Jury selection opened Monday in a landmark civil trial accusing Meta Platforms of deliberately engineering Instagram to addict teenagers and concealing years of internal research documenting the harm.

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed the lawsuit in October 2023, alleging the social media company violated the state’s consumer protection law by designing a product it knew drove compulsive use among minors while misleading the public about its safety. The trial is expected to last six to seven weeks before Chancellor Russell Perkins in Nashville.

The state contends that Mark Zuckerberg received repeated warnings from Meta employees about research showing Instagram caused depression, anxiety, sleep deprivation and other mental health harms in teenage users. According to the 406-page complaint, Zuckerberg declined to fund efforts to reduce those harms and instead made misleading public statements about the volume of harmful content on the platform.

“Instagram did not become so addictive by accident,” the complaint states. “Meta dedicated vast resources to understand Young Users’ psychology and behavior so it could better exploit Young Users’ developmental vulnerabilities through irresistible design features.”

Skrmetti is seeking financial penalties and a court order requiring Meta to change specific Instagram features the state identifies as harmful to minors, including Reels, autoplay, notifications and disappearing content designs. Tennessee’s consumer protection law allows fines of up to $1,000 per violation.

A Meta spokesperson said Friday the company has already built “safe, age-appropriate defaults for teens alongside simple tools for parents to set the right boundaries for their family.” Meta has consistently argued that the state’s claims rest on user-generated content and that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields the company from liability for content posted by third parties.

The Tennessee trial opens four months after a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million, finding the company violated that state’s consumer protection law and misled users about the safety of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta said it will appeal that verdict.

Tennessee is one of 42 states that have filed lawsuits against Meta over its platforms’ alleged harm to minors. A separate federal trial consolidating claims from 29 states is scheduled to begin August 18 in California. Another trial, involving a 15-year-old Florida boy who alleges social media damaged his mental health, opens July 27.

The trial runs concurrently with at least two additional proceedings against Meta in California courts, as the company navigates thousands of similar cases filed by states, school districts and individual plaintiffs across the country.

Legal experts who track the litigation say the Tennessee outcome carries weight beyond state lines. The verdict will test whether state consumer protection statutes can reach the internal design decisions of social media platforms – a question that runs directly into ongoing debate over the scope of Section 230 immunity. A loss for Meta could open the door to court-ordered redesigns of features used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

The former U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, wrote in a 2024 New York Times guest essay that “the mental health crisis among young people is an emergency,” and identified social media as “an important contributor.” Australia enacted the world’s broadest social media restriction for children in December 2025, barring users under 16 from the platforms entirely.

The trial is expected to feature dozens of witnesses, including Meta executives and researchers. Attorneys for the state will argue that the company treated teenage addiction as a feature rather than a flaw, building mechanisms that kept minors scrolling for as long as possible while the company profited from every additional second of engagement.