The Supreme Court has cleared the way for a lawsuit that treats a platform’s decision not to check your ID as an illegal business practice. By declining to hear Meta’s appeal in Meta v. Vermont, the justices let Vermont’s claim against Instagram move forward and tucked inside that claim is a demand that should worry anyone who values logging on without handing over proof of who they are.
The case began in 2023, when Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, a Democrat, sued Meta, alleging violations of the state’s consumer protection laws.
The headline accusation is that Instagram was built to hook young users.
One of the listed offenses is Meta’s failure to “verify users’ age upon account creation,” which the state frames as an “Unfair Acts and Practices” violation of Vermont’s Consumer Protection Act.
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The remedy Vermont seeks is an injunction barring those practices and the practical effect of such an order would push Meta toward far broader age verification than it runs today.
A lawsuit nominally about addictive design is being used to recast the absence of identity checks as consumer fraud. Verifying age online means collecting government IDs, scanning faces, or building behavioral profiles detailed enough to estimate how old someone is and every one of those methods replaces an anonymous account with a tracked, identified one. The state could have argued for narrower design fixes. It chose a theory whose logical endpoint is mandatory ID at the door.
Meta fought to stop the case on constitutional grounds, telling the Supreme Court, “The complaint alleges that Meta violated Vermont law by ‘designing’ Instagram to be addictive, but there is no allegation that Meta ‘designed’ Instagram in Vermont or with features in any way unique to or targeted at Vermont.”
Earlier, the Vermont Supreme Court rejected Meta’s claim, noting that because the state sued Meta for allegedly pushing an addictive program on minors and lying to users about it, any due process concerns have been “clearly extinguished.”
Clark, announcing the suit, said, “Instagram’s harm to teens, and particularly girls and young women, is well-documented. But Meta has denied and downplayed these harmful impacts for continued profits. Meta knowingly designed and developed Instagram features to exploit teens’ vulnerabilities to maximize revenue. This is reprehensible and a violation of Vermont’s Consumer Protection Act. This lawsuit aims to hold Meta accountable.”
With the appeal denied, Vermont v. Meta returns to Chittenden County Superior Court, where discovery is expected to be the next phase. The reach of the ruling extends past Instagram.
A parallel suit, Vermont v. TikTok, had been frozen while Meta’s appeal played out, and now it can move too. TikTok faces the same construction, accused of targeting children with addictive features and faulted for failing to “adequately verify TikTok users’ age upon account creation,” again pleaded as an “Unfair Acts and Practices” violation of the same statute, again paired with an injunction request that would seemingly force broader age verification.
You can hold a dim view of how these platforms treat teenagers and still see what is being built through the courtroom side door. The verdicts and each surviving complaint adds weight to a legal theory in which staying anonymous is itself the harm, and the cure is a system that knows your name before it lets you in.
