The consumer-protection case against Meta is on the calendar in Oakland as People of the State of California, et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., case 4:23-cv-05448-YGR, inside MDL 4:22-md-03047-YGR [E1][E2]. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is trying it in Courtroom 1 of the Ronald V. Dellums building [E1]. Jury selection finished on 12 August with an eight-person advisory jury; the judge keeps the last word [E3]. Opening statements began on 18 August, states in the morning and Meta in the afternoon, under a pretrial order that set openings and evidence for that Tuesday [E4].
Nineteen August was a trial day, not a new opening. Contemporaneous reports describe continued evidence, including Arturo Béjar on direct [E5]. The four states running the consumer-protection phase are California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey; a larger bipartisan group of about 29 attorneys general stands behind the COPPA claims [E6]. Those are the parties on the docket, not a press-conference coalition invented for the cameras [E1][E6].
The states’ opening, delivered by Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill, put the business model as hook the users, hold them, harvest their data, and hide the truth [E5]. Internal documents cited in court included a study titled Long Term Retention: The Young Ones Are The Best Ones [E5]. The COPPA count alleges collection of personal information from users under 13 without verifiable parental consent [E1][E5]. Remedies sought are civil penalties, restitution or disgorgement, and injunctive changes to the product, not a personal-injury damages trial [E6].
Paul Schmidt of Covington, for Meta, told the jury that some teenagers struggle with time on social media and that the company takes the problem seriously [E7]. He said the same internal surveys the states cite also show substantial shares of users who felt better or neutral, and that Meta has an age-13 rule, detection tools and time-management features dating to 2018 [E7]. His closing beat for the day was to wait for all the evidence and not treat the case as a referendum on social media [E7].
Attorney General Rob Bonta’s pretrial release said Meta designed a dangerous product for young users, knew it to be dangerous, and lied about how dangerous it was [E6]. After Day 1 he said this is not a damages case and pointed the court toward civil penalties and restitution rather than Meta’s $1.4 trillion figure [E6][E7]. That posture matches the remedies already briefed on the docket [E1][E6].
No official transcript of the 18 or 19 August sessions was in the open record at the freeze [E1][E4]. What is docketed is the caption, the judge, the advisory jury, the opening date and the claim split between four states’ consumer statutes and the wider COPPA group [E1][E2][E4]. The rest is courtroom reporting of those two days [E5][E7].