Meta's Instagram faces Tennessee addiction trial: Check details here

Meta heads to trial in Nashville on Monday to face claims that Instagram wasn't just popular with teenagers; it was built to be impossible for them to put down.

The lawsuit, filed by Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti's office, accuses Meta of violating the state's consumer protection law by knowingly designing Instagram to drive compulsive use among teens while misleading the public about the platform's safety.

The state claims Meta sat on internal research showing the harm and kept shipping features it knew were risky, without warning users. Skrmetti's team alleges CEO Mark Zuckerberg was repeatedly warned by employees about the research and declined to fund efforts to address it.

Tennessee wants more than financial penalties; it's asking a court to order changes to the platform itself. The case zeroes in on specific design choices: autoplay, Reels, notifications, and content that disappears after a set window.

Meta has pointed to a decade of work on age-appropriate defaults and parental controls and argues Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields it from liability for content users post themselves.

Jury selection begins Monday for the case's first phase, where jurors will decide whether Meta broke Tennessee law.

How the Meta's Instagram trail will unfold?

If they do so, a second phase ensues, whereby a judge will consider fines ranging from zero to $1,000 per offence according to state laws, as well as any platform modifications. The lawsuit is predicted to take seven weeks and overlaps with two other trials against Meta currently taking place in California.

Tennessee is not the only one. All states have filed lawsuits against Meta concerning their platforms’ influence on children, with a federal trial involving 29 states beginning August 18 in California and another filed by a Florida teenager against both Meta and Snap starting on July 27.

This lawsuit is the second in the states’ cases to go to the jury, with the previous one being New Mexico’s. There, the jury found that Meta was misleading its consumers concerning platform safety and ordered $375 million in damages to be paid to the state.