceable rather than aspirational. The default "cannot be modified to a less restrictive setting without approval from a Supervising Parent". Meta must limit adjacent surfaces so that teens "cannot access broader Meta SMP features (beyond the content in a single message) and effectively circumvent" the limit. And when the brake engages, Meta's apps "shall not recommend or otherwise suggest that the Teen User utilize a different Meta SMP or engage in messaging", which is an explicit ban on the sideways nudge. *Source: Dkt 572-1, Sections II.B.2.a and II.B.3.a.* 51. **[ESTABLISHED]** Other injunctive terms, all default-on for teen users unless noted. Numbers of likes and reactions: Meta's apps "will, by default, disable Teen Users from seeing numbers of likes or reactions", modifiable only by a supervising parent. Cosmetic procedure filters are disabled for teens outright. A **non-personalized feed** must be offered as a selectable default home feed within four months, with a prompt every 90 days, and the agreement forbids a thumb on that scale: Meta "shall not preselect or prioritize accepting or rejecting this switch for the Teen User and shall present this choice independent of other setting options". Note the asymmetry that the site should not blur: the time limits and the likes counter are **defaults**, while the non-personalized feed is an **option**. *Source: Dkt 572-1, Sections II.C and II.D.* 52. **[ESTABLISHED]** Compliance is audited, but not for the whole term. An **Independent Auditor** reports to a State Committee on implementation and must "prepare and make public an executive summary of each Final Report". The auditor's term "shall begin two (2) months following the Effective Date and continue until 120 days following the fifth Final Report", while the obligations of the judgment "shall expire 10 years from the Effective Date". **So the audited window is roughly the first five years of a ten-year judgment**, and the later years are enforced by the court's retained jurisdiction rather than by a standing auditor. *Source: Dkt 572-1, Sections III.C, III.G and III.J; Dkt 576, Section IX.B.* 53. **[ESTABLISHED]** The Effective Date is defined as "the first business day after which the Court in the MDL Action has entered the Consent Judgment", which makes it **2026-08-27**, and the Compliance Date is six months after that. Dates in the injunctive terms run from those two, not from the announcement. *Source: Dkt 572-1, Sections I.Y and I.R.* 54. **[ESTABLISHED, and the site must not overstate what this settles]** The judgment records no finding of wrongdoing and expressly disclaims being a standard. It states that the agreement and judgment "do not constitute an admission by Defendant of any liability, wrongdoing, or violation of any local, state, federal, or international law", and, in the sentence that matters most for how this project may describe it, that "Nothing in this Consent Judgment or the Agreement shall be construed to apply to, establish a standard of care for, or serve as precedent in any non-participating U.S. state or any international jurisdiction whatsoever." **The obligations are contractual and limited to the settling states.** *Source: Dkt 576, Section IX.C.* 55. **[ESTABLISHED]** What is **not** released. The release carves out criminal liability, securities, tax, antitrust and environmental liability, and two categories that matter here directly: "Any claims of private individuals for any types of monetary or injunctive relief", and claims by school districts and other governmental-unit plaintiffs whose cases are in JCCP 5255 or the MDL. **The personal-injury and school-district tracks of MDL 3047 survive this judgment, as do the other three defendants, who are not parties to it.** What is carved *in* rather than out is at claim 61: the fifteen satellite state-court AG cases the release does reach. *Source: Dkt 572-1, Section IV.C.1.* 56. **[ESTABLISHED]** Both sides waived appeal. The judgment provides that "Each Party waives all rights to appeal this Final Judgment and all orders to date arising from the Action" and requires every party to withdraw pending appeals within five business days, with a carve-out for the portions of any appellate matter that arise from other actions. **That disposes of Meta's remaining appellate track in this case**, including anything left over from the Ninth Circuit disposition at claims 38 to 42. *Source: Dkt 576, Section XI.B.* 57. **[ESTABLISHED]** **The full trial record, now that it is closed.** Evidence was heard on four days: 2026-08-18 (5 hours 17 minutes), 2026-08-19 (5 hours 13 minutes), 2026-08-24 (5 hours 27 minutes) and 2026-08-25 (5 hours 22 minutes). 2026-08-20 was a status conference of 1 hour 34 minutes on "trial filings, protocols and e-discovery issues", after which the matter was continued to the Monday. The plaintiff states called five witnesses in all: **Arturo Bejar**, **Dr. Jean Twenge**, **George Volichenko**, **Francesco Fogu** and **Adam Mosseri**. *Source: Civil Minutes for each day (AG-case Dkt 550, 560, 561, 571, 573, 574).* 58. **[ESTABLISHED]** **Mark Zuckerberg did not testify at this trial.** The states' case was interrupted by the settlement four days into evidence, and no civil minute entry records him as a witness. This closes an open question this ledger carried from the opening day, and the answer is that the trial ended before it was reached, not that either side resolved it. *Source: the civil minutes for every trial day, which name every witness called.* 59. **[OBSERVED, and it is a caution about secondary coverage of a number]** Coverage of the settlement on 2026-08-26 and 2026-08-27 reported the total as **$16.68 billion**, **$16.7 billion**, **$17 billion**, **$17.1 billion** and **$18 billion**, in outlets of comparable standing, and one report described the coalition as 29 states while another said 47 states plus four territories and a third said 51 attorneys general. The Exhibit B figures at claim 47 reconcile most of the spread: $16.68 billion is the exhibit's own maximum, and roughly $17.2 billion is that plus the cost fund and the Cambridge payment. **No published account located in this pass separated the guaranteed money from the contingent money**, which is the distinction that determines what Meta actually pays. *Source: contemporaneous coverage, surveyed 2026-08-28; reconciliation against Dkt 572-1, Exhibit B.* 60. **[ESTABLISHED, corrected 2026-08-28 on the same day's audit]** The Cambridge Settlement Amount buys **releases of Cambridge Analytica-era claims from 48 of the 51 settling states**, allocated by Exhibit E, whose 48 rows sum to the defined $459,293,017.80 exactly. **An earlier version of this claim said the settlement resolves the four Cambridge Analytica-era state complaints outright, and that is not what the document does.** The agreement enumerates four pending Cambridge complaints as the subject-matter template: *People v. Meta Platforms, Inc.*, No. 25-631678 (Cal. Super. Ct., S.F. Cnty.); *State of New Mexico ex rel. Torrez v. Facebook, Inc.*, No. D-101-CV-2021-00132; *District of Columbia v. Facebook, Inc.*, No. 2018-CA-008715-B; and *People of the State of Illinois v. Facebook, Inc.*, No. 2018 CH 03863. But the "Cambridge Settling States" list **excludes California, the District of Columbia and American Samoa, and does not include New Mexico at all**, and only Cambridge Settling States are Cambridge Releasors. So of the four enumerated complaints, **only Illinois's is held by a releasing state**; the California, D.C. and New Mexico Cambridge cases are not released by this agreement, and nothing in it establishes what becomes of them. **The New Mexico one is in any event a different case from the addiction case in this project's New Mexico ledger** (No. D-101-CV-2023-02838), and neither New Mexico case is part of this settlement. *Source: Dkt 572-1, Sections I.L, I.M, I.N, I.O and IV.B, and Exhibit E (48 rows verified to sum to the defined amount).* 61. **[ESTABLISHED, and it is the part of the scope this record missed on its first pass]** **The settlement reaches past this case into the states' own courts.** "Actions" is defined as "the MDL Action and the Satellite AG Actions", and "Satellite AG Actions" is an enumerated list of **fifteen state-court cases in fourteen jurisdictions**: Arkansas (Polk County), the District of Columbia, Iowa (Polk County), Massachusetts (Suffolk County), Mississippi (Hinds County), Montana (Lewis and Clark County), three Nevada cases (Clark County), New Hampshire (Merrimack County), Oklahoma (Osage County), Puerto Rico (San Juan), **Tennessee ("State of Tennessee v. Meta Platforms, Inc., et al., Chancery Court, Twentieth Judicial District, Davidson County, No. 23-1364-IV (Tenn.)")**, Utah (Salt Lake County), and Vermont (Chittenden County). The agreement makes those cases end in **two steps, on two different clocks**, which is worth separating because they are easy to conflate. First, under Section X.G, "Promptly, and in no event more than 24 hours after the execution hereof", Meta and the settling states must "jointly notify the courts in each of the Actions" of the settlement and "jointly request that each court vacate all deadlines, including trial dates". Then, under Section X.I, they "shall jointly move in each Satellite AG Action within ten (10) business days" of that notice "for the entry of the Consent Judgment fully and finally resolving the Releasors' Claims". **A vacated calendar is not a resolved case**; the second step is the one that ends it. **The Tennessee entry is the case this project covers as its own separate proceeding**, whose Nashville trial was in its fifth week of evidence on the day this agreement was executed; see the `tennessee-v-meta` ledger, section (g), for that side of it. *Source: Dkt 572-1, Sections I.A, I.ZZ and X.I.* 61a. **[ESTABLISHED as to the list and the one docket read; the access survey is the drafter's, dated 2026-08-28]** **The fifteen satellite cases, and whether anyone can actually watch them.** The agreement gives each a caption and a number, which makes them checkable in principle. Whether they are checkable in practice varies by state, and this was surveyed rather than assumed: | Jurisdiction | Case number | Public docket access, probed 2026-08-28 | |---|---|---| | Arkansas, Polk Cnty. Circuit | 57CV-23-47 | CourtConnect returns HTTP 200 and **an empty JavaScript shell**; a plain fetch sees no case data at all | | District of Columbia Superior | 2023-CAB-006550 | eAccess search endpoint returned HTTP 500; no case-level query was reached | | Iowa, Polk Cnty. District | EQCE092822 | not probed | | Massachusetts, Suffolk Superior | 2384CV02397 | only the portal landing page was loaded; the case itself was not queried | | Mississippi, Hinds Cnty. Chancery | 25CH1:23-cv-01205 | not probed | | Montana, Lewis & Clark Cnty. | BDV-25-2024-0000797 | not probed | | Nevada, Clark Cnty. District (three cases) | A-24-886110-B, A-24-886115-B, A-24-886120-B | probe redirected (HTTP 302) | | New Hampshire, Merrimack Superior | 217-2023-CV-00594 | not probed | | **Oklahoma, Osage Cnty. District** | **CJ-2023-180** | **fully open, server-rendered, no login: the whole docket is one HTTP GET** | | Puerto Rico, San Juan | SJ2024CV11569 | not probed | | Tennessee, Davidson Cnty. Chancery | 23-1364-IV | register free, **documents behind a paid subscription** (see the `tennessee-v-meta` ledger) | | Utah, Salt Lake Cnty. Third District | 230908060 | only the XChange landing page was loaded; the case itself was not queried | | Vermont, Chittenden Superior | 23-CV-04453 | the portal root timed out; the case itself was not queried | **The survey's own limits, stated because a table like this invites over-reading.** Only three rows record a real case-level query (Arkansas, Nevada, Oklahoma; Tennessee's access was established separately in its own ledger). Five were not probed at all, and four more were touched only at a portal's front door, which proves nothing about the case behind it; a *not probed* row is not a paywalled one, and the earlier version of this project's position, that these are *mostly* paywalled and not worth tracking, was an assertion with one data point behind it and is retired here. What the probing does establish is that **at least one satellite docket is completely open**, which is enough to disprove the general claim, and that **HTTP 200 is not evidence of access** for this family of sites: Arkansas returns a successful empty shell against a direct case URL, the same false-success shape this project already documented for the European Commission's press corner. *Source: the case list from Dkt 572-1, Section I.ZZ; the access results from probes run 2026-08-28 and recorded here rather than in prose.* 61b. **[ESTABLISHED, and it is the satellite mechanism working, observed on a primary]** **Oklahoma's docket shows the settlement arriving.** The Osage County docket for CJ-2023-180 carries, on **2026-08-26**, the entry "JOINT MOTION TO VACATE ALL CASE DEADLINES", the same day the federal consent judgment was entered, alongside a "STIPULATED AMENDED PROTECTIVE ORDER" the day before. **That is the first of the two steps at claim 61, the 24-hour obligation under Section X.G, not the ten-business-day one under X.I.** An earlier version of this claim called it the ten-day obligation, which conflated the two clocks: what Oklahoma did on the day was ask its court to clear the calendar, and the motion to enter a consent judgment there is the next thing to look for. Either way it is visible in a state court that charges nothing to look. **What cannot be done there is quotation:** OSCN serves its docket entries as text but its underlying documents as **TIFF images with no text layer** (a `pdftotext` extraction of the motion returns zero characters against a passing control), so those documents are pointers to a place in a record, never a text to quote, the same treatment this project gives ASR transcripts and the Dutch judgments. *Source: OSCN docket export, cached 2026-08-28; OSCN's own header states the information is not an official record, which is why the entry titles are cited and nothing is quoted from the documents.* 62. **[ESTABLISHED, and it is the quietest term in the agreement about the loudest count at trial]** **The deception theory gets a forward-looking injunction, and it is the least enforceable term in the document.** Section II.E.4 provides: "Meta is enjoined from making false, misleading, or deceptive representations regarding the effect or efficacy of safety features for Teen Users on Meta SMPs." Then the gates: it "applies exclusively to representations made by Meta on or after the Effective Date"; it "may be enforced exclusively with the consent of a majority of the State Committee, and only if the enforcing state provides Meta with at least 30 days notice of the alleged violation, and an opportunity to confer and propose a corrective action plan"; and compliance with it "shall not be subject to the independent audit under Section III". **The claim that carried both trials (that Meta misrepresented its safety tools) is answered prospectively by an injunction no single state can enforce alone and the auditor is instructed not to examine.** *Source: Dkt 572-1, Section II.E.4.* 63. **[ESTABLISHED, recorded because the site's own test runs on these definitions]** Four defined terms decide how strong the product obligations actually are. **"Reasonably Accessible"** (the standard for finding the feed option): "viewable within three user gestures and clearly labeled, easy to notice, viewable without scrolling, and discoverable in an intuitive location within the Meta SMP". **"Clear[ly] and Conspicuous[ly]"** (the standard for the prompt): "difficult to miss (i.e., easily noticeable), and easily understandable by users". **"Non‑Personalized Feed"**: "a Meta SMP feed for which content is populated by accounts the Teen User follows or has friended, displayed in chronological order", with a carve-out for integrity, security and legal moderation that "shall not constitute personalization". And **"Longform Content"**: "a piece of video or audio content with a duration of at least 22 minutes" not artificially extended, which matters because the daily limit's own text says it "shall not include time spent watching Longform Content, engaging in messaging, or accessing settings". **A teen's hour inside a 22-minute-plus video counts as zero against the two-hour limit.** (Note the extraction wrinkle: the defined term uses a non-breaking hyphen, U+2011, where the operative text uses an ordinary one, so a naive search for the definition by its own name misses it.) *Source: Dkt 572-1, Sections I.Q, I.EE, I.OO, I.VV and II.B.3.a.i.* ## Tensions / open questions - **Whether Mark Zuckerberg testifies at this trial. CLOSED 2026-08-28, and the answer is that the question expired.** He did not. The trial ended on 2026-08-26, four days into evidence, and no civil minute entry names him as a witness; the states called Bejar, Twenge, Volichenko, Fogu and Mosseri and got no further. The expectation recorded here on the opening day (Meta's counsel saying in opening statement that he would testify, the judge indicating the same) was never tested. **He did testify in person in the California state bellwether on 2026-02-18** (see `california-state-bellwethers` claim 26), which remains the only occasion on which he has answered for these design decisions under oath in a trial. *Source: the civil minutes for every trial day (claim 57).* **Note what this closure is worth: a settlement four days into evidence is also a settlement before the chief executive took the stand**, and this record should not imply the two are unrelated when it cannot show that they are. - **What Meta's age gate actually does when a user enters an under-13 birthdate (opened 2026-08-20).** This is the sharpest factual dispute this record has found about a specific product mechanic, and the COPPA claims at the centre of this trial turn on it. **Colorado's attorney general said in public that entering a birthdate under 13 does not remove the user: the product prompts them to enter a different date.** In sworn testimony in the California bellwether six months earlier, **Meta's chief executive said enforcement of the age limits is very difficult and that the company removes users found to be underage.** Those are not the same account. One describes a product that actively coaches a child past the gate; the other describes a company struggling to catch children who lie. **Both cannot be the whole truth of the same screen**, and the difference is exactly the kind this project exists to resolve, because a control that redirects a truthful answer is not a weak brake but an inverted one. *Sources: press-conference ASR at 10:37 (CAPTION-ASR, quarantined) and multi-outlet coverage of the 2026-02-18 testimony (secondary). Neither is a primary. Resolvable from the trial record, from Meta's own product, or from the COPPA exhibits.* - **Are the "four states" a subset of the "29 states"? RESOLVED (2026-07-16): subset.** Law.com's headline counts the first trial at 29 states total; Reuters describes the COPPA claims plus consumer-protection claims from CA/CO/KY/NJ; all four are among the original 33 federal filers. No source lists the four as additional to the 29. Caveat: the subset reading is a well-supported inference across sources; no single source states it in one sentence. - **"Terms formally undisclosed" vs. specific settlement dollars. RESOLVED (2026-07-16).** Reuters obtained the actual settlement agreements through a public-records request, so the per-defendant amounts (claim 23) are documented terms, not reported estimates. "Not disclosed in court" remains true. - **"Bellwether" is used for different things.** The *settled* bellwether was the first school-district test case (Breathitt County). The *August* trial is the state attorneys general's trial. A first school-district bellwether *trial* (Tucson) is expected February 2027. All get called "bellwether" in coverage; they are different tracks within the same MDL and should not be conflated. - **The "$1.4 trillion" is a ceiling, not a verdict.** It is Meta's own framing of the maximum arithmetic exposure. What the states will actually argue for, and what a court could award, are unresolved. - **The exact rosters of the 29 (August) and 14 (February 2027) states** are not enumerated in any accessible source. **Narrowed 2026-08-20**: the *departures* are now named (Michigan, Georgia, Missouri, North Dakota, January 2025, claim 17a), which accounts for 33 minus 4 equals 29 without enumerating who remains. - **The four withdrawal filings have not been read (opened 2026-08-20).** Claim 17a rests on the Michigan Attorney General's office as quoted by one outlet, plus structural corroboration from the Ninth Circuit caption. A search of the MDL docket for a January 2025 notice of dismissal did not locate one in this pass, and **that is a statement about the query rather than about the docket**: the search API samples documents rather than returning a full docket, so absence here is not evidence. Reading the filings would take claim 17a to ESTABLISHED and would settle whether the other three states gave the same reason. - **The Section 230 narrowing is ANCHORED as of 2026-08-18, though not to the orders themselves.** This was opened 2026-07-24 because the hub described earlier MDL rulings as narrowing the case on Section 230 grounds with nothing in this ledger tying that to a document. The Ninth Circuit's published opinion now describes those rulings directly, which is a better anchor than the coverage and a weaker one than the orders: on the **first track**, the district court granted Meta's motion in part and denied it in part, "ruling that section 230 bars some of the claims and only to the extent that they concern allegedly defective platform features targeting Meta's role as a publisher of third-party content", and it then **denied** Meta's motion to certify that order for interlocutory appeal under 1292(b); on the **fourth track and most of the second**, it "generally denied" the motions and let the claims proceed while finding that Section 230 provides "a fairly significant limitation" on them. **What is still missing is the order numbers and dates**, which an appellate opinion does not supply. The hub may now state the narrowing as a holding described by the Ninth Circuit rather than as background. See claims 38 to 42. - **The states' own penalty submission has been read. CLOSED 2026-08-18, and the answer was not the expected one.** Dkt 473 was fetched and read. It states no monetary total: the AGs say they will present final requests for monetary relief at trial. The only "$200 billion" in it is **Meta's 2025 revenue**, cited to Meta's Form 10-K. See claims 22a to 22c. - **What the states will actually seek. LARGELY ANSWERED 2026-08-20, and the answer is that they will not name a number (opened 2026-08-18).** Four outlets covering the opening reported roughly $200 billion as the states' ask, two of them placing the statement at a hearing in the week of August 10 and one attributing it to a court filing. No filing reached states it as a demand, and the states' own filing uses that number for the defendant's revenue. Two readings were left open: the states stated it separately at an August hearing, whose transcript (Dkt 540) is **not mirrored in the free archive**; or the coverage read a revenue figure as a demand. **The second reading is now strongly supported, from the plaintiffs in public.** At the press conference on the day of opening statements a Reuters reporter put both figures to the attorneys general and asked whether the states had a number. California's attorney general said the states are not asking for $1.4 trillion, that the figure is Meta's own arithmetic maximum, that $200 billion is Meta's annual revenue, and that the states leave the final amount to the judge's discretion. See claims 22d to 22g. **So the honest answer to "what will the states seek" is that they have declined to state a total, which is the same thing Dkt 473 says.** **What is still open, and why this is not marked closed.** Those claims rest on a machine transcription and are tiered OBSERVED; ASR is not a verbatim record and cannot establish exact words. Dkt 540 remains unmirrored, so if a figure was stated at the August hearing this record still cannot see it. And a public statement about what a party is not seeking is not a filing: the states' actual trial request, when made, is the thing that settles this. **The site should still publish no figure as the states' demand**, which is what it already does. - **Whether the trial was bifurcated is now unanswerable, and stays recorded rather than closed (opened 2026-08-18).** See claim 37. The trial ended before any remedies phase could exist, so the docket will never settle what the structure would have been. It is left here because the underlying lesson is the durable part: a party's docket-entry caption is not a holding, and this record declined to publish one as structure. - **Does the February 2027 follow-on trial survive the settlement? NARROWED 2026-08-28, and mostly answered by the judgment's own terms.** Claim 17 records a second trial for 14 further states' own state-law claims. The entered judgment states that "all claims by the States in this Action are fully and finally resolved through entry of this Consent Judgment", and the released states include every state that was to be tried, so **the states' February 2027 trial has nothing left to try**. What holds the February 3, 2027 date now is the **school-district bellwether track**, which the release expressly carves out: coverage identifies the cases as the Tucson Unified School District and the Charleston County School District, the second of which this record had not previously named. **Still open:** no scheduling order confirming the school-district pairing has been read here (the Tucson expectation is claim 17's, from Meta's own filing; Charleston is coverage only), and no order formally vacating the states' follow-on has been located, so the mechanics are inferred from the release's scope rather than from a docket entry. **Narrowed further 2026-08-28 by ECF 3407** (claim 31a): X states it "is not a defendant in any bellwether", and Discord's and Roblox's cases are stayed outside discovery, so whatever is tried in February 2027 is tried against the original four. *Source: Dkt 576, Section XI.A; MDL Update and JTNY trial-calendar coverage, August 2026 (secondary, for the two district names).* - **Whether the fourteen non-Tennessee satellite cases actually get their consent judgments entered. OPEN (2026-08-28), and partly checkable for free.** Claim 61 records the ten-business-day obligation, which runs to roughly 2026-09-10. Claim 61b shows Oklahoma performing it. The other thirteen were surveyed for access (claim 61a) and most are either behind a subscription, behind a JavaScript shell, or unprobed. **This is a Tension rather than an issue because it belongs to this proceeding's evidentiary record**, and it has a real trigger rather than a reminder. *Trigger: refetch `https://www.oscn.net/dockets/GetCaseInformation.aspx?db=osage&number=CJ-2023-180` and look for an entry disposing of the case; Oklahoma is the cheapest proxy for whether the mechanism is completing generally.* - **Whether the four withdrawn states were paid as part of a negotiated re-entry or by operation of the release. OPEN (2026-08-28).** See claim 46a. Michigan, Georgia, Missouri and North Dakota left over discovery burden and are settling states with Exhibit B rows. The agreement does not narrate how they got there. Answering it would say something about whether withdrawing from a case like this actually costs a state anything. ## Sources - META AND STATE ATTORNEYS GENERAL CONSENT JUDGMENT, entered 2026-08-26, AG-case Dkt 576 / MDL ECF 3451 (PRIMARY; fetched and cached 2026-08-28): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.576.0.pdf - Settlement Agreement, fully executed, filed 2026-08-26 as Exhibit 1 to the Joint Motion to Enter Consent Judgment, AG-case Dkt 572-1, 130 pages (PRIMARY; fetched and cached 2026-08-28; byte-identical to the copy the California Department of Justice publishes with its release): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.572.1.pdf - TRIAL ORDER NO. 3 RE TRIAL PROCEEDINGS, TIMING OF JUROR DISCHARGE, & PRIVILEGE DISPUTE, filed 2026-08-26, AG-case Dkt 575 / MDL ECF 3450 (PRIMARY; fetched and cached 2026-08-28): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.575.0.pdf - Civil Minutes for the trial days of 2026-08-19, 2026-08-20, 2026-08-24, 2026-08-25 and 2026-08-26, AG-case Dkt 560, 561, 571, 573 and 574 (PRIMARY; fetched and cached 2026-08-28 as one combined file): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/ - California Attorney General (Rob Bonta) press release announcing the settlement, dated 2026-08-26 (PRIMARY, official AG; fetched and cached 2026-08-28; describes the settlement as PROPOSED, which the same day's entered judgment overtakes, see claim 45a): https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-secures-transformative-17-billion-settlement-meta - PUBLISHED OPINION, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, People of the State of California v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 24-7032, argued and submitted 2026-01-06, filed 2026-08-10 (PRIMARY; fetched and cached 2026-08-18; on the trial docket as Dkt 541, in the MDL as ECF 3398): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.541.0.pdf - Meta's Opposition to the State AGs' Submission on Penalties, Dkt 455, filed 2026-07-06 (PRIMARY; fetched 2026-07-16, cached 2026-08-18 so its spans could be machine-verified): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.455.0.pdf - State AGs' Reply Regarding State AGs' Penalty and Disgorgement Charts, Dkt 473, filed 2026-07-13 (PRIMARY; fetched 2026-08-18 via CourtListener/RECAP): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.473.0.pdf - Civil Minutes for the trial day of 2026-08-18, Dkt 550 (PRIMARY; fetched 2026-08-18): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.550.0.pdf - Stipulation and Updated Order Governing Trial Protocol, Dkt 549 / MDL ECF 3416, filed 2026-08-18 (PRIMARY; fetched 2026-08-18): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.549.0.pdf - Pretrial Order No. 8, Dkt 534 / MDL ECF 3392, filed 2026-08-16 (PRIMARY; fetched 2026-08-18): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.534.0.pdf - JPML Pending MDL Dockets by Actions Pending report, dated August 3, 2026 (PRIMARY; fetched and cached 2026-08-28; the current filename is listed at the index below, and the host returns a false 404 to minimal user-agent strings, see claim 32a): https://www.jpml.uscourts.gov/pending-mdls-0 - JPML Pending MDL Dockets by Actions Pending report, dated July 1, 2026 (PRIMARY; fetched 2026-07-16, cached 2026-08-28): https://www.jpml.uscourts.gov/sites/jpml/files/Pending_MDL_Dockets_By_Actions_Pending-July-1-2026.pdf - JPML Pending MDL Dockets by Actions Pending report, dated June 1, 2026 (PRIMARY; fetched 2026-07-16, cached 2026-08-28, for the month-over-month delta): https://www.jpml.uscourts.gov/sites/jpml/files/Pending_MDL_Dockets_By_Actions_Pending-June-1-2026.pdf - Joint Motion to Enter Consent Judgment, Dkt 572, filed 2026-08-26 (PRIMARY; fetched and cached 2026-08-28): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.572.0.pdf - Joint Status Report Pursuant to CMO 36 on the X Corp., Discord and Roblox cases, MDL ECF 3407, filed 2026-08-17 (PRIMARY; fetched and cached 2026-08-28): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/gov.uscourts.cand.401490.3407.0.pdf - Pretrial Order No. 3, MDL ECF 3212, filed 2026-06-29; Joint Trial Stipulations, ECF 3258, filed 2026-07-13; Pretrial Order No. 6, ECF 3284, filed 2026-07-20; Case Management Order No. 36, ECF 3295, filed 2026-07-23 (PRIMARY; read on the docket 2026-07-25, cached 2026-08-28 when the quote check was widened to section (h)): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/ - Docket export for the Oklahoma satellite AG case, STATE OF OKLAHOMA et al VS. META PLATFORMS et al, No. CJ-2023-00180, Osage County District Court, via the Oklahoma State Courts Network (PRIMARY for docket events, and OSCN itself says it is not the official record; documents are TIFF images with no text layer; fetched 2026-08-28): https://www.oscn.net/dockets/GetCaseInformation.aspx?db=osage&number=CJ-2023-180 - Summary-judgment order, Dkt 3214 (AG-case Dkt 440), filed 2026-06-29, via CourtListener/RECAP (PRIMARY; fetched 2026-07-16): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/gov.uscourts.cand.401490.3214.0_3.pdf - Meta's penalty submission, Dkt 455, filed 2026-07-06, via CourtListener/RECAP (PRIMARY; fetched 2026-07-16): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.455.0.pdf - Joint pretrial statement, Dkt 470, via CourtListener/RECAP (PRIMARY; fetched 2026-07-16): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.470.0.pdf - CourtListener dockets (PRIMARY; consulted 2026-07-16): MDL master 4:22-md-03047, https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65407433/in-re-social-media-adolescent-addictionpersonal-injury-products-liability/ ; consolidated AG case 4:23-cv-05448, https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67908468/people-of-the-state-of-california-v-meta-platforms-inc/ - California Attorney General (Rob Bonta) press release on the ruling, dated 2026-06-30 (PRIMARY, official AG; fetched 2026-07-16): https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/ahead-meta-trial-attorney-general-bonta-secures-critical-win - California Attorney General press release on the October 2023 filing (PRIMARY, official AG; fetched 2026-07-16): https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-files-lawsuit-against-meta-over-harms-youth-mental-health - Top Class Actions, Meta social media addiction lawsuits cleared for August bellwether trial (SECONDARY; fetched 2026-07-16): https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/meta-social-media-addiction-lawsuits-cleared-for-august-bellwether-trial/ - JURIST, Meta says state AGs seek $1.4T over youth safety claims (SECONDARY; fetched 2026-07-16): https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/07/meta-says-state-ags-seek-1-4t-over-youth-safety-claims/ - Engadget, Meta is facing $1.4 trillion in state lawsuits over social media addiction (SECONDARY; fetched 2026-07-16): https://www.engadget.com/2209332/meta-is-facing-1-4-trillion-in-state-lawsuits-over-social-media-addiction/ - Law Commentary, Meta pushes back on states' $1.4 trillion penalty demand (SECONDARY; fetched 2026-07-16; its 'extraordinary and unjustified' is an unquoted paraphrase, see Discrepancies): https://www.lawcommentary.com/articles/meta-pushes-back-on-states-14-trillion-penalty-demand-in-social-media-addiction-case - Reuters wire via Claims Journal (order timing), Insurance Journal (trial structure), Yahoo Finance (bellwether settlement records request) (SECONDARY; fetched 2026-07-16): https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2026/07/01/338553.htm ; https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2026/07/07/876450.htm ; https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/meta-paid-9-million-settle-234825076.html - Law360 headline + MLex, advisory-jury / withdrawn-jury-demand coverage (SECONDARY, surfaced via web search): https://www.law360.com/articles/2482427/ ; https://www.mlex.com/mlex/data-privacy-security/articles/2482653 - NOT FETCHED (403; paywalled even in archive): Law.com/The Recorder, https://www.law.com/therecorder/2026/06/30/29-states-head-to-trial-against-meta-after-social-media-addiction-judge-refuses-to-toss-claims-/ ; Courthouse News, https://www.courthousenews.com/meta-tries-to-defeat-ags-claims-ahead-of-childrens-addiction-trial/ --- # The California state-court bellwethers (JCCP 5255): K.G.M. v. Meta and Google, and the follow-on trials Source: https://de-amplify.com/distillations/california-state-bellwethers > Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding (JCCP) 5255, California state court (Los Angeles Superior Court); first bellwether K.G.M. v. Meta and Google As of 2026-08-20. This is the evidence-tiered claim ledger behind the K.G.M. case file on de-amplify.com, published in full for transparency. Tiers: ESTABLISHED (stated in a primary source, or said on the official record at a hearing; a fact about what was filed or said, not necessarily adjudicated true), OBSERVED (secondary coverage, or a document read into the record), ASSUMED (the distiller's inference, flagged). Provenance flags ([interested-party], [advocacy-witness], [single-witness], [lawmaker characterization]) mark claims resting 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, a court-issued notice, an official government release) or in the project's verified baseline with independent corroboration; 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, not the distillation skill's agreement-based multi-source tiers. ## Reader summary As of July 25, 2026, there is a large group of lawsuits in California state court, not the separate federal case, that accuse social media companies of designing their apps to be addictive and harming young users. About 1,600 of these suits, brought by individual young people, families, and more than 250 school districts, have been bundled together in a single coordinated proceeding called JCCP 5255, run out of Los Angeles Superior Court. A handful of "bellwether" (test) cases are being tried first to show how juries might react. In the first bellwether, K.G.M. v. Meta and Google, a jury returned a $6 million verdict on March 25, 2026 against Meta (which owns Instagram) and Google (which owns YouTube); Snap and TikTok had settled out of that first test case around the turn of 2026, which is why only two companies faced the jury. In early June 2026 (the ruling was announced June 10), the trial judge turned down the companies' requests to throw out or re-run the case, and both companies have since filed notices that they will appeal. Important: that verdict is being appealed; it has NOT been reviewed or approved by any appeals court yet. A second test case was set for trial on July 27, 2026, and it collapsed before it could be heard: YouTube settled out (reported June 23), then TikTok (June 30), then Snap reached a tentative settlement (July 20), and on July 22 the plaintiff simply dropped his remaining claims against Meta, which on the available reporting paid nothing. So the second test case produced settlements from three companies and no jury verdict at all. Worth holding on to, because it is the pattern rather than an accident: of the two bellwethers tried so far, one reached a jury and the other was resolved by the defendants leaving the room. ## Claims (the ledger) ### (a) The JCCP 5255 proceeding and the court 1. **[ESTABLISHED]** The California cases are consolidated in a state-court coordinated proceeding known as JCCP 5255 (a Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding), captioned "Social Media Cases", heard in "Department 12" of the Los Angeles Superior Court (Spring Street Courthouse). *(LA Superior Court public notice, 2026-02-13, primary, cached 2026-08-18; verified baseline.)* (Corrected 2026-08-18, on the first run after the notice was cached: the comma had been inside the closing quote, which claims the notice's own phrase ended there.) 2. **[ESTABLISHED]** This proceeding is separate from the federal multidistrict litigation (MDL 3047). JCCP 5255 is a California *state*-court matter; the federal MDL is a different proceeding in Oakland federal court before a different judge. *(LASC notice; verified baseline; AP coverage.)* 3. **[ESTABLISHED]** The proceeding contains roughly 1,600 coordinated cases. That count includes more than 350 families and more than 250 school districts alongside individual young plaintiffs, so it is not composed solely of individual youth suits; and later July 2026 coverage reports higher running totals as filings continue. *(Verified baseline; Scientific American for the composition; plaintiff-firm trackers for the rising count, treated as directional only.)* 4. **[ESTABLISHED]** The bellwether trials are presided over by Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl of the Los Angeles Superior Court. *(LASC public notice, primary: the notice names the "Hon. Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl" as presiding; corroborated by the Social Media Victims Law Center release and AP coverage.)* (Corrected 2026-08-18: the quoted span had been rendered `Hon. Carolyn B. Kuhl`, dropping the notice's own "Judge". It is set as a literal, not a quotation, because it is not a quotation of the notice: that is the correction. The court's usage is redundant and the record is the record.) ### (b) K.G.M.: the first bellwether verdict and the 70/30 split 5. **[ESTABLISHED]** The first bellwether is *K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. et al.* (with Google as a co-defendant), tried in Los Angeles Superior Court. Snap and TikTok, originally also defendants in the first bellwether, settled out around the turn of 2026, leaving Meta and Google to face the jury. *(Verified baseline; AP, NPR, Al Jazeera; the Snap/TikTok first-bellwether settlements per the baseline and January 2026 coverage.)* 6. **[ESTABLISHED]** On March 25, 2026, the jury returned a $6 million verdict against the defendants. *(Verified baseline; NPR, verdict Wednesday March 25; Al Jazeera; AP.)* 7. **[ESTABLISHED]** The $6 million is made up of $3 million in compensatory damages plus $3 million in punitive damages. AP's phrasing describes the punitive $3 million as recommended by the jury on top of the $3 million awarded; the post-trial ruling left the full amount intact. *(Verified baseline; Al Jazeera; NPR; AP via Washington Times; SMVLC release.)* 8. **[ESTABLISHED]** The award was allocated 70% to Meta and 30% to Google, meaning Meta is responsible for $4.2 million and Google for $1.8 million (the compensatory portion splitting $2.1 million / $0.9 million on the same ratio). This is why some outlets report only Meta's $4.2 million share. *(Verified baseline; Al Jazeera; MediaPost; Fox Business; the compensatory split per the Crowell & Moring client alert.)* 9. **[OBSERVED]** The plaintiff is a young woman identified by the initials K.G.M. and by the first name "Kaley," reported as 20 years old at the time of the July 2026 coverage and from Chico, California; she said she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube starting in childhood (YouTube from about age 6, per NPR), worsening her mental-health struggles. *(AP via Washington Times and Las Vegas Sun; NPR. Age, name, and hometown carried by secondary coverage only.)* 10. **[OBSERVED]** The jury found the companies negligent in the *design* of their apps, that features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and push notifications were built to maximize engagement, that the companies knew of the risks, and that they failed to adequately warn young users. *(NPR, Al Jazeera, Fox Business, NBC; characterization of the jury's findings, not a quotation from the verdict form.)* ### (c) The post-trial motions denied (a trial-court ruling, NOT an appeal) 11. **[ESTABLISHED]** In early June 2026, the trial court denied the defendants' motion for a new trial and their motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict (JNOV), in a 26-page ruling. **Date precision:** the denial was announced and widely covered on June 10, 2026, but Reuters reports the judge ruled "on Tuesday," which was June 9; the order's exact date should be taken from the minute order before anyone prints a numeral. This record says "early June (announced June 10)." *(Reuters via reprints; MediaPost, 26-page ruling; CNBC URL dated 2026/06/10; SMVLC release, datelined June 10, announcing that the court "has denied" the motions; AP: denied in early June.)* 12. **[ESTABLISHED]** That denial is a **trial-court** decision (the same court that held the trial declining to disturb its own verdict). It is NOT an appellate ruling and does NOT mean an appeals court has reviewed or approved anything. *(Verified baseline; procedural-posture discipline. The ruling was issued by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl per the plaintiff-counsel release and Reuters.)* 13. **[OBSERVED]** In denying the motions, Judge Kuhl reportedly wrote that the trial evidence "was sufficient to support a finding that Instagram design features were a substantial factor" in causing the plaintiff's harms and that Meta "never provided adequate warnings regarding the harms posed to minor users." **Sourcing caution, confirmed by the 2026-07-16 audit:** those two exact sentences appear only in the plaintiff-side SMVLC release; independent outlets corroborate the ruling's thrust but quote *different* passages of the same order (Reuters: the plaintiff was harmed by Instagram's design features regardless of content viewed; MediaPost: YouTube's design features maximized engagement to the point of creating addiction). Treat the wording as reported, not verified against the order itself. *(SMVLC release; Reuters; MediaPost.)* ### (d) The appeals filed: who and when 14. **[ESTABLISHED]** Both defendants have filed notices of appeal of the K.G.M. verdict. *(Verified baseline; AP via Washington Times / Las Vegas Sun / Fortune.)* 15. **[ESTABLISHED]** Meta filed its notice of appeal first, in early July 2026, in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The precise date derives to **Tuesday, July 7, 2026**: AP's story published July 10 says Meta filed "Tuesday," and AP's July 15 story says Meta filed less than a week before YouTube's July 13 filing. No outlet prints the numeral, and docket confirmation was blocked (the Court of Appeal's public portal rejects automated lookups), so July 7 is a derivation; "early July" is the safe printable form. *(AP via Las Vegas Sun, 2026-07-10; AP via The Columbian, 2026-07-12; AP via Washington Times, 2026-07-15.)* 16. **[ESTABLISHED]** YouTube (Google) filed its notice of appeal on Monday, July 13, 2026, in Los Angeles County Superior Court. *(AP, dated July 15, 2026: filed "Monday," which was July 13; Fortune adds YouTube's argument that it is not a social media platform.)* 17. **[ESTABLISHED]** As of the July 16, 2026 as-of date, the verdict has NOT been reviewed, let alone affirmed, by any appellate court. The appeals have only just been *filed*; briefing and argument still lie ahead. *(Verified baseline; AP/Fortune: the companies "are expected to provide their arguments related to the appeal in later court filings." Caveat: this rests on press coverage plus the absence of any contrary report; the appellate docket itself could not be machine-checked.)* ### (e) The second bellwether and the settlements 18. **[ESTABLISHED, then OVERTAKEN 2026-07-25]** A second bellwether trial was scheduled to begin July 27, 2026 (Los Angeles Superior Court, within JCCP 5255). **It will not be held.** See claim 24a: every defendant resolved out before the date, and the plaintiff dismissed the last one on July 22, 2026. The scheduling fact remains true of the period it describes; the trial does not. *(Verified baseline; FindLaw; The Recorder, 2026-07-08; The Next Web.)* 19. **[OBSERVED]** YouTube (Google) settled its part of the second bellwether confidentially, reported **Tuesday, June 23, 2026**. An earlier version of this record dated it June 24; that is the publication date of The Recorder's story, not the settlement date. Reported as a settlement in principle with confidential terms. *(Fox Business; Gizmodo, June 24, citing Reuters; Morgan & Morgan's announcement, June 24; The Recorder story, June 24.)* 20. **[OBSERVED]** TikTok also settled its part of the second bellwether confidentially, on **Tuesday, June 30, 2026**. This resolves this record's original discrepancy flag D-1: the baseline said "early July"; the sources say June 30, and the deployed website content was corrected to June 30 on 2026-07-16. *(The Next Web, June 30, crediting Bloomberg's Tuesday report; NBC News; settlement in principle, terms private.)* 21. **[ESTABLISHED, then OVERTAKEN 2026-07-25]** After YouTube and TikTok settled out, Meta and Snap remained as the defendants set to face the jury on July 27, 2026, and coverage of a July 8 pretrial ruling reported Judge Kuhl tentatively allowing testimony from senior executives including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram's Adam Mosseri, and Snap's Evan Spiegel. Both have since resolved out; see claims 24a and 24b. That executive testimony never happened, **because the second bellwether never reached a jury**. Read alongside claim 26, which records that Zuckerberg did testify in person at the FIRST bellwether on 2026-02-18: this claim is about the second trial only, and the two are one paragraph apart in this record. *(Verified baseline; The Recorder, 2026-07-08, via search excerpt; superseded by the July 20 to 22 events below.)* 22. **[OBSERVED]** The second-bellwether plaintiff is a 15-year-old identified by the initials R.K.C. and the first name "Russell," who is reported to live in Florida; he alleges that features like infinite scroll and autoplay drove compulsive use that caused anxiety and sleep deprivation. **See D-2: the plaintiff's Florida residence does not move the case out of California state court; it is still the JCCP 5255 second bellwether before Judge Kuhl.** *(NBC News; The Recorder; FindLaw; The Next Web.)* ### (e2) How the second bellwether ended without a trial (added 2026-07-25) 24a. **[OBSERVED]** **Snap reached a tentative settlement**, announced **Monday, July 20, 2026**; terms undisclosed. *(Bloomberg, July 20; TechCrunch, July 21.)* 24b. **[OBSERVED]** With every other defendant resolved, the plaintiff **voluntarily dismissed his claims against Meta on Wednesday, July 22, 2026**. This is a plaintiff's withdrawal, **not a settlement with Meta, not a defence verdict, and not a continuance**; on the reporting available, **Meta paid nothing**. Plaintiff's counsel Emily Jeffcott said he "has elected to withdraw his claims against Meta" given "the overall successful result of the litigation" and concerns about a weekslong trial. **So the July 27, 2026 trial will not take place.** *(Courthouse News, July 22, staff reporter at the LA courthouse; TechCrunch, July 22; corroborated across four independent outlets plus a Meta statement.)* 24c. **[ASSUMED]** Whether the July 22 dismissal was **with or without prejudice is not established**, and it matters: without prejudice would leave the claim refilable. The distiller flags this as unresolved rather than inferring either way. > **Source-tier note on 24a to 24c, stated plainly.** These rest on **secondary coverage only**. The Los Angeles Superior Court docket is not machine-retrievable (`lacourt.org/casesummary` is dead, the media portal is a JavaScript app behind a CAPTCHA), so **no primary filing was obtained** for the settlement or the dismissal. Under this project's rules that keeps them OBSERVED, not ESTABLISHED, however well corroborated. The site nonetheless corrects the affected pages immediately, because leaving a *known-false* trial date on a public page through the date itself is the larger error. Anyone with LASC access should pull the July 22 entry in `23SMCV03371` and re-tier these. ### (f) Current status (as of 2026-07-25) 23. **[ESTABLISHED]** First bellwether (K.G.M.): the $6 million jury verdict stands at the trial-court level; post-trial motions denied in early June 2026 (announced June 10); both defendants have filed notices of appeal (Meta in early July, derived July 7; YouTube July 13). The appeal is pending and unreviewed by any appellate court. *(Verified baseline + corroborating coverage above.)* 24. **[OBSERVED, restated 2026-07-25]** Second bellwether: **resolved without trial.** YouTube settled (reported June 23), TikTok settled (June 30), Snap settled tentatively (July 20), and the plaintiff dismissed Meta (July 22). No jury ever heard it. *(Superseded the earlier "trial set for July 27; Meta and Snap remain" statement; see 24a to 24c and their source-tier note.)* 25. **[ESTABLISHED]** K.G.M.'s appeal: as of 2026-07-25 **no appellate case has been docketed** in the California Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District. A search of the live appellate docket by the JCCP lead trial-court number returns only two long-concluded pre-trial writ proceedings, and a party search for "Meta Platforms" returns 19 records, none of them this appeal. This is expected rather than surprising, because a California notice of appeal is filed with the *trial* court and sits with the clerk before transmission. The practical consequence for this record: **any reported appellate case number is wrong, because none exists yet**, and there is no stay, supersedeas bond, record designation, or briefing schedule. *(Searched 2026-07-25 with two passing positive controls: a known case number returned its summary, and a known trial-court number returned 2 records.)* 26. **[OBSERVED, added 2026-08-20]** **Mark Zuckerberg testified in person at the K.G.M. trial, on Wednesday, February 18, 2026**, 35 days before the verdict. Reported as his first testimony about child safety before a jury. Adam Mosseri testified roughly a week earlier. On the substance, coverage records him denying that Meta seeks to make Instagram addictive or that he sets company-wide direction to increase time spent or to recruit under-13s, describing enforcement of Instagram's age limits as very difficult, and being questioned about the decision to permit beauty filters simulating cosmetic surgery after internal expert warnings. *(Multi-outlet secondary: NPR, which ran a preview and a same-day testimony report; PBS NewsHour, naming the weekday and date prospectively; NBC News; Fortune; KTLA; Rolling Stone; and the New York Times as cited by the case's Wikipedia entry.)* **Why this is OBSERVED and not ESTABLISHED**, given how many outlets carry it: the tier key here reserves ESTABLISHED for a primary source or the verified baseline with corroboration, and **the trial transcript is a Los Angeles Superior Court record, which is in no free archive**. That is the same constraint that holds this whole ledger to four machine-checked spans. The date is corroborated in two independent directions, prospectively by an outlet naming the weekday and the date, and retrospectively by same-day testimony coverage, which is the strongest confirmation available without the transcript. ## Tensions / open questions - **The exact date of the post-trial denial (June 9 or June 10).** Reuters says the judge ruled "on Tuesday" (June 9); the announcement and coverage are dated June 10. Open until the minute order is checked; this record and the website say "early June (announced June 10)." - **Whether the June ruling's quoted wording is exact.** Claim 13 quotes Judge Kuhl via a plaintiff-side press release; the 2026-07-16 audit confirmed no independent outlet carries those exact sentences (they quote other passages). The *fact* of the denial is solid; the exact wording should be verified against the signed order before quoting publicly. - **Whether Mark Zuckerberg testified in the K.G.M. trial. CLOSED 2026-08-20, the same day it opened, and the answer is yes.** He testified in person on 2026-02-18; see claim 26. The California attorney general's hedged remark was correct, and the hedge was the only reason to doubt it. **The lesson is about where the doubt came from**: this record had no Zuckerberg-testimony source because nobody had looked, and the absence read like an open question about the trial when it was an open question about this ledger's coverage. One search with a positive control settled it. Original entry follows. ~~**Whether Mark Zuckerberg testified in the K.G.M. trial (opened 2026-08-20).**~~ At a press conference on 2026-08-18, California's attorney general said, hedged with "I think", that Zuckerberg testified in the Los Angeles trial Meta lost. That is this case. **Nothing in this record establishes it**: the only Zuckerberg-testimony source here is Law.com reporting in July 2026 that he *could* testify in the **second** bellwether, which is a different trial and was prospective. So there are three readings and this record cannot choose between them: he testified in K.G.M. and no source in this ledger covered it; the AG was thinking of the second bellwether; or the AG was mistaken, which his own hedge allows for. **It matters more than a detail of witness order**, because a chief executive taking the stand in the first trial his company lost is a fact the site would state, and the source for it is currently a hedged remark captured by machine transcription. The trial transcript settles it, and Los Angeles Superior Court records are in no free archive, which is why this ledger is guarded at four spans in the first place. *Source of the claim: press-conference ASR at 28:16, CAPTION-ASR tier, quarantined from `npm run check:quotes`; distilled at `docs/research/single-source/2026-08-18-ag-press-conference.md` claim Q21.* - **JCCP 5255 case-count precision and currency.** "Roughly 1,600" is consistent across March-April 2026 sources but is a round number from secondary coverage, includes school-district and family suits, and rises over time; it is not a docket count. ## Sources - Project verified baseline (already fact-checked policy-paper account): internal - LA Superior Court public notice, Social Media Cases (JCCP5255), Dept. 12, Hon. Carolyn B. Kuhl, dated 2026-02-13 (PRIMARY, court-issued; fetched 2026-07-16; note the notice's headline typos the number as JCCP5225, the body says 5255): https://www.lacourt.org/newsmedia/uploads/1420262138162526PN-2-13-2026SocialMediaCases(JCCP5255)INFORMATIONFORTHEPUBLIC.pdf - AP via Washington Times, YouTube joins Meta in appealing (2026-07-15; fetched 2026-07-16): https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jul/15/youtube-joins-meta-appealing-jury-verdict-faulted-users-social-media/ - AP via Las Vegas Sun (2026-07-10, Meta's appeal) and The Columbian (2026-07-12) (fetched 2026-07-16): https://lasvegassun.com/news/2026/jul/10/meta-appeals-landmark-jury-verdict-that-found-it-t/ ; https://www.columbian.com/news/2026/jul/12/meta-appeals-verdict-in-case-accusing-it-of-hooking-young-users-on-social-media/ - NPR (text edition), verdict coverage (2026-03-25; fetched 2026-07-16): https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5746125 - Al Jazeera, verdict explainer (2026-03-26; fetched 2026-07-16): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/26/jury-finds-meta-youtube-liable-for-social-media-addiction-what-we-know - MediaPost, post-trial ruling coverage (2026-06-11; fetched 2026-07-16): https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/415703/judge-rejects-meta-and-google-bid-to-overturn-add.html - Reuters (Jody Godoy) post-trial ruling wire, via reprints (fetched 2026-07-16): https://www.peoplenewstoday.com/news/en/2026/06/10/1144620.html.Google-and-Meta-denied-new-trial-in-youth-social-media-addiction-case.html ; https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/meta-google-denied-trial-youth-172718935.html - Social Media Victims Law Center press release (PLAINTIFF-SIDE PARTY RELEASE; quotes the post-trial ruling; fetched 2026-07-16): https://socialmediavictims.org/press-releases/court-denies-meta-and-googles-bid-to-overturn-historic-k-g-m-verdict/ - Fox Business, YouTube second-bellwether settlement (fetched 2026-07-16): https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/googles-youtube-reaches-settlement-lawsuit-alleging-child-social-media-addiction - The Next Web, TikTok settlement (2026-06-30, crediting Bloomberg; fetched 2026-07-16): https://thenextweb.com/news/tiktok-settles-addiction-lawsuit-rkc-florida-teen - Scientific American, JCCP composition (fetched 2026-07-16): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-the-meta-and-google-verdict-means-for-social-media-design/ - Law.com / The Recorder, second-bellwether coverage (2026-06-24 settlement story; 2026-07-08 Zuckerberg-testimony story) (403 direct; read via search excerpts): https://www.law.com/therecorder/2026/06/24/googles-youtube-settles-second-bellwether-case-over-social-media-addiction/ ; https://www.law.com/therecorder/2026/07/08/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-could-testify-in-2nd-social-media-addiction-trial/ - NBC News, TikTok settlement / R.K.C. (403 direct; via search index + corroborators): https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-reaches-settlement-social-media-addiction-trial-florida-teen-rcna352299 - CNBC, post-trial ruling (HTTP 403; URL date 2026/06/10; content via the Reuters wire above): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/10/google-and-meta-denied-new-trial-in-youth-social-media-addiction-case.html --- # State of New Mexico v. Meta: the standalone child-safety action Source: https://de-amplify.com/distillations/new-mexico-v-meta > State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms, First Judicial District Court, Santa Fe; New Mexico Unfair Practices Act; child-safety / exploitation theory As of 2026-08-28. This is the evidence-tiered claim ledger behind the New Mexico case file on de-amplify.com, published in full for transparency. Tiers: ESTABLISHED (stated in a primary source, or said on the official record at a hearing; a fact about what was filed or said, not necessarily adjudicated true), OBSERVED (secondary coverage, or a document read into the record), ASSUMED (the distiller's inference, flagged). Provenance flags ([interested-party], [advocacy-witness], [single-witness], [lawmaker characterization]) mark claims resting 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, an official government release, including its verbatim republication) or in the project's verified baseline with independent corroboration; 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, not the distillation skill's agreement-based multi-source tiers. ## Reader summary As of August 13, 2026, New Mexico is the first U.S. state to win a full trial against Meta (the company behind Facebook and Instagram) over harm to children, and the case has now been decided. On March 24, 2026, a Santa Fe jury found Meta broke New Mexico's consumer-protection law by misleading the public about how safe its apps were and by failing to protect kids from sexual exploitation, and ordered Meta to pay $375 million, the maximum the law allows ($5,000 for each of 75,000 violations). Meta says it will appeal, so that money is not final. A separate second phase, decided by Judge Bryan Biedscheid rather than a jury, ended in a final judgment file-stamped August 6, 2026 and announced August 7. The judge found Meta's platforms are a public nuisance in New Mexico, held that Section 230 did not shield Meta from that claim, and ordered it to pay a further $567 million into an abatement fund, bringing the total to $942 million. The judge also ordered changes to how the apps work for minors, supervised for five years: no push notifications to under-18 accounts between 10:00 PM and 7:00 AM, or during school hours in term time; "like counts" hidden by default on under-18 accounts unless a parent permits otherwise; and a hard cap of 90 hours a month of use across Facebook and Instagram combined. **What the court refused is as important as what it ordered, and most coverage omits it.** New Mexico asked for changes to the feed itself. The judge said no, and granted "no abatement relief relative to the design and implementation of Meta's algorithms." He agreed that autoplay, infinite scroll, like counts and algorithmic recommendations "combine to facilitate addictive or problematic behaviors in adolescent users," but held that ordering changes to them would directly affect how content is presented and so "would likely violate the First Amendment and Section 230", that such industry-wide features "require legislative or executive branch action", and that restricting Meta alone could unfairly damage it against competitors who were not in the case. The measures that survived (notifications, like counts, time limits) are the ones the court called "least connected with platform content." This is a child-safety and consumer-protection case; it is not the separate federal "social-media addiction" litigation. ## Claims (the ledger) ### (a) The case, court & theory 1. **[ESTABLISHED]** The case is *State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms, Inc.*, a standalone action brought by the State of New Mexico. *(Verified baseline; NM DOJ release.)* 2. **[ESTABLISHED]** It was tried in Santa Fe, in New Mexico's First Judicial District Court. *(Verified baseline; corroborating coverage.)* 3. **[ESTABLISHED]** The presiding judge is Bryan Biedscheid of the First Judicial District Court. He was elected chief judge of that district in 2022, so both stylings in the record are correct: the DOJ's April 2026 release says "District Judge Bryan Biedscheid," and trial coverage says "Chief Judge." *(Santa Fe New Mexican, 2022, on the chief-judge election; DOJ release via republication; Santa Fe New Mexican and Source NM trial coverage.)* 4. **[ESTABLISHED]** The legal claim in the first phase was brought under the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act (the state's consumer-protection statute). *(Verified baseline; DOJ release; NPR; Crowell & Moring.)* 5. **[ESTABLISHED]** New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed the suit in New Mexico state court in December 2023. *(Crowell & Moring client alert; DOJ coverage.)* 6. **[ESTABLISHED]** The state's core theory was that Meta made misrepresentations about how safe its platforms were and failed to protect children from exploitation on those platforms. *(Verified baseline; DOJ release; NPR adds the jury's related findings: false or misleading safety statements, unconscionable trade practices exploiting children's vulnerabilities, and concealment of knowledge of child sexual exploitation.)* ### (b) The $375M verdict + its statutory basis 7. **[ESTABLISHED]** On March 24, 2026 (a Tuesday), a jury returned a verdict of $375 million in civil penalties against Meta. *(Verified baseline; DOJ release; NPR; Source NM; Crowell & Moring.)* 8. **[ESTABLISHED]** This was a **jury** verdict (not a judge's ruling and not a settlement). *(Verified baseline; NPR; Source NM.)* 9. **[ESTABLISHED]** The $375 million is the statutory maximum: $5,000 for each violation, applied to 75,000 violations ($5,000 × 75,000 = $375,000,000). *(Verified baseline; DOJ release confirms "$5,000 per violation," "the maximum allowed," and "75,000 state law violations"; NPR confirms the $5,000 per-violation maximum.)* 10. **[OBSERVED]** The DOJ characterized the outcome as making New Mexico "the first state in the nation to prevail at trial against a major tech company for harming young people." *(DOJ release, carried by search index; nmdoj.gov itself 403s, an access failure rather than a disconfirmation.)* 11. **[OBSERVED]** In the first phase New Mexico had sought a substantially larger sum: the state's closing argument urged a penalty that could top $2 billion (reported by CNBC as roughly $2.1 billion), and NPR notes the $375 million award was less than one-fifth of the request. *(Source NM; NPR; CNBC via search. Enrichment only; the load-bearing figure is the $375M verdict.)* ### (c) What it was for: safety / exploitation, NOT addiction 12. **[ESTABLISHED]** This is a consumer-protection / child-safety case about (1) misrepresentations regarding platform safety and (2) failure to protect children from sexual exploitation. *(Verified baseline; DOJ release.)* 13. **[ESTABLISHED]** It is **not** an "addiction" case. *(Verified baseline; flagged explicitly to prevent conflation.)* 14. **[ESTABLISHED]** It is **not** part of the federal multidistrict litigation (MDL). It is a separate New Mexico state-court action. *(Verified baseline; Crowell & Moring confirms it was filed in New Mexico state court, a separate state action.)* 15. **[OBSERVED]** Trial evidence included internal Meta documents and testimony (from former Meta employees, law enforcement, and New Mexico educators) that the state said showed Meta's design features enabled predators to engage in child sexual exploitation on its platforms. *(DOJ release / search summary; context only.)* ### (d) The appeal posture 16. **[ESTABLISHED]** Meta has **said it will appeal** the $375 million verdict; the verdict is therefore **not final / not affirmed** as of the as-of date. **Posture precision (corrected 2026-07-16):** this is *announced intent*, not a filed appeal. The DOJ's own release says Meta "has announced its intent to appeal that verdict"; Meta's statement in verdict-day coverage is future-tense ("We respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal"); and no source reports a notice of appeal filed in this case, consistent with the second phase (and so any final judgment) still being open. An earlier version of this record said "Meta is appealing"; the deployed website content said the same and was corrected on 2026-07-16. A filed notice may appear at any time; that would be an update, not a reversal. *(DOJ release via republication; NPR; Source NM.)* 17. **[OBSERVED]** Before the second phase, Meta also tried to dismiss the case, claimed immunity under Section 230, and moved to postpone the second-phase bench trial; the court denied those motions. *(DOJ release via republication; context on procedural posture, not the appeal itself.)* ### (e) The second phase + the ~$953M abatement REQUEST + the design-change stakes 18. **[ESTABLISHED]** There is a second, separate phase of the same case that is decided by a **judge** (a bench trial), not a jury. *(Verified baseline; Santa Fe New Mexican; DOJ release.)* 19. **[ESTABLISHED]** The second phase concerns a public-nuisance claim and prospective (forward-looking) relief. *(Verified baseline; DOJ release; Santa Fe New Mexican.)* 20. **[ESTABLISHED]** The second-phase bench trial began May 4, 2026. *(DOJ release via republication: "Phase 2 begins May 4"; Santa Fe New Mexican.)* 21. **[OBSERVED]** The bench trial ran 13 days. *(Santa Fe New Mexican.)* 22. **[ESTABLISHED]** Testimony in the second phase finished on May 21, 2026. *(Verified baseline; Santa Fe New Mexican, re-fetched 2026-07-16: "testimony concluded May 21, 2026." May 22 was the phase's final day overall, not the end of testimony; that distinction was the source of an earlier page error, fixed 2026-07-16.)* 23. **[OBSERVED]** Both sides filed proposed findings / written closing statements around June 12, 2026. *(Santa Fe New Mexican; search corroboration.)* 24. **[ESTABLISHED]** New Mexico has asked the judge to order Meta to pay approximately $953 million, which the state frames as Meta's equitable share (about 21%) of a $3.7 billion total 15-year abatement program; the ~21% is the portion an expert attributed to social media. *(Verified baseline; Santa Fe New Mexican, fetched directly: "$953 million," Meta's "equitable share of the cost of abating," about 21% of a $3.7 billion total; Source NM: "nearly $1 billion.")* 25. **[ESTABLISHED, and now SUPERSEDED by the judgment; see section (g)]** That $953 million was a **request**, not an award, and the court did not grant it: the abatement fund ordered on 2026-08-06 is **$567 million**, not $953 million. The rest of this claim is retained as the pre-judgment record, including the caveat that ended up being the right one. The second-phase decision was still **pending** (undecided) as of the previous as-of date. **Re-checked 2026-07-25: still pending.** The New Mexico DOJ's live press-release index covers July 9 through July 24, 2026 and carries no ruling release, and this office has press-released every favourable milestone in this case; Meta's newsroom is likewise silent through July 24. *(Verified baseline; Santa Fe New Mexican: "a request, not an award; the case awaits Judge Bryan Biedscheid's decision.")* **Caveat, stated because it is the honest limit of this check: absence of a press release is not the docket.** The New Mexico Courts case-lookup application is gated behind a data-use agreement invoking a criminal-penalty statute, which was not accepted on the project's behalf. Anyone wanting certainty should accept that disclaimer themselves and search `D-101-CV-2023-02838`. 25a. **[ESTABLISHED, correcting an earlier framing]** The state's requested figure **moved up, not down**. New Mexico DOJ's own release of **May 22, 2026** states the State sought **$779.5 million**; the ~$953 million figure appears on **June 17, 2026**. The $3.7 billion is an expert's 15-year program estimate introduced at opening, so describing $953 million as a reduction "down from $3.7 billion" adopts the State's own rhetorical framing and hides that the ask rose between May and June. State the sequence, not the spread. *(NM DOJ release, 2026-05-22; Santa Fe New Mexican, 2026-06-17.)* 25b. **[ESTABLISHED, correcting a mischaracterisation]** The NM DOJ release headlined **"After $375 Million Loss, Meta Tries to Run. Court Says No."** is dated **April 9, 2026** and does **not** describe an appeal, a bond, or a stay. It describes Judge Biedscheid **denying Meta's motion to postpone the phase-two bench trial**. The same release says Meta "has announced its intent to appeal", which is announced intent only: **no notice of appeal, supersedeas bond, or stay dispute has been found anywhere.** *(NM DOJ release 2026-04-09, recovered in full via the Internet Archive capture `20260506195252` because the live URL returns 403.)* 26. **[OBSERVED]** The requested payment would fund a roughly 15-year program to abate the harm the state alleges ("abate public harm to children and teens"). *(Santa Fe New Mexican; verified baseline.)* 27. **[OBSERVED]** Beyond money, New Mexico asked the judge to order specific platform / design changes. The Santa Fe New Mexican's account of the state's request lists: "more effective age controls"; removing features such as "infinite scroll during sleep and school hours"; "safer algorithms" that "do not prioritize engagement over well being"; and mandatory advisories warning about "potential mental health harms." The Crowell & Moring alert describes the sought orders more broadly as including age verification, predator removal, and restrictions on encrypted messaging for minors; both accounts can be true of one broad request. *(Santa Fe New Mexican; Crowell & Moring.)* 28. **[OBSERVED, and OVERTAKEN BY EVENTS; see section (g)]** Why this case was watched: it was the live U.S. proceeding **furthest along** toward a court-ordered product-design change rather than only a payment; its remedies record was closed and awaiting decision. **That decision landed on 2026-08-06 and this claim is now history rather than status.** The design remedy exists, and it is narrower than the phrase "design-change order" suggests: notification, like-count and time-limit measures on under-18 accounts, and nothing at all on the feed. **Corrected 2026-07-16:** an earlier version called it "the only live proceeding in the American record that could order design changes," which is false as stated. The state attorneys general in federal MDL 3047 also seek injunctive relief (the October 2023 filing seeks "injunctive and monetary relief"; the June 29 order treats the request as live; the joint pretrial statement says injunctive relief "will be tried solely to the Court" in a remedies phase after liability), so the federal case could also reach a design-change order, but only in a post-liability remedies phase after its August 2026 trial. *(Drafter synthesis over: the MDL primary filings via CourtListener/RECAP, the DOJ and SFNM accounts of this case's posture. See the audit issue for the full evidence.)* ### (f) Current status 29. **[ESTABLISHED]** As of August 13, 2026: final judgment has been entered. The $375 million jury verdict stands, the court added a $567 million abatement fund and a five-year injunctive program, and Meta has said it will appeal (no filed notice found), so none of it is final. *(The judgment itself; superseding the July 16 status this claim previously carried.)* ### (g) The final judgment, 2026-08-06 (read directly; this section is anchored to the order, not to coverage) 30. **[ESTABLISHED]** The case was decided by a document captioned **"FINDINGS OF FACT, CONCLUSIONS OF LAW, AND JUDGMENT, ORDER, AND DECREE OF THE COURT"**, 68 pages, **file-stamped 8/6/2026 4:41 PM** by the First Judicial District Court, Santa Fe County, and signed by **Bryan Biedscheid, Chief District Court Judge, Division VI**. This resolves the open question the Tensions section carried about the ruling's procedural label: it is all of those instruments in one document. **Event date is 2026-08-06; the New Mexico DOJ announced it on 2026-08-07.** *(Judgment, caption and signature block.)* 31. **[ESTABLISHED]** The judgment recites the two-phase structure: Phase 1 a jury trial "held between February 2, 2026 and March 24, 2026" on the Unfair Practices Act claims and civil penalties; Phase 2 a bench trial "held between May 4, 2026 and May 22, 2026" on the State's abatement request based on public nuisance. *(Judgment, opening paragraph.)* 32. **[ESTABLISHED]** The court ordered Meta to "pay and deposit a total of $567,000,000.00 into a fund", **in addition to** the jury's $375,000,000 Phase 1 civil penalties. Total exposure in New Mexico is therefore **$942 million**. The fund is allocated by category in a table in the order: Treatment $420,000,000.00; Screening and Assessment $90,000,000.00; Awareness and Prevention $33,000,000.00; Referral, Linkage, and Coordination $15,000,000.00; Implementation, Continuous Quality Improvement, and Evaluation $9,000,000.00. *(Judgment ¶ 121 and the table following it.)* 33. **[ESTABLISHED]** The court held that **Section 230 does not shield Meta from the public-nuisance claim**: "This Court concludes that Meta is not immune from the public nuisance claim", and "the Court concludes that Section 230 does not protect Meta from the State's public nuisance claim." *(Judgment ¶¶ 104 and the conclusion of section E.)* 34. **[ESTABLISHED]** The **injunctive relief actually ordered on problematic use** is three measures, all aimed at under-18 accounts. (a) Meta "shall eliminate push notifications on its platforms for known or estimated accounts belonging to users under 18 years of age" from **10:00 PM to 7:00 AM** on all days and from **8:00 AM to 3:00 PM** on academic-year weekdays, with exclusions permitted for messaging from connected users and for "urgent, targeted messages, such as for security or hazard alerts." (b) Meta "shall hide, as a default setting for all accounts where the user is under 18 years of age", all like counts it appends to content, overridable only with parent or guardian permission. (c) Meta "shall implement a mandatory usage time limit" restricting under-18 users to "not more than 90 hours of use per month cumulatively across Facebook and Instagram." *(Judgment ¶¶ 168 to 170.)* 35. **[ESTABLISHED, and the load-bearing claim for this project]** The court **granted no relief at all against the feed**: "The Court grants no abatement relief relative to the design and implementation of Meta's algorithms." Its reasoning is explicitly a First Amendment and Section 230 reasoning, and it is the mirror image of claim 33: Section 230 did not bar **liability**, but it did constrain the **remedy**. The state's algorithm requests were "vague and aspirational, rather than objective and measurable", "would directly alter and limit the manner in which platform content is displayed", and so "would likely violate the First Amendment and Section 230." *(Judgment ¶¶ 171 to 173.)* 36. **[ESTABLISHED]** On infinite scroll and autoplay specifically, the court declined on separation-of-powers and competitive grounds: "regulation of industry-wide features that contribute to problematic use, such as infinite scroll and autoplay, require legislative or executive branch action", and ordering changes "would risk competitively damaging Meta's platforms to an unreasonable extent, and possibly running afoul of the First Amendment and Section 230 because of the direct effect those features have on content presentation." The court also noted "the absence of Meta's competitors in this litigation". *(Judgment ¶¶ 160, 164.)* 37. **[ESTABLISHED]** The court nonetheless made an explicit **finding on the mechanism**, which is the part of this order most useful to a design-standard argument: "the evidence at trial proved that design elements, such as autoplay, infinite scroll, ... and push notifications create a product that, particularly for adolescent users, is highly rewarding psychologically and neurochemically. As a result, for many, it is irresistibly compelling to start scrolling and very difficult to stop or abstain from its use." It further found that "algorithmic content recommendations can create harmful feedback loops and" what it called "rabbit hole" users. *(Judgment ¶¶ 161 to 162.)* 38. **[ESTABLISHED]** The line the court drew between what it would and would not order is a **content-proximity** line, stated in those terms: push notifications and like counts are "least connected with platform content", a like count is "merely a feature created and offered by Meta to principally track and motivate user feedback, all without altering the underlying published content", whereas autoplay, infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations "are most closely tied to content presentation because they directly impact the manner in which users are presented with third-party postings and advertising." *(Judgment ¶¶ 163, 165.)* 39. **[ESTABLISHED]** On the problematic-use measures the court was "in large measure, adopting Meta's proposals", finding "Meta's proposed measures to address push notifications on Facebook and Instagram to be compelling." *(Judgment ¶ 160.)* **[ASSUMED]** that this materially weakens any reading of these provisions as a contested win on design; the court says it adopted the defendant's own offer. *(Drafter inference from ¶ 160, flagged.)* 40. **[ESTABLISHED]** The order runs for an **Abatement Period** with **reporting requirements**, and creates a **Child Safety Monitor**; it also contains sections on Child Sexual Exploitation, Chatbot Usage, Accurate Disclosure and Educational Programs, and Law Enforcement Reporting. *(Judgment, section headings B, D, E, H, I, J of the abatement part.)* Those sections have **not** been distilled claim by claim. Age Assurance (section C) has been, below, because it bears directly on the policy paper's section 7. #### (g.1) Age Assurance: the court wanted it, and held that COPPA forbids ordering it 41. **[ESTABLISHED]** The court treated age verification as central rather than peripheral: "Age verification is the key to making Meta's platforms safe for adolescents", because there must be substantial certainty about whether a user is over 13 (old enough to use the platforms) and over 18 (so adolescent protections come off and restrictions on connecting with adolescents go on). Without that certainty, it found, there will be "adults communicating with adolescents by claiming a false younger age and tweens communicating with teens and adults by claiming a false older age". *(Judgment ¶ 136.)* 42. **[ESTABLISHED, and the finding this project should carry into section 7]** **COPPA is what blocked the remedy, not the First Amendment.** The court reasoned that the COPPA Rule defines "collection" broadly and expressly includes "passive tracking of a child online", so ordering age verification would compel the very collection COPPA restricts. Its conclusion: "it is the Court's conclusion that it cannot order Meta to request children to submit personal data or be passively tracked online, even for age-verification purposes." The section is captioned accordingly: "The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act limits this Court's options to require age-verification tools." *(Judgment ¶¶ 134 to 135 and the section C.i heading.)* 43. **[ESTABLISHED]** The court considered the **FTC's 2026 age-verification enforcement policy and declined to rely on it**, because the policy "does not create any substantive rights or entitlements", the FTC "retains its ability to bring actions for violations of COPPA through age-verification tools", and agencies "are free to change their existing policies" so long as the change is explained (citing *Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro*, 579 U.S. 211 (2016)). Flatly: "The FTC policy from 2026 does not change the COPPA Rule." *(Judgment ¶¶ 134 to 135.)* **[OBSERVED]** The policy referred to is an FTC statement announcing it "will not bring an enforcement action under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule) against certain website and online service operators that collect, use, and disclose personal information for the sole purpose of determining a user's age via age verification technologies", limited to general-audience and mixed-audience services. *(ftc.gov press release, read 2026-08-13.)* 43a. **[ESTABLISHED, and the reason the site names that policy by year only] The statement carries no date at all, which is why no month can honestly be attributed to it.** The policy statement itself was retrieved on 2026-08-13 and cached at `docs/distillations/sources/ftc-2026-02-25-coppa-age-verification-policy-statement.txt`. **It bears no date anywhere on its face:** no issue line, no "By direction of the Commission", no vote line, no signature block. A search of the full three-page text for any month-day-year string returns nothing. That is the simplest explanation for the judgment's own vagueness at ¶ 134, where a court with the document in front of it wrote only that the FTC "issued a policy in early 2026". It could not cite a month either. **The surrounding date evidence is nonetheless clear, and is recorded here rather than on the site.** Three independent signals give **February 25, 2026**: the statement PDF's own `CreationDate` (Wed Feb 25 10:50:29 2026), the date printed under the press-release headline, and that page's `article:published_time` metadata. One outlier, a bare `