Meta Loses Supreme Court Bid to Block Vermont Teen Addiction Suit

The Supreme Court declined on Tuesday to hear Meta Platforms Inc.’s bid to escape a Vermont lawsuit accusing Instagram of deliberately addicting teenagers, a brief procedural refusal that removes the company’s last cleared appeal route and pushes the case toward full discovery. Vermont’s suit can now move forward with Meta’s own internal research on teen mental health sitting at the center of what state prosecutors have built over three years.

Vermont is one of 42 states whose attorneys general have filed enforcement actions against Meta. The high court said nothing about the underlying merits, as it does not when declining a case. Its silence arrives while 2,527 similar actions pile up in federal court, two jury verdicts from March have already begun setting the damages template, and a New Mexico judge prepares to rule on whether to declare Instagram a public nuisance requiring billions in remediation.

The Jurisdiction Wall That Collapsed

Meta’s core argument was procedural: neither the company nor the design of its apps has specific ties to Vermont, so Vermont courts should have no authority over the dispute. The company cited the 14th Amendment’s due process clause and warned that losing on this point would expose it to identical legal challenges in every state.

Vermont countered with a linked chain of reasoning: Instagram reaches Vermont teenagers, collects their behavioral data, and runs advertising systems that generate revenue from campaigns targeting Vermont teens specifically. Vermont’s Supreme Court accepted that logic in 2025 and let the case proceed. Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, a Democrat who filed the original consumer protection lawsuit in 2023, said the Supreme Court’s denial affirms “that companies that choose to do business in Vermont, like Meta, can be held accountable when they harm kids.”

Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court reached the same jurisdictional conclusion in April, ruling that Meta must face that state’s youth addiction lawsuit too. Together, the Vermont and Massachusetts decisions form a two-state template that other AGs, attorneys general, can cite when Meta attempts the same procedural exit in their courts.

The Research Meta Buried

Teen Girls, Body Image, and the Numbers Inside the Building

At the center of the state cases sits not external academic research but Meta’s own internal studies, presentation decks, and survey findings, which have moved from leaked documents into formal court exhibits across courtrooms from Santa Fe to Los Angeles. Vermont’s consumer protection complaint describes Instagram as having “studied teens’ neurological, cognitive and psychological vulnerabilities to cause them to use the app compulsively and excessively.” That language paraphrases the company’s own documents, not the state’s advocacy.

One internal study reviewed in a U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee analysis of Instagram and teen mental health found 13.5% of teen girls reporting that Instagram worsens thoughts of suicide. Another internal finding: 17% of teen girls said the app makes eating disorders worse. A separate internal presentation found 66% of teen girls and 40% of teen boys reporting “constant negative comparisons” while using the platform. Almost all American teenagers between 13 and 17 use social media, with about a third saying they use it “almost constantly,” according to the Pew Research Center.

The Strategy That Brought Kids In Young

Design intent, not just documented harm, separates these cases from routine tort claims. Attorneys for plaintiffs in the Los Angeles trial introduced internal documents in which Meta executives described the company’s approach to its youngest potential users:

If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.

Those words, from an internal Meta document shown to jurors at trial, accompanied data indicating that 11-year-olds were four times more likely to return to Instagram than to competing apps, despite the platform requiring users to be at least 13. A Meta researcher’s note cited in court filings from the California multidistrict litigation compared suppressing negative findings to the tobacco industry’s practice of concealing its own research on cigarette harms. Four whistleblowers later alleged Meta rewrote its policies around researching sensitive topics, including children, within six weeks of former Meta product manager Frances Haugen leaking internal documents to journalists.

Meta has disputed the framing across multiple court venues. “We strongly disagree with these allegations, which rely on cherry-picked quotes and misinformed opinions,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement to press in late 2025. The company says it has introduced more than a dozen teen safety measures over the past year, including Teen Accounts with built-in parental controls and content restrictions for minors.

Two Juries in Two Days, Three Hundred Million Dollars Apart

On March 24, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties for misleading users about platform safety while children were targeted by sexual predators, a case brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez under the state’s landmark unfair practices case. A bench trial phase began May 4, seeking $3.7 billion in additional abatement costs alongside a public nuisance declaration and mandatory design changes including age verification and restrictions on encrypted messaging for minors.

Twenty-four hours later in Los Angeles, a separate jury concluded that Meta and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube negligently designed platforms harmful to young people, awarding $6 million in combined compensatory and punitive damages to a 20-year-old woman who said she became addicted to social media as a child. Jurors deliberated for more than eight days following a seven-week trial that included deposition footage of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who testified that Instagram does not target children. Independent scientific evidence presented throughout these proceedings aligns with a peer-reviewed analysis of 37 studies on Instagram and adolescent mental health, which found consistent links between heavy use and depression, anxiety, and disordered eating in teenagers.

42 States, 2,527 Cases, and No Insurer to Call

The Vermont ruling is one pressure point in a litigation landscape that has grown faster than any single filing captures.

• 42 state attorneys general filed coordinated enforcement actions against Meta, the wave Vermont’s 2023 lawsuit was part of from its first day on the docket.
• 2,527 pending actions now sit in the Adolescent Social Media Addiction multidistrict litigation (MDL, a federal case-consolidation mechanism) in the Northern District of California, up from 2,172 several months earlier.
• $800 million in Meta Class A shares is held by proponents of a shareholder resolution documented in a proxy filing submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on child safety and executive pay, calling for compensation to be tied to child safety outcomes.
• Meta’s own insurers, including Hartford Casualty Insurance Company, were ruled not obligated to cover the claims by the Delaware Superior Court in March, on grounds that the claims arise from intentional design choices, meaning every settlement and adverse verdict draws directly from company funds.

In May, Meta settled a lawsuit from a school district in Kentucky, one of thousands of school districts seeking to recover costs tied to a campus mental health crisis. The settlement amount was not publicly disclosed. Twenty-nine state AGs have separately asked the federal MDL court to consolidate their cases into a single trial, arguing that Meta’s conduct and underlying evidence are substantially the same across states. Meta opposes consolidation, contending each state’s consumer protection framework differs too much for a single jury to apply.

New Mexico’s arithmetic, taken alone, illustrates what state-level exposure looks like. The $375 million civil penalty verdict plus the $3.7 billion abatement demand represent one state’s calculation. Forty-one others are watching the denominator grow.

Meta has called the public nuisance approach “a misguided strategy that ignores the hundreds of other apps teens use daily.” The company says it remains committed to safe, age-appropriate experiences and launched 13 safety measures in the past year.

The “Big Tobacco” Template Courts Are Borrowing

The tobacco comparison that has become standard across plaintiffs’ courtroom filings did not originate in their briefs. Internal Meta communications, documented in an analysis of court-filed Meta internal studies by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, included a researcher’s note comparing the suppression of negative findings to the tobacco industry’s practice of concealing its own cigarette research. Plaintiffs’ attorneys across state and federal dockets embedded that comparison in their trial narratives, and it appeared in closing arguments at both the New Mexico and Los Angeles trials in March.

Legal mechanics in the current wave differ from the 1990s tobacco settlement. That deal emerged from fraud and misrepresentation claims coordinated by state AGs over years of negotiation, resolving through a single master settlement agreement. Social media litigation now spans product liability, consumer protection, public nuisance, and products-defect claims simultaneously, across dozens of courts with different standards of proof. What the New Mexico bench phase tested specifically, whether a digital platform’s architecture can be declared a public nuisance, has never been decided by an American court before.

If New Mexico First Judicial District Chief Judge Bryan Biedscheid grants the public nuisance declaration, it hands plaintiffs in other states a theory requiring them to prove only harm and the company’s capacity to abate it, not fraudulent intent. That remediation framework, not the fraud theory, is the piece of the tobacco template that state AGs are actually trying to carry into the digital era.

June Sets the Precedent Calendar

On June 15, the first federal school district bellwether trial is scheduled to begin in the Northern District of California, drawing Meta, TikTok, Snap Inc., and YouTube into a single proceeding. In MDL practice, a bellwether trial is a test case whose outcome guides settlement negotiations for hundreds or thousands of similar claims. If school districts prevail on a products-defect theory, damages calculations across all 2,527 MDL actions shift in a direction current settlement math has not yet priced in.

The New Mexico bench trial wrapped its testimony phase on May 22, with Chief Judge Biedscheid requesting written closing arguments from both sides by June 12 before issuing his ruling on the public nuisance question and the full abatement demand. Meta has warned it may remove its platforms from New Mexico entirely if the demands cannot be resolved, a threat the state’s AG office has not treated as grounds to negotiate down. The Supreme Court closed one procedural exit on Tuesday; June closes the next set.