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Meta’s opening statement in Oakland was delivered by Paul Schmidt, a Covington & Burling partner who co-chairs the firm’s product liability and mass torts practice. His track record includes trial wins for McKesson in the opioids litigation, Eli Lilly in the Cymbalta cases, and Hoffmann-La Roche in the Accutane trials. Covington’s own website quotes a book by Washington Post reporters calling one of his cross-examinations “a master class in how to destroy a witness.”
I was in the courthouse for both sides. California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill gave the states a four-word shorthand — hook, hold, harvest, hide — and walked the eight-member advisory jury through the gap between what Meta said publicly and what its internal documents show. Schmidt’s answer was a phrase he returned to again and again: wait for all the evidence. His core argument is that science has not established a causal link between rising teen mental health problems and rising social media use. That argument is not wrong on the facts. Science deals in consensus, not certainty, and as the former editor-in-chief of Popular Science I can tell you no serious researcher will ever say a thing is 100% settled. Manufacturing doubt inside that gap is exactly the strategy that worked for Big Tobacco and for the oil industry on climate.
The Case Against Meta
Twenty-nine state attorneys general say Facebook and Instagram collected personal information from children under thirteen without asking their parents, which a 1998 federal law called COPPA makes illegal. Four of those states — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey — go further. They say Meta built specific features it knew were hurting young users, and then told parents and Congress the opposite.
The filters fight shows how the same facts get framed twice. O’Neill described Meta banning appearance-altering filters, asking outside experts whether to make the ban permanent, hearing yes from the experts and yes from its own staff — and then Zuckerberg putting them back after seeing the growth numbers. Schmidt described a ten-month review Meta was under no obligation to conduct, ending in a split decision that kept surgery-adjacent filters off and let the giraffe ears back on, all built by third parties in the first place. Anderson Cooper asked me tonight whether this is social media’s cigarette moment. What I wish I’d said: the value of a trial like this is that it turns a decade of vague dread about these products into specific, testable, legislatable language.
Arturo Bejar, Instagram’s former head of wellbeing turned whistleblower, took the stand Tuesday for direct examination. I’m waiting for the cross this morning before I bring it to you, so you get both halves.
