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Four states kicked off a closely-watched trial against Meta last week, alleging that the social media giant designed its platforms to keep young people hooked, misled the public about risks, and collected children’s data in ways that violated federal law.

Stanford law Professor Nora Freeman Engstrom, an expert in tort law and legal ethics whose scholarship explores the injury-claims system, explains the legal foundations of the case and how its outcome could shape how tech companies design products for years to come.

What is this trial about?

The broader litigation – a federal Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) that encompasses roughly 3,000 lawsuits – is about social media addiction writ large. An MDL is a procedural device courts use when many federal lawsuits across the country raise similar questions. Rather than have dozens of judges reinvent the wheel, the cases are transferred to a single judge who coordinates discovery, resolves common legal questions, and often conducts a handful of test trials.

The current trial is just one chapter in that much larger story: it involves states, not private plaintiffs, and targets Meta, not other social media providers such as TikTok and Snapchat. And rather than focusing on all the harm Meta allegedly caused, this trial zeroes in on just two bodies of law: state consumer protection statutes and the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

In this trial, which states have claims, and what are they alleging?

Four states – California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey – have alleged violations of state consumer protection statutes and additional claims under COPPA, while more than two dozen other states have also joined in, with claims exclusively under COPPA. The states say Meta designed Facebook and Instagram in ways that kept young people compulsively engaged, knew about serious risks, misled the public about those risks, and, separately, collected data from some children under 13 without abiding by federal requirements.

What are the stakes of this trial?

This is a government enforcement action for civil penalties and injunctive relief. A liability finding could make Meta cough up staggering civil penalties and force significant changes in its operations. Beyond that, this trial is functioning as something called a “bellwether trial.” The term “bellwether” comes from the bell-wearing sheep that leads the flock; where that sheep goes, the flock follows.

Bellwether trials tend to blaze the trail. They lead the way, offering insights into which arguments work, which evidence resonates, and how strong the cases really are. The other 2,900-plus cases won’t formally be bound by what happens over the next few weeks in Oakland, but this trial will set the tone for what follows; it will help shape the parties’ settlement expectations and inform their broader litigation strategies. Thus, a resounding state victory could accelerate a broader reckoning over social media safeguards and statements. If Meta prevails, it’ll take a lot of wind out of other plaintiffs’ sails.

What evidence is likely to matter most?

This case will turn on deception: whether Meta publicly represented its platforms as safe for teens while internal research said otherwise. The states have identified more than 100 potentially deceptive statements by Meta representatives.

Meta, for its part, is apt to counter that these statements were accurate when made, were qualified, were mere opinion, or were not made with the requisite knowledge or intent. Additionally, Meta is apt to insist that it couldn’t have lied when it said its platforms aren’t addictive because social media “addiction” isn’t real. In the company’s words: “‘Social media addiction’ is not a recognized condition.” So, Meta reasons, it cannot have misrepresented the risks of a condition that doesn’t exist.

Keep an eye on the daylight – if any – between what Meta employees were saying internally and what the company was telling the outside world. The more daylight there is, the more trouble for Meta.

What is Section 230, and does it pose an obstacle for the plaintiffs in this case?

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects platforms, including social media companies, from liability based on their users’ content. The idea is you can’t sue a message board for defamation just because a user happens to post something defamatory.

Here, Section 230 looms large, but Judge Gonzalez Rogers has ruled that the statute doesn’t protect platforms from all accountability, and the states have wisely designed their claims to fit into Section 230’s gaps. Rather than arguing “Instagram compiled harmful third-party content and served that harmful content to teenagers” – a claim that would run headlong into Section 230 – they’re arguing that Meta itself possessed information, made representations inconsistent with that information, misled users, parents, and regulators, and, ultimately, inflicted harm. That framing, in my view, elegantly avoids the obstacle that Section 230 erects.

But whatever happens in Oakland, make no mistake: The Ninth Circuit will ultimately weigh in on whether Section 230 limits or prohibits the states’ claims – and then, because a significant federal question is presented, the Supreme Court may also take a crack at it.

Is this “Big Tobacco 2.0”?

There are obvious echoes: government plaintiffs, damning internal company documents, and allegations that big companies made billions peddling an addictive product to vulnerable people while causing catastrophic, society-wide harm.

Social media is harder, in some ways, because it involves speech, implicates Section 230, and presents a much more contested causal story. Further, smoking causes cancer – a disease that’s relatively easy to identify and diagnose. The harms flowing from social media are less visible and more diffuse.

On the other hand, when the state AGs initiated tobacco litigation in the 1990s, there was no template for a coordinated campaign of that scale. What state AGs were doing was totally unprecedented. Now, in the aftermath of the tobacco litigation of the 1990s and the behemoth opioid litigation, which crested around 2021, nobody is writing on a clean slate. The strategy has been battle-tested; social media is simply the next front.

An associate professor in Earth and planetary sciences, Willenbring has introduced hundreds of students to the field and created a welcoming, engaging space for them to learn.

In recognition of her extraordinary commitment to student engagement, growth, and success, Associate Professor Jane Willenbring has received the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s 2026 Excellence in Teaching Award.

The award was established to acknowledge and recognize dedication to quality teaching. Recipients are selected based on nominations from students and faculty and are announced at the end of spring quarter.

“This award recognizes not only Jane’s exceptional abilities as an educator today, but also the lasting influence she will have on generations of students who will carry forward the knowledge, curiosity, and passion she has instilled in them,” said Arun Majumdar, dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “Jane embodies Stanford’s educational excellence, and this recognition is richly deserved.”

The accolade came as a surprise to Willenbring, but not to those who know her pedagogy. “It’s not every day you get to win a teaching award, and I am deeply honored by this recognition,” said Willenbring, who also holds a courtesy appointment in Earth system science.

The nominations for Willenbring note her ability to make geoscience accessible to students of all academic and socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as her genuine investment in each student’s achievement.

“She consistently broke down difficult material in ways that felt intuitive and engaging,” a nominator commented. “She always brought great energy to every class, and you could tell she genuinely cared about whether students were connecting with the material.”

The nominator added: “Her ability to meet students where they are while still challenging them intellectually is what makes her teaching truly exceptional.”

Skillful, fun teaching

In the award nominations, students and colleagues raved about Willenbring’s co-teaching of EPS 1/EARTHSYS 11: Introduction to Geology, a course that exposes students to the breadth of geoscience. With more than 100 students regularly enrolled, it ranks as one of the largest undergraduate courses in the Doerr School of Sustainability. A colleague said in nominating comments that Willenbring “brought new life” to the course, growing its popularity to the point that the university now offers it in both winter and spring quarters. “Much of this is due to Jane’s work ethic, dedication, and teaching skill in communicating basic science to non-majors in a fun way,” the nominator said.

Another colleague commented: “Jane’s lectures were pitched perfectly for the non-major audience and laced with humor and anecdotes that kept the class engaged.”

Willenbring also drew plaudits for her teaching of EPS 20: The Geoscience of Environmental Justice, which tackles climate change, air pollution, contaminant migration, and more at an introductory level. Students reported feeling invested in the curriculum’s subject matter and enlivened by Willenbring’s own experiences.

“She wove topics together, highlighting real case studies and personal stories to that of environmental justice, and truly called upon our positionality as students and academics,” a student nominator said.

Bringing everyone along in learning

Students appreciated that Willenbring always made time for them, despite being extremely busy pursuing her own research. “I looked forward to staying for her office hours, where she told such incredible stories about her work in Antarctica,” a nominator related. “After hearing about the time that she got a sunburn on the roof of her mouth while hiking up a glacier, for example, I will never forget the meaning of albedo.” Albedo is a measure of how much sunlight – including sunburn-causing ultraviolet light – a surface reflects, with fresh snow having the highest albedo of any common natural substance on Earth.

Nominators also noted Willenbring’s advocacy for students beyond the classroom. “What touched me the most was how much she supports each student individually,” said a nominator who took the environmental justice course. “After each student’s final presentation, she actively connects them with PhD students in her network based on their interests, creating opportunities for those who want to get involved in research labs.”

A seminar Willenbring teaches, GEOLSCI 305: Invisible Curriculum, illustrates her prioritization of professional development. The seminar is designed to prepare students for graduate school and careers by imparting helpful information that may be implicitly assumed but not explicitly stated during their academic journey.

“There can be a lot to navigate in academia, and this seminar is a way to help everyone get to similar levels of awareness,” Willenbring said.

Associate Professor Jane Willenbring brings her passion for people and surface processes to understand how environmental changes impact life on Earth, and how life impacts the planet.

Rich academic experiences

For her own research, Willenbring studies the evolution of Earth’s surfaces over time, including the movements of tectonic plates, the effects of long-term climate change, and physical transformations caused by living organisms. The interest traces back to her childhood in Mandan, North Dakota, a small city outside of Bismarck, where she recalls enjoying the outdoors then as she does now. “In some ways, I’m still that kid running the hose, making little rivers in the dirt,” she said. “I liked to play in the dirt, and still do.”

Following through on these interests, she went on to earn a bachelor’s degree with honors from North Dakota State University in soil science and geology and a master’s degree from Boston University in geology and Earth science. She earned her PhD, also in geology and Earth science, from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she was a Killam Scholar.

She initially pursued her postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota, then at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Germany. She became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and subsequently at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, where she was director of the Scripps Cosmogenic Isotope Laboratory (SCI-Lab). In the summer of 2020, Willenbring joined Stanford University as an associate professor.

She credits her varied university and research experience with informing her teaching philosophy. “I’ve loved all the universities I’ve been at, but Stanford is really special,” said Willenbring. “The collaborative research environment here, the enthusiasm of the students for research – it’s been a wonderful experience teaching at Stanford.”

A new Stanford study shows data brokers are making it difficult for consumers to submit privacy requests and failing to report how many privacy requests they receive.

It’s no secret that businesses collect personal information as users scroll and click through websites and mobile apps. But a booming ecosystem of third-party data brokers that buy and sell massive amounts of customer data remains invisible to most consumers.

To make that ecosystem more transparent, California passed a law expanding data broker regulation: the, which built on the state's 2019 data broker registration law. Under the act, any business that knowingly collects and sells the personal information of consumers with whom it has no direct relationship must register with the state and give consumers the right to delete their data, correct personal information, and learn what personal information the business is selling.

The problem? Most data brokers are ignoring those rules.

Joint research from and Stanford HAI looked at compliance with California’s strict privacy laws and are fully complying with the law.

“This is a surprisingly low compliance rate,” says Stanford HAI Privacy and Data Policy Fellow . “It’s possible data brokers are still working out how to report on the required metrics, but they’ve been on notice for more than three years and this step is now mandatory.”

Allowing consumers to manage their own personal data matters for many reasons. When brokers sell your data, it can impact what ads you see, what pricing businesses offer you, and whether you get hired for a job or qualify for a loan. Inaccurate information spreads quickly through the ecosystem and persists long after it’s detected.

“Companies use personal data to create a 360-degree profile and make predictions about you, but often that data is incorrect,” King says. “People need to have some control over the entire coursing river of their data, especially as AI developers build more automated systems that are unsupervised by humans.”

Today, it’s unclear to what extent data brokers influence the development of AI because of a lack of transparency with how frontier models are built. However, the now requires brokers to disclose whether they have sold data to generative AI developers. So far, more than 30 companies have disclosed this information. “California has been a leader in mandating broker transparency on paper. In principle, that should allow us to better understand the role of data brokers in the AI ecosystem, but in practice, our research shows that disclosures are far from complete,” says RegLab Director .

By July 1, 2025, data brokers had to publicly report how many consumer requests they received in the prior calendar year for the following categories:

They also needed to share the mean and median number of days to fulfill each request type, and a breakdown of the number of requests they complied with and denied.

But when King, Ho, and coauthors Anna-Maria Gueorguieva, PhD candidate at the University of Washington and RegLab 2025 Summer Graduate Student Fellow, and Apoorva Panidapu, RegLab undergraduate research assistant, manually reviewed privacy policies for all 522 self-registered data brokers in 2025, they found only 9% fully complied by reporting on the full set of transparency requirements and 45% did not submit any rights request metrics at all to the California Privacy Protection Agency.

Moreover, the found 64% of data brokers added friction to rights request processes, using confusing website designs, multiple forms, or excessive verification steps to make it more difficult for consumers to submit requests. Such “dark patterns” are expressly prohibited by the law.

The team identified several possible reasons for noncompliance: The system relies on data brokers to self-register, penalties are inconsistent, and the agency that enforces the rules is under-resourced.

The Delete Act also authorized a new technical platform, the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (), that will allow California residents to submit data-deletion and opt-out-of-sale requests to all registered data brokers with a single request. Now live as of August 1, every 45 days data brokers must delete all personal information related to consumers who opt out, including behavioral, financial, health, location, and relationship data, as well as any inferences drawn about individuals from their data.

The platform holds promise, but its effectiveness will depend on how effectively consumer rights organizations publicize the new mechanism, King says. As it stands today, the platform has over a half-million consumer registrations, due in part to a publicity campaign by CalPrivacy to build consumer awareness.

Another phase of the legislation kicks in by 2028, when data brokers will have to undergo third-party audits every three years to assess their compliance with the Delete Act. King adds that this is when the stakes will go up.

“California is leading the way in consumer privacy laws, but our findings paint a troubling picture of how these protections have been implemented,” she says. “Without clear reporting requirements and consistent financial consequences, businesses simply won’t do it.”

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5 stations from 5 contributors

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37

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Good

Main pollutant:

PM2.5

6.7 µg/m³

20°

2 km/h

63 %

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37 AQI? US

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20:00–21:00 Oct 02 Local time

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