A Nashville courtroom is now the stage for one of the biggest tech accountability cases in the country, as Tennessee’s lawsuit against Meta officially went to trial this week. The state claims the company built Instagram into what it calls an “addiction machine,” designed from the ground up to hook children and teenagers.
Jury selection played out over several hours before a panel was finally seated and sworn in Thursday. Chancellor Perkins presided over the process, excusing several potential jurors and ruling on challenges raised by Meta’s legal team. Opening statements are expected to begin Friday.
Tennessee is far from alone in this fight. The state is one of 42 across the country suing Meta over allegations that its platforms, especially Instagram, were engineered to exploit young users’ psychology and keep them scrolling. According to the state’s complaint, Meta poured significant resources into understanding how teenagers think and behave, then used that knowledge to build features that were nearly impossible for young users to put down, all in service of capturing more of their time and personal data.
The lawsuit also targets Meta’s leadership directly, naming CEO Mark Zuckerberg and alleging company executives knew Instagram was harmful overall and particularly damaging to young women. Rather than share those findings publicly, the state claims Meta restricted internal access to the most alarming research to reduce the risk of leaks.
Court filings allege a gap between what Meta told the public and what it knew internally. One public report reportedly downplayed bullying and harassment on the platform as rare occurrences. But an internal survey cited in the lawsuit paints a different picture, allegedly finding that in a single week, more than a quarter of users witnessed bullying, 8 percent were bullied themselves, and nearly 12 percent received unwanted advances.
Meta has pushed back on the allegations. In a statement, the company said hundreds of thousands of Tennessee teens rely on social media daily to connect with friends and family, explore their interests, and find support. The company said it has spent the past decade building age-appropriate defaults for teen accounts along with tools that let parents set boundaries for their kids, and that it remains committed to improving those protections.
The timing of Tennessee’s trial is notable. It comes just two months after juries in two other states ruled against Meta and Google in similar social media addiction cases. In California, a jury awarded $6 million to a young woman who said she developed depression and suicidal thoughts after becoming addicted to YouTube and Instagram. In New Mexico, a jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million after finding the company misled users about safety and allowed the platform to be used for child sexual exploitation, according to the Tennessee Bar Association.
Legal observers say these cases represent a real shift in how courts are treating tech platforms. Historically, companies have been shielded from liability tied to user-generated content. But plaintiffs in these recent cases have successfully argued the harm came from the platforms’ design choices themselves, not just what users posted.