Hello! My name is Kelly Stonelake. I worked at Meta from 2009 until 2024, including as Director of Product Marketing. After experiencing sexual harassment and witnessing child safety failings, plus Meta’s retaliation toward women speaking up about it, I filed a lawsuit and became a federal whistleblower and advocate for legislative reform. I write this Overturned newsletter on tech accountability and broken systems of power.

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Yesterday, a New Mexico judge issued a 68-page final order against Meta that does considerably more than affirm the $375 million jury verdict the company received earlier this year.

The court also ordered Meta to deposit $567 million into a fund for prevention, screening, treatment, and other programs addressing the damage associated with its platforms. Together, the two financial components total $942 million, before counting what Meta will have to spend complying with the rest of the order.

But the money is only part of the story.

For the next five years, Meta is supposed to change how Facebook and Instagram operate for people in New Mexico. It must restrict when minors receive notifications, hide like counts by default, impose a monthly usage cap, prevent adults from being algorithmically connected to children, improve age assurance, strengthen sextortion protections, submit child-sexual-abuse reports to human review, and show users safety information on the platforms themselves.

The court found that Meta’s platforms had become a public nuisance whose effects spread outward into New Mexico’s schools, hospitals, families, courts, and law-enforcement systems.

And the metaphor the court used to explain that conclusion came from Meta itself.

Meta itself offered the analogy of a factory emitting pollution to argue that any relief should be limited to stopping and repairing the harm, without closing the factory.

The judge accepted that framework, then applied it against Meta:

• Meta’s platforms are the factory.

• The psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children are the pollution.

• The “pollution” spreads beyond Meta’s platforms and burdens children, families, schools, hospitals, and law enforcement.

The court stressed that it was not shutting down Facebook or Instagram or directly regulating particular content. It was requiring Meta to address the harms created by the way its platforms operate.

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I break down the 68-page document below, but first would love to share a conversation I had with the BBC this morning while sitting outside my 12-year-old’s hockey practice.

On why this judgment matters:

“We’re talking about a meaningful impact on their bottom line, which is the only way to get their attention and to drive actual change.”

“When we start thinking about how you extrapolate the damages to children on a state-by-state or a per-capita level, we’re talking about a meaningful impact on their bottom line.”

On Meta claiming their products aren’t harmful and they work hard to keep kids safe:

“Meta knows their products cause harm, don’t do enough to change that, and then really tries to perform care.”

“What the public gets to see, and what jurors get to see, and judges get to see, is a mountain of evidence that makes very clear that the opposite is true.”

“Giving parents the “peace of mind” of parental controls or oversight, [controls] not actually working, and then blaming parents and lobbying to keep them out of courtrooms is a real move in deflection and smoke and mirrors.”

Like what Meta’s orientation toward youth safety that I saw first hand in Horizon:

“We’re going to imply we have parental controls, but they won’t actually exist when we launch the product. We’re just going to make sure parents feel like their kids are safe.”

On Meta’s opportunity:

“You have to put on your hat as if the job was to keep people that use your product safe and to deliver on the promise that technology should improve our lives.”

“Meta had the opportunity to be doing that from the beginning, but they have really focused on how to maximize profit at the cost of everything else.”

Breaking down the court’s order:

Essential facts

• The case was brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez against Meta.

• The proceeding had two phases:

  • A jury trial from February 2 to March 24, 2026, addressing violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act.

  • A bench trial from May 4 to May 22, addressing whether Meta created a public nuisance and what it must do to abate it.

• The jury found 75,000 Unfair Practices Act violations and imposed the maximum $5,000 penalty for each, totaling $375 million. The violations concerned New Mexicans under 18 who used Meta’s platforms without being properly informed of their risks, or who would not have used them if properly informed. (¶¶ 8–12, pp. 3–4)

• Yesterday’s final order requires Meta to deposit another $567 million into an abatement fund. (¶ 121, p. 45)

• The five-year period begins with the August 6 order but is paused during an appeal if Meta posts a supersedeas bond (a surety bond that a court requires from an appellant who wants to delay payment of a judgment until an appeal is over). That means an appeal could substantially delay the actual implementation clock. (¶ 131, pp. 48–49)

• Meta must report publicly to the court and the State every June 30 and December 31 on its compliance with every abatement requirement. (¶ 132, p. 49)

• The court anticipates additional orders and hearings governing how the $567 million fund will be administered and spent. (¶ 130, p. 48)

What the court found

• Meta’s platforms are “a cause of and substantial contributing factor to the youth mental health crisis in New Mexico.” (¶ 79, p. 27)

• Meta knowingly designed Facebook and Instagram to maximize engagement, including in ways harmful to teenagers, while failing to disclose the risks adequately. (¶¶ 54–64, pp. 18–21)

• The court found that Meta’s conduct and platform design contributed to:

  • Problematic and compulsive use.

  • Depression, anxiety, sleep deprivation, suicide risk, and disordered eating.

  • Bullying and disruption in public schools.

  • Grooming, sextortion, and other forms of child sexual exploitation.

  • Burdens on families, hospitals, schools, courts, and law enforcement.

• The court acknowledged that social media can provide valuable connection, news, education, entertainment, and support for marginalized communities. It also acknowledged that TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and other platforms contribute to the harms. But it held that other companies’ conduct does not relieve Meta of responsibility for its own contribution. (¶¶ 50–53, 97–102)

• The court rejected Meta’s argument that New Mexico’s existing mental-health vulnerabilities relieved the company of responsibility. It applied the logic of the “eggshell plaintiff” rule: Meta remains responsible even if the consequences of its conduct are more serious in a population that was already vulnerable. (¶ 101, pp. 36–37)

  And let’s not forget what we learned in the Los Angeles trial. From Mark Zuckerberg Takes the Stand Today in Los Angeles Social Media Addiction Trial:

  “Meta said in their opening statement that the plaintiff’s issues are to blame on her challenging home life, but lead trial attorney for the plaintiff, Mark Lanier, responded by emphasizing the findings of a study, “Project MYST.” The study, conducted by Meta, found that children who experienced “adverse events” like trauma and stress were particularly vulnerable for addiction; and that parental supervision and controls made little impact.”

  

• It also rejected Meta’s Section 230 defense because the State’s claim concerned Meta’s own product designs and features, rather than liability for content created by third parties. (¶¶ 104–107, pp. 38–40)

Internal evidence highlighted by the court

• A May 2020 Meta presentation said:

“Approval and acceptance are huge rewards for teens and interactions are the currency on [Instagram].”

• It said direct messages, notifications, comments, follows, and likes encouraged teens to keep returning. The same presentation directly connected “Fewer Notifications” to “Fewer Sessions” and then “Less Time Spent.” (¶ 28, p. 10)

• An August 2022 internal presentation found:

  • 18.3% of weekly Instagram teen users exhibited behavior associated with problematic use.

  • 7.4% exhibited late-night use during hours likely to displace sleep. (¶ 29, p. 10)

• Meta’s June 2023 internal research said:

  • “Teens have worse integrity experiences than adults.”

  • “Teen ranking is especially driven by engagement terms.” (¶ 58, p. 19)

• Meta’s “Teen Fundamentals” research said the teenage brain is generally about 80% mature and that the remaining development involves the frontal cortex, including judgment, planning, and foresight. It recognized that teens’ heightened sensitivity to novelty and reward made them especially vulnerable without a mature frontal cortex to impose limits. (¶ 60, p. 20)

• An internal 2019 test reported that 26% of the accounts recommended to users Meta classified as groomers were teen accounts. (¶ 32, p. 11)

• A Meta employee wrote in 2020 that People You May Know was responsible for 80% of violating adult-minor connections. (¶ 32, p. 11)

• Arturo Bejar described the fundamental problem:

“The product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls.” (¶ 31, p. 11)

New Mexico-specific evidence

• From 2018 through 2024, Instagram averaged approximately 180,116 monthly active New Mexico users between 13 and 17. In March 2024, it had 195,453 monthly active teen users in the state. (¶ 26, p. 9)

• The top 1% of New Mexico teens by time spent on Facebook used it for at least 290 minutes, nearly five hours, each day. (¶ 68, p. 22)

• Persistent sadness or hopelessness among New Mexico students in grades 9–12 was 16% higher in 2023 than in 2013. Youth major depressive episodes more than doubled between 2013–14 and 2022–23. (¶ 15, p. 5)

• The youth suicide rate during 2019–23 was 31% higher than during 2009–13. Suicide represented approximately five times as many adolescent deaths as cancer during the later period. (¶ 16, p. 6)

• Among students using social media more than once an hour, compared with less-frequent users:

  • Suicide attempts were 25% more likely.

  • Injury during a suicide attempt was 38% more likely.

  • Anxiety symptoms were 17% more likely.

  • Persistent sadness or hopelessness was 23% more likely.

  • Depression symptoms were 36% more likely. (¶ 69, p. 23)

• The court credited expert analysis concluding that one in ten New Mexico children ages 11–17 had at least one mental-health concern that would not have existed without social-media exposure. Among children with at least one concern, the expert attributed 21% of those cases to social-media use. (¶¶ 72–74, pp. 23–25)

• A separate expert estimated that 70,784 New Mexico children experienced technology-facilitated sexual abuse in 2023. That figure covers technology generally, not Meta alone. (¶ 35, p. 12)

• New Mexico’s Internet Crimes Against Children unit receives dozens of reports each month concerning sextortion of New Mexico victims on Instagram. (¶ 38, p. 13)

• Approximately 75% of Meta CyberTip reports concerning New Mexico require law enforcement to obtain a warrant because Meta has not conducted human review, a higher percentage than for any other platform. The ICAC commander testified that a majority of Meta’s reports were “junk tips.” (¶ 39, p. 13)

What Meta must change

Age assurance

Meta must:

• Continue improving its age-assurance models and signals.

• Use reasonable best efforts to develop a dedicated model for identifying users under 13 within two years.

• Request proof of age when its systems predict that a New Mexico Facebook or Instagram user is under 13.

• Mark accounts for deletion when users do not verify their age within 30 days, subject to legal-hold requirements.

• Review profiles, images, posts, and comments for admissions inconsistent with the age entered by the user.

• Treat users as under 13 or under 18 when Meta believes they fall into that category but cannot determine a precise age.

• Review the friend networks of accounts suspended or deleted for being under 13.

• Partner with schools or a child-safety organization to create a portal through which administrators can report suspected under-13 accounts.

• Make reporting underage accounts easier.

• Delete accounts and personal information belonging to users under 13.

• Maintain an appeals process for users whose ages are incorrectly estimated. (¶ 142, pp. 52–54)

Teen accounts and adult-minor contact

For New Mexico users under 18, Meta must:

• Keep Instagram accounts private by default.

• Limit Facebook friend connections by default to other users under 18.

• Prevent private teen accounts from appearing in searches unless someone searches for the specific username.

• Prevent teen accounts from being recommended to adults.

• Prevent unconnected adults from messaging minors.

• Require parental or guardian consent before changing these protective defaults.

• Keep these minimum protections in place for the five-year abatement period. Meta cannot discontinue or weaken them without the State’s written agreement or a court order. (¶¶ 143–145, pp. 54–55)

• Keep end-to-end encryption disabled on Instagram during the abatement period. The court declined to prohibit it on Facebook. (¶ 144, p. 55)

Sextortion and sexual exploitation

Meta must:

• Strengthen sextortion warnings so that minors are strongly encouraged to end suspicious communications, while visually deemphasizing any option to continue.

• Maintain or improve systems for identifying sextortion and sexual exploitation.

• Maintain the Take It Down program.

• Prevent minors from sending or receiving nudity that violates Meta’s policies.

• Continue blurring images suspected of containing nudity.

• Apply a one-strike policy to adults found to have engaged in child sexual exploitation, disabling all related accounts and using its most advanced tools to prevent the person from opening new accounts, unlike their latest seventeen-strike policy (!!!!!).

• Provide prominent reporting mechanisms for child sexual exploitation.

• Have a human review reports submitted through that mechanism within 48 hours.

• Provide a low-friction, youth-accessible way to report unwanted sexual advances and give the person reporting prompt feedback. (¶¶ 151–156, pp. 56–57)

Chatbots

• Meta must prevent minors in New Mexico from having romantic or sexualized interactions with its chatbots.

• Adults must be prevented from using a Meta chatbot to simulate or discuss a romantic or sexual interaction with a minor. (¶¶ 157–159, pp. 57–58)

Notifications, likes, and usage limits

• No push notifications to known or estimated minors:

  • Between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. on any day.

  • Between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on school-year weekdays.

• Exceptions are permitted for messages from connected users and urgent targeted messages such as security or hazard alerts.

• Like counts must be hidden by default for minors. A parent can permit the minor to change that setting.

• Users under 18 must be limited to 90 hours per month across Facebook and Instagram combined. This is a monthly cap, roughly equivalent to three hours per day, rather than a daily limit. (¶¶ 168–170, p. 60)

Disclosures and education

• Meta must display a safety-information banner:

  • At least monthly to every adult Facebook and Instagram user in New Mexico.

  • At least weekly to users under 18.

• The banner must link to Meta’s transparency, parent, safety, help, and Teen Account materials. The State can review, edit, and approve it.

• New users under 18 must receive a daily information screen for their first 30 days explaining safety practices, report

  

  ing tools, rabbit holes, algorithm resets, nudges, and usage controls.

• Meta must fund and operate a New Mexico educational campaign about platform risks, parental controls, bullying, reporting tools, and underage accounts.

• Meta must provide schools with ready-made educational materials approved by the State.

• The court specified that these materials cannot simply be glossy Meta advertisements. They must present the risks and safety tools straightforwardly. (¶¶ 174–183, pp. 61–64)

Independent research

• Meta must maintain the Meta Content Library, Content Library API, and Center for Open Science Partnership.

• Universities, rather than Meta, will decide which researchers are qualified, which methods are ethical, and which research is meritorious. (¶ 184, p. 64)

Law enforcement and CyberTips

• Meta must fund semiannual training for state and federal law enforcement investigating internet crimes against children.

• It must maintain a dedicated contact for New Mexico ICAC.

• Within 30 days, Meta must meet with NCMEC to discuss improving CyberTips.

• If NCMEC raises reasonable concerns, Meta has 45 days to make the requested changes or explain in writing why it cannot.

• Every report of newly posted or shared CSAM involving New Mexico users must receive expedited human review before being sent to NCMEC.

• Meta must consult NCMEC before changing its New Mexico CyberTip system and test whether changes work as intended.

• Within 30 days, Meta must report its baseline rate for detecting new CSAM. It must report annually after that and improve detection by at least 5% before the abatement period ends. (¶¶ 185–194, pp. 64–66)

What the judge didn’t order

• No direct changes to Meta’s recommendation algorithms.

• No prohibition on infinite scroll or autoplay.

• No prohibition on end-to-end encryption for Facebook.

• No relief directed at WhatsApp, which the court found was not a contributing cause of this particular public nuisance because it does not recommend content or connections.

• No general child-safety monitor. The court may later appoint a monitor or special master if a specific compliance dispute repeatedly returns to court. (¶¶ 135–140, 144–148, 160–173, 195–201)

The court agreed that autoplay, infinite scroll, like counts, notifications, and algorithmic recommendations combine to facilitate problematic use, but concluded that direct restrictions on algorithms, autoplay, and infinite scroll raised First Amendment, Section 230, jurisdictional, and competitive concerns.

Meta built the factory. Meta profited from the harmful pollution. Now, at least in New Mexico, it has been ordered to help clean it up.

But didn’t Meta say they’d leave New Mexico if forced to change?

Before the remedies trial, Meta warned that New Mexico’s proposed safety requirements “could compel” it to withdraw Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp from the state as “the only feasible means of compliance.”

Its attorney later told the judge that the requirements would make operating there “untenable,” while insisting this was “not a threat.”

But what else should we call it?

This is the corporate equivalent of IKEA saying that if a state required it to fix dressers that tipped over and killed children, it would close every store in that state rather than make the furniture safer. When IKEA dressers were linked to child deaths, the appropriate response was a recall, refunds, repairs, and wall-anchoring kits, not punishing the residents of any state that objected to children being crushed by furniture.

Meta’s argument turns its own refusal to adapt into a threat against consumers: either New Mexico accepts the product on Meta’s terms, including the harms a jury and judge found it caused, or Meta may take the product away.

A company’s enormous scale and preference for operating one standardized product everywhere do not excuse it from basic safety obligations. If anything, they make the claim that it cannot afford to comply more absurd.

Now New Mexico is calling Meta’s bluff, and whether they choose to withdraw or pay and change, other states following New Mexico’s lead can also make it “untenable” for Meta to do nothing.

The judgment is over 1.5% of Meta’s net income (profit) in 2025. Hypothetically, if every state landed a billion dollar judgment, that’s 82% of Meta’s annual profits.

If instead of each state landing a billion dollar judgment, their judgment is based on youth population size relative to New Mexico, that figure starts looking more like TWICE their annual profits.

And then there is Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia, South America.

This is the beginning. This is the way.

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For much of my nearly 15 years working at Meta, I believed in the company’s public commitments to safety. I have since learned that companies reveal their real priorities not through what they say, but through what they measure, reward, and pay for.

That is why I urged Meta shareholders to support Proposal 10 at the company’s annual meeting this morning. The proposal, filed by Proxy Impact on behalf of Lisette Cooper and co-filed by faith-based and institutional investors collectively holding more than $800 million of Meta stock, asks Meta’s board to publish a report assessing the feasibility of integrating child-safety improvements into the company’s senior executive compensation program.

Meta’s board says the proposal is unnecessary because the company already prioritizes keeping young people safe online. It also argues that its current compensation program supports executives in focusing on company priorities, and that the board’s compensation committee is best positioned to determine pay structure.

But that is the point.

“Meta’s board calls this unnecessary, citing child protection as a company priority,” I told Meta’s executives and shareholders this morning, “but executive compensation is tied to the stock price, which largely reflects growth and revenue–without any child-safety performance condition. And it’s not working.”

If child protection is truly a company priority, shareholders should be able to see how that priority shows up in the compensation structure of the executives who make Meta’s product and business decisions. A value that lives only in press releases, carefully worded public statements, and reactive safety features is not the same as a value that is measured, weighted, and tied to pay.

This conversation takes place as Meta is facing a child-safety crisis with mounting legal, regulatory, and reputational consequences:

• In March, a New Mexico jury found Meta violated state law in a case brought by the state attorney general, who accused the company of misleading users and enabling child sexual exploitation on their platforms. The jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties, and New Mexico is now seeking billions more for an abatement plan and platform changes.

• The next day, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable in a landmark social-media addiction case involving harm to a child, assigning Meta 70 percent of the responsibility. At that trial, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri testified that he receives annual stock-based compensation in the “tens of millions of dollars.”

• In April, the European Commission issued preliminary findings that Meta breached the EU Digital Services Act by failing to keep children under 13 off Instagram and Facebook—findings that, if confirmed, carry fines for Meta of up to $12 billion.

• And this past week, Meta settled the first trial-bound school-district case seeking to hold social media companies responsible for costs tied to youth mental health harms. The case, brought by Breathitt County School District in Kentucky, had been selected as a bellwether among roughly 1,200 similar school-district lawsuits.

• The Delaware Superior Court ruled that Meta’s own insurers were not obligated to defend certain child-safety claims because the claims arose from intentional design choices rather than ordinary accidents.

• At least 15 countries are advancing restrictions on minors’ access to social media, including Australia’s recent social media age restrictions, with many other countries considering or enacting similar policies.

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In almost every other industry, when a company’s core business creates serious safety risks, executive compensation reflects proportional responsibility for those risks. Energy, aviation, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and transportation companies commonly tie pay to safety, compliance, environmental performance, or operational-risk metrics because failures in those areas can kill people, trigger enforcement, destroy trust, and impose major financial and operational burdens.

Social media companies should not get their own rule book.

“…decisions to increase engagement and revenue often bolster the stock price but lack transparent accountability for the consequences of those choices – like physical and psychological harm to kids including sextortion, grooming, suicide, human trafficking, cyberbullying, and addictive endless scroll,” I said this morning.

If a platform redesign would reduce risk to children but also reduce engagement or the “upside” of behavioral data collection, who inside the company is financially accountable for choosing safety?

While serving on the leadership team for Meta Horizon Worlds in 2022, I saw how child-safety and privacy concerns could be treated first as legal exposure to be managed rather than as product harms to be fixed. At one point, I was asked not to create a discoverable record about underage users and federal children’s privacy violations in a product that connected children with unknown adults, without any parental control or consent.

Inside a company like Meta, leaders are not always rewarded for surfacing the most serious risks; I was punished.

“Former Oculus researchers testified that Meta’s legal team altered or omitted findings about children exposed to grooming or sexual misconduct and halted projects that could create legal risk,” I said this morning, “executives must be incentivized to prevent child-safety failures, not just manage Meta’s exposure to them.”

“Meta’s board said the company does this through products like Teen Accounts, but independent testing found that only 8 of the 47 tested youth safety features worked as described,” I said this morning, “executives must be measured against whether child-safety systems actually work, not whether Meta can manage the optics.”

Meta has spent years telling the public that child safety is a priority. Yet shareholders are now asking only for a feasibility report on whether child-safety performance should be integrated into senior executive pay. Not an immediate overhaul. Not a prescriptive formula. A report.

If Meta’s board believes child safety is already integrated into executive accountability, it should have no reason to oppose studying and explaining that to shareholders.

Around the world, governments are losing patience with platforms that insist they can regulate themselves while children continue to bear the cost of design choices optimized for growth. Proposal 10 notes that such laws could increase compliance costs, threaten Meta’s user pipeline, and force product redesigns that affect revenue.

I closed my statement this morning by addressing Zuckerberg, who was on the call:

“To Meta’s majority shareholder and my former boss, Mark Zuckerberg: If you don’t want 50 states, dozens of countries, and thousands of lawsuits threatening business sustainability and dictating child-safety requirements, explore a compensation structure that would incentivize your leaders to solve the problem first.”

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A 10-year-old fourth grader from Normandy Park, WA, could not be more excited to pull up the education technology platform her school mandates. “I love i-Ready,” says Sophia (note: name changed for privacy) with bright blue, full-moon-eyes, before listing off her favorite characters in the software, “Plory is an orange alien, Yoop Yooply is green.”

She’s looking at an expanded form of a four-digit number, and the software directs her to write the individual place value in boxes labeled “thousands,” “hundreds,” “tens,” and “ones.” Incorrect answers are highlighted but not explained, so Sophia tries several different numbers until she’s allowed to continue. When she answers correctly, she moves on to another question.

Behind the colorful animations and alien friends, behind the bar charts showing how many minutes Sophia has logged this week, bigger, more existential questions are being asked of the digital assessment and instruction platform used by more than 13 million K-8 students like Sophia across the United States.

With $775 million in annual revenue largely generated from taxpayer-funded school districts, i-Ready is marketed by its parent company, Curriculum Associates, as a tool that accelerates student growth and improves outcomes. Curriculum Associates says the program provides personalized instruction based on student performance and collects data to support learning.

For many families and kids like Sophia, i-Ready is simply part of the school day. For others, it has become a source of concern, not just about how well it supports learning and assessment, but what it collects in the process.

Districts often adopt tools like i-Ready to provide consistent assessments across classrooms and to help students meet grade-level standards. But independent research on its effectiveness is limited, and a new federal lawsuit alleges that the system collects vast personal data on the kids who use it, then shares that data with third parties without parental consent.

The class action lawsuit brought by lead plaintiffs and California online safety advocates, Nicole Reisberg (Nicki Petrossi) and Lila Byock, each on behalf of their children, was filed in December and alleges i-Ready collects detailed behavioral, demographic, and technical data on students, including interaction patterns and inferred performance metrics, and shares or uses that data in ways not adequately disclosed, including for commercial purposes. Together with their lawyers, they explicitly monitored HTTP traffic and watched the actual requests generated when kids used i-Ready.

“When a student interacts… information… is… instantaneously transmitted to third parties,” the complaint says, including advertising companies, marketing companies, and identity-resolution companies. They assert these practices are in violation of several consumer protection, invasion of privacy, and unjust enrichment laws.

“Parents want to know what data is being taken about their child,” Petrossi told me, “Dozens if not hundreds of parents have reached out to Curriculum Associates to request their child’s data. Many of them have told me that the company has denied their request. Parents are being given the run-around and we are not OK with that.”

The company disputes the lawsuit’s allegations and says it does not sell student data or use it for advertising. In a February Motion to Dismiss, i-Ready asserted the claims were legally insufficient and “seek to destroy a longstanding regulatory framework that allows schools to consent to EdTech providers’ collection of student data in the classroom.” Plaintiffs and their lawyers filed a response to i-Ready’s Motion to Dismiss last month.

Emily Cherkin, a former middle school teacher, left the classroom and became an educational consultant and author after seeing firsthand the impact of EdTech at school. Cherkin filed a lawsuit in 2024 against a different EdTech platform, PowerSchool, alleging they collect data, sell it, and expose children to risk online.

“Lo and behold, six months later PowerSchool experienced a massive data breach,” she said.

Emily Cherkin on Substack

“Tools like i-Ready make kids and parents way more anxious and obsessed about the wrong things and forces teachers to think about learning and progress as a quantifiable sum when neither children nor teachers are standardized,” Cherkin told me, “I reject the use of products like i-Ready whose business model relies on data collection of minors without parental consent for profit. That is fundamentally out of alignment with child development.”

While the evidence section of i-Ready’s website includes studies detailing how it improves learning outcomes and accelerates student growth through personalized instruction, none of these studies are peer-reviewed, and there have been zero randomized controlled trials. The evidence listed is largely made up of white papers commissioned by i-Ready directly and studies without control groups.

Erin Ambrozic is the PTSA president at Sophia’s school and the mom of one of her classmates. She has raised concerns about i-Ready to her daughter’s teachers over the past four years as well as to her principal several times to better understand i-Ready’s effectiveness. “My daughter has received inconsistent scores every year across fall/winter/spring diagnostics, oscillating from exceeding to below grade level, then back to exceeding or at grade level, in a pattern and across a timeline where, were i-Ready truly effectively measuring her growth over the school year, it would mean she was actually getting less educated throughout each school year.”

A 2025 study found i-Ready’s trimester-based assessments less predictive than traditional end-of-year state standardized assessments of whether or not a student would pass the next year’s standardized assessment.

“I’ve spent time on the platform myself from the student side at home, and I don’t find it particularly intuitive or clearly aligned with classroom instruction,” said Ambrozic, “I actually think it’s a very poor use of student time.”

Another parent at Sophia’s school who has been questioning i-Ready, Becky Heinle, a mother of three, said, “Every teacher I have raised concerns with since first grade has told me not to be concerned with the results.”

Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a former teacher and neuroscientist who focuses on learning and recently testified on education technology alongside Cherkin before the United States Senate, dug deep into i-Ready’s body of evidence, concluding he could find “zero meaningful evidence” demonstrating its effectiveness. He notes that i-Ready advocates often point to two studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Education on reading and math that Curriculum Associates lists on their website.

“Both studies were conducted in partnership with Curriculum Associates, the developer of i-Ready. Both were released as white papers, meaning they were not peer-reviewed,” Dr. Horvath wrote.

Peer review and controlled trials help us distinguish between something that works and something that merely claims to. A peer-reviewed study has been scrutinized by independent experts before publication. A randomized controlled trial compares outcomes between students who use a tool and students who don’t, under conditions designed to rule out other explanations. Without these safeguards, a company can fund its own research, design studies that favor its product, and publish the results without anyone independently checking the methodology.

“The name ‘Johns Hopkins’ carries weight, however, so it’s worth examining what they actually found,” Dr. Horvath wrote. Their results? The researchers concluded that there were no statistically significant associations between i-Ready use and student outcomes in reading. In math, researchers reported a difference between i-Ready users and the control group of less than one percent.

“Across grades, students using i-Ready improved by 7.8%, while students not using it improved by 7.0%, a difference of less than one percentage point,” Dr. Horvath explains, “In a sample of 7,646 students, at roughly $70 per student, that amounts to over $535,000 spent on i-Ready to achieve a 0.8% difference in mathematics performance, with no measurable change in reading.”

Dr. Horvath on Substack

The absence of strong independent evidence does not necessarily mean a tool is ineffective, but it does make its impact harder to evaluate. Curriculum Associates, along with several teachers and school administrators featured in i-Ready’s case studies and marketing materials, did not respond to my requests for comment on either the lawsuit or Dr. Horvath’s review.

But they’re responding to the influx of criticism in other ways.

John Allen Wooden, a Los Angeles writer and dad who started investigating i-Ready after witnessing his son’s experiences first-hand, noticed last month that i-Ready was buying ads on Google against his name, headlining the ad, “The Real Facts About i-Ready.”

“At first I thought it might be a glitch, so I reached out to contacts elsewhere in the country and got confirmation from both Alaska and NYC that they were seeing the same thing when they searched my name. So I promptly posted it online and tagged Curriculum Associates. The ad stopped running within 12 hours after I exposed it,” Wooden told me.

Wooden’s research into the platform began last year when his middle school son began complaining about i-Ready. With a thirty-year career in online media and internet product development, Wooden has experience with producing quality digital experiences.

John Allen Wooden on Substack

“I was first struck by how dreadfully poor the design and performance was: slow, repetitive, and aesthetically age-inappropriate, with infantile cartoon characters delivering questions to a tween whose favorite movie is Aliens. Then I quickly noticed that the educational content therein was equally poor; with many questions having confusingly ambiguous phrasing, typos, and indicating “correct” answers that were quite simply wrong. Worst of all, the mandate for students wasn’t to successfully complete lessons or reach any mastery milestones, it was merely to spend a fixed number of minutes engaging with the platform.”

All of the teachers interviewed for this article described school or district-level minutes requirements. “I don’t know that we should be giving 5-year-olds iPads and requiring them to spend time there during the school day,” said a Washington state kindergarten teacher who asked to remain anonymous.

The basis for the minimum minutes recommendation? A 2021 study paid for and executed by Curriculum Associates.

The next time Wooden’s son had a group of friends over, he asked them what they thought of i-Ready. “My question was met with a chorus of boos and furious denunciations.”

“My curiosity was piqued. I started researching the program, and was shocked to discover how massive its footprint is within US schools, how virtually no legitimate studies support it and how it had received effectively zero press scrutiny,” said Wooden, who has begun publishing a six-part investigation into what he’s uncovered, “As someone who knows all too well how the digital media sausage is made, I could discern the sophisticated techniques Curriculum Associates was using to deploy a digital smokescreen of internally produced, officiously packaged, SEO’ed ‘research’ that was dominating search results for anyone attempting due diligence.”

Curriculum Associates has ignored every email Wooden has sent to their publicly listed press email address, Wooden says.

Young people sent reactions directly to Petrossi after she went public about filing suit against Curriculum Associates. She shared some of their responses on Instagram, which are largely expressions of gratitude as well as comments like “...I HAVE DEPRESSION BECAUSE OF THAT APP…” and “...YOU’VE JUST SAVED ME…”

And it’s not just students who have been sending Petrossi feedback. “Teachers have reported that they are being forced to use i-Ready,” she said.

“Districts are mandating a certain amount of time students need to do i-Ready,” a Los Angeles teacher told Petrossi in a screenshot shared with me “90 minutes a week on i-Ready is more important than instruction from a teacher in the eyes of the district.”

“We just had a very dedicated, hardworking, and passionate young teacher fired because her students didn’t show enough growth on their i-Ready diagnostics,” explained a sixth grade math teacher to Petrossi in another screenshot shared with me, “She was fired 3 weeks prior to doing her tenure presentation.”

While Petrossi and Byock’s lawsuit focuses on data practices, it intersects with a broader question: if the educational benefits of the platform are not clearly established through independent research, what justifies its widespread use?

i-Ready’s alleged practices mimic a predatory dynamic in consumer tech that schools may be unintentionally replicating: high data extraction, limited transparency, weak independent evidence of benefit, and adoption ahead of safeguards and testing.

Could the hundreds of thousands of dollars that school districts spend on i-Ready be better spent on proven interventions, such as hiring reading/math interventionists, reducing class sizes, and/or funding targeted tutoring blocks?

“To be fair to Superintendents and School Boards, Curriculum Associates has targeted them for years with a highly sophisticated lobbying and misinformation campaign that convinced them they were licensing a quality, proven-effective product,” said Wooden, “It is not quality. All the supporting data is self-dealing black box junk. It doesn’t work.”

Back in Normandy Park, Sophia doesn’t know about the lawsuit, or the studies, or the fired teacher in New York. A half hour into the lesson, it’s also unclear whether she understands the concept of place value. But she knows Plory is orange and Yoop Yooply is green, and she knows she needs to finish her minutes.

Practical Resources:

• Lead plaintiff in the class action, Nicki Petrossi, published a guide for contacting your schools and school boards here.

• Copies of the emails I wrote to my Superintendent and school board, as well as an email I wrote to other parents who might be interested in staying informed and organizing here.

• Webinar May 21, 12pm PST: Join Jodi Carreon (Schools Beyond Screens) in conversation with lead plaintiffs Lila Byock (Schools Beyond Screens) and Nicki Petrossi (Scrolling2Death) and attorney Andrew Liddell (EdTech Law Center) to discuss the allegations in the case and answer frequently asked questions from the public. Register here.

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Around the massive table sat lawyers and policy professionals who had signed up for a continuing legal education (CLE) event. The stunning space was punctuated by boxes of complimentary pizza and a very heavy topic: children lost and hurt by social media.

The pizza was still warm when Matt Bergman started talking about the parents.

They had camped outside the Los Angeles courthouse, he told the room. They were there to bear moral witness, to sit in the gallery when Mark Zuckerberg was called to the stand. Many of them had watched him lie to Congress in 2024 without much consequence. Their children were dead because of social media and they had waited years for a jury to hear what the companies’ own documents said about what those companies knew. Most of them have filed lawsuits of their own with the help of Mr. Bergman’s office.

“If one child is saved by this [work],” Bergman said, repeating what parent after parent had told him, “it’s all worth it.”

The CLE, “Social Media: Legislation and Litigation,” was a one-hour lunchtime program hosted by the Washington State Board Association’s Antitrust, Consumer Protection & Unfair Business Practices Section on April 29, 2026. The panel, moderated by Danica Noble, co-chair of the section (who is also running for Washington State congress), brought together three people working different fronts of the same fight:

• Matt Bergman is the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center. He built his career representing asbestos victims at the shipyards across Puget Sound before turning, almost by accident, to social media litigation. His firm filed the first product liability case against a social media company in January 2022. He has now taken Meta and YouTube to a jury—and won.

• Lisa Callan represents Washington’s 5th Legislative District and has been one of the driving forces behind HB 1834, the state’s most comprehensive attempt to regulate addictive algorithmic feeds for minors. She also sponsored the companion chatbot bill that passed this session. I testified in support of both bills.

• Joe Kanada works in the Consumer Protection Division of the Washington Attorney General’s Office, which sued Meta in October 2023 alongside thirty other state AGs and filed a separate action against TikTok in Washington state court in October 2024. He offered his remarks in a personal capacity, though the office’s public record speaks for itself.

The Verdicts: Cheetahs and Gazelles

Bergman opened with his social media litigation origin story. Three things pulled him into this work:

• Frances Haugen’s 2021 congressional testimony and leaked documents revealing that these companies knowingly target children

• Dr. Vivek Murthy’s 2021 Youth Mental Health Advisory as Surgeon General, documenting a 142 percent increase in suicidality among 10-to-16-year-olds, calling for a warning label on social media

• A 2021 Ninth Circuit opinion called Lemmon v. Snap that cracked open a path around Section 230.

That last one matters as we try to understand how these cases even get to a courtroom. Section 230, passed in 1996 when Netscape was the dominant browser and social media didn’t exist, has been interpreted by courts to grant sweeping immunity to platforms whenever third-party content is involved, which is essentially always. As Bergman described, “it imposes on plaintiffs burdens that no other plaintiff carries, and grants companies immunity that no other company enjoys.”

His breakthrough was product liability theory. By arguing that the harm flows from the design of the platform — the algorithms, the engagement mechanics, the structural decisions — rather than from any specific piece of content, Bergman’s team found a way past the motion to dismiss. For years, cases had been dying at that stage. No one could get to discovery, which meant no one could find the documents that proved what the companies knew.

The KGM trial, the first social media case ever presented to a jury, involved a young woman who became addicted to social media at age nine. The defense strategy was to blame the victim and blame the family. Kaylee didn’t have the easiest family background, she had preexisting mental health challenges. Recordings of her mother yelling at her to clean up were played for the jury.

But Bergman explained that what swung the case was Meta’s own internal documents showing that the company knew children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and those with preexisting mental health challenges were more susceptible to addiction and mental health harms from its platforms. In closing argument, Mark Lanier, whom Bergman called the greatest trial lawyer in America, told the jury that these companies operate like cheetahs.

“They prey on the gazelles,” Lanier said, “but only the weakest ones.”

The jury found Meta and YouTube liable for negligence. They also found malice. They awarded three million dollars in compensatory damages and three million dollars in punitive damages. Bergman made clear: this was not the worst case in the portfolio. The court selected it as representative to be tried first.

More trials are coming. Personal injury cases, AG cases, school district cases. Bergman has no illusions about winning every one. He also has no intention of stopping.

“This work provides to me the same moral clarity that the civil rights movement had in the 1960s,” he told the room. “How can one ever imagine a legal system where a company should be immune when they tell a 16-year-old boy to step in front of a train, and he steps in front of a train?”

The room applauded.

Legal Barriers: 230, The First Amendment, and the Question of Who is Thirteen?

Kanada picked up the thread on Section 230 and clarified a key tension: thirty years ago, the internet looked like a virtual bulletin board. There was a clear line between what users posted and what platforms hosted. But that line has dissolved, he said. The product now is a feed built on top of other people’s content, and courts have struggled to reconcile that reality with a statute written for a different internet.

The good news, from the enforcement side, is that courts are increasingly willing to let cases focused on product design move forward. The bad news is that defendants have noticed, and are now leaning harder into the First Amendment as their next shield, arguing that algorithmic curation is a form of protected speech.

“The very first thing out of the lobbyists' mouths is that the state shouldn't bother because it's just going to get sued, it can't afford the fight, and it's going to lose anyway,” Rep Callan said.

Kanada pointed to a footnote in a 2024 Supreme Court case, Moody vs. NetChoice, suggesting that an algorithm reveals no message or expression of the company. It reflects the user’s own inputs back to them.

“If it’s zeros and ones, it’s not speech,” added Bergman, “There’s no there there, there’s no individual, there’s no ideological focus. It’s just scraping stuff off the internet and making probabilistic correlations.”

“Even if it’s speech, why is it protected?” Bergman asked, “Pornography is speech that’s not protected. Sexual harassment is speech that’s not protected.”

“Dr. Sawbones has a right to stand in front of the courthouse and say castor oil cures cancer, but if Dr. Sawbones tells his patient to take castor oil for their cancer, there’s malpractice there. Particularly when you’re talking about kids, there are statutes. There are statutes that prohibit online grooming of kids, and that’s what these companies do.”

When the conversation turned to age verification, Kanada laid out the three tiers for identifying how old someone is:

1. What do people say (self-reported or stated age)

2. What people do (company inferences)

3. What people have (government ID, facial age estimation, credit cards)

He explained that the tiers move from less reliable to more reliable, but also from less invasive to more invasive. But he believes many of the tier 3 techniques can be implemented in privacy-preserving ways. The problem, he said, is that the reaction is almost reflexive: people hear they'd have to provide an image of themselves and push back immediately, despite the fact that they've often already done exactly that on the very platforms in question.

Rep Callan said the core problem is that even when you can argue the data isn't permanently stored, legislators need to be shown—technically, convincingly—that the information won't be compromised. In a political climate where data privacy is already a top-of-mind concern, and where tech companies are changing their systems and products faster than legislation can understand and catch-up, that's a challenging, moving goal post.

Brian Boland, former Meta VP and witness in both the Los Angeles KGM trial and the recent New Mexico case was sitting next to me. Our heads began nodding when Bergman added that the companies already know peoples’ age with a huge degree of accuracy.

Noble, the moderator who spent decades at the FTC, added: “This company will sell you an ad for someone who has been divorced two, but not more than three times, who’s got three, but not more than four dogs, who likes Reba McEntire and lives 30 miles from a Midwest urban center, but they don’t know who’s 13?”

When Noble testified on Washington legislation supporting restrictions on AI chatbots, she recommended amending “these will apply if a user is a minor” to “these will apply if a user is a minor or you reasonably should know.”

“Because if a predatory chatbot is accessed by a kid on a Seattle Public School computer, there’s no liability right now.” she said.

Rep Callan brought the view from Olympia, where her experience of advancing child safety legislation illustrates the gap between what everyone agrees is a problem and what anyone is willing to vote for.

HB 1834/SB 5708, the bill targeting addictive algorithmic feeds, has been through two sessions without passing. The bill’s approach is to put control in the hands of users and parents: instead of an endless feed curated by engagement-maximizing algorithms, content stops when the user’s own selections are exhausted. More like reading a book, less like a slot machine.

The opposition has been layered and strategic. And this session, a new challenge emerged: concerns about the LGBTQ community, amplified by tech industry lobby, arguing that restricting algorithmic feeds would prevent queer youth from finding their communities online. Rep Callan explained that the bill doesn’t block content. It changes who decides what content a young person sees, shifting that power from the algorithm to the user.

The barrier is the knowledge asymmetry, she said. Tech companies testify with precision about how compliance would be impossible, how the technology changes too fast for regulation to keep up, how any specific requirement would be unconstitutional by next quarter. Legislators, most of whom are not technologists, hear this and hesitate.

“It is much easier to vote no when you’re uncertain than to vote yes and discover you’ve been wrong,” she said.

What’s Next: From Attention Economy to Intimacy Economy

The final section of the panel turned to what’s coming: large language models, more AI Chatbots, Artificial General Intelligence.

Bergman said that what began as an attention economy has become an intimacy economy. Social media was designed to keep eyes on screens to maximize advertising impressions. AI chatbots are designed to engage people emotionally, to emulate human relationships, to make users feel understood and seen and valued.

He named ChatGPT’s fourth version as the inflection point, which he said was rushed to market to beat Gemini without adequate testing. That version embodied two design decisions with enormous consequences:

1. Anthropomorphism: making the AI seem human

2. Sycophancy: making it agree with and validate whatever the user says

Calling out the difference between how Open AI and Anthropic deploy these design decisions, for example, Bergman said, “this is where the product liability rubric works really well… because there’s real differences into into the level of emotionality that those platforms engage in and the level of harmful content.”

“It’s a design decision.”

Bergman’s firm has filed the first cases against AI chatbots. One involves a twenty-three-year-old man who spent four hours in his car while ChatGPT guided him through the process of taking his own life. When he looked for an off-ramp, mentioning his brother’s graduation, the chatbot dismissed it as “just a date.” Another category of cases involves what Bergman calls AI-induced delusional disorders, sometimes referred to as “AI psychosis”: people well past the typical age for organic psychotic breaks developing grandiose or conspiratorial delusions after sustained interaction with AI systems.

He also raised a structural concern about large language models themselves, citing the work of Emily Bender at the University of Washington and Timnit Gebru in the field of ethical AI. A model trained on everything scraped from the internet inherits all of the internet’s worst material: the violence, the racism, the sexual exploitation. When that becomes the raw material, the outputs reflect it. The engineering analogy, borrowed from Gebru: if you’re building a bridge, you think about what vehicles will cross it, what loads it needs to bear, and then you choose your materials accordingly.

“The current approach to AI is building a bridge out of pig iron and never asking who’s going to drive over it,” Bergman said.

Kanada offered a more cautious perspective. He pushed back on the assumption that the social media framework maps neatly onto AI. The mechanisms of overuse are different: social media hooks kids through social pressure, the need to be where everyone else is, the fear of missing out. AI engagement runs on a feedback loop of questions and validation. The harms diverge too: social media damages through comparison and imagery: bodies and lives that make your own feel inadequate. AI doesn’t really operate in that register. The one clear overlap, Kanada said, is displacement: both steal time from sleep, school, and real human connection.

“We haven’t solved the social media problems,” he said. “I want to solve those first.”

In Rep Callan’s mind, the two are already converging. She explained that we go to social media to be more connected, but if there’s an algorithm able to build AI companions that provide more connection than the friend next door, tech companies are going to pursue it because it will sell them more ads.

“It all really comes back to… how is that going to keep the profit moving in the social media companies’ direction?”

The legislative challenge, she said, is writing that down on a piece of paper.

“Even if we get in a bill piece of paper, how do we actually hold accountability to that? How do you actually hold compliance to that?”

The ground keeps moving. The companies that haven’t yet been held fully accountable for what their social media platforms do to children are already building the next thing, products designed to go deeper, to become more intimate, to replace the relationships that make us human.

“I want all of you to help me, please,” Rep Callan said at the end of the hour, standing at the head of the very long table.

Titania and I process the verdict in real time, and reflect on our gratitude for the parent survivors who led this movement.

And in our subsequent conversation, I talk about what I found inside Meta’s Horizon Worlds leadership: an all-male team, an open secret that the platform was full of children on adult accounts, and an explicit instruction not to create any discoverable record of that knowledge. Harassment, racism, predators. I talk about being told my job was to silence another woman raising safety concerns rather than address them.

I also talk about what happened to me when I refused and was retaliated against. The autistic burnout that took away my ability to form words, regulate my emotions. The suicidal ideation that followed. And how the misogyny and disregard for ethical whistleblowers that exists inside companies like Meta gets coded directly into the products they build for your children.

We discussed my decision to not sign a separation agreement holding Meta harmless, the conversation I had with about what I could do to make a difference for those on the margins within Meta as well as the most vulnerable users of the product who were being harmed in their pursuit of profit above all else.

This conversation covers the litigation, Section 230, advertiser accountability, my decision to file a lawsuit against Meta, and what a genuinely safer internet for kids could actually look like.

Watch the interview here:

Or listen:

Spotify | Apple Podcasts

Here are some key comments from the interview and timestamps so you can navigate to the portions you’re most interested in:

ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE VERDICT

[4:45] “I’m thinking about all the parents, the survivor parents who have been the leaders in this fight for years. Some of them 15 years who are experiencing a moment of critical validation.”

[5:00] “I am just so grateful to the jury of our peers who saw through the smoke screens that many policy makers, regulators, and parents have been unable to see through, in large part due to the PR and propaganda mechanisms that these companies are able to deploy.”

[7:01] “I’ve been talking now for almost a year about how Meta knows that they’re harming kids and does it anyway. And that has impacted my life in pretty profound ways as well. And just to see that finally there seems to be some actual acknowledgement of that and justice for families that are impacted, it is just so incredibly meaningful.”

ON WHAT I FOUND INSIDE HORIZON WORLDS

[15:05] “It was a room full of, it was all men on this leadership team that I had joined and I was immediately read in on the open secret that the vast majority of the people using Horizon were children.”

[15:23] “They were accessing the product using adult accounts, which meant that they had completely open and unrestricted access to speak...children, sometimes under the age of five, sometimes teenagers, having conversations with unknown adults.”

ON BEING TOLD TO SILENCE ANOTHER CONCERNED COLLEAGUE

[21:31] “A man named Jeff Lin...said, ‘Yeah Kelly, we need to talk about that. We need you to shut her up and we’re going to find out if you’re as good as they say you are…It was as if everyone else in the room had just heard what someone had for lunch that day. Like there wasn’t shock, there wasn’t concern.”

ON THE INSTRUCTION NOT TO DOCUMENT

[22:40] “We were explicitly told we can’t create any record that’s discoverable of our knowledge that there are kids in the product.”

ON THE TREATMENT OF WOMEN INSIDE META

[34:22] “Out of the 20 of us that were VPs or directors in that function...there were I think like four or five women. And by the time I left on my medical leave, all but one were out on leave.”

[34:52] “The other women on the team were like, ‘All the folks that are potentially looking out for me are dwindling away. What does this mean for me?’”

[36:22] “[My boss] had both apologized for not doing more to get me in the room but then also told me that I wouldn’t be recognized for the work I did pausing the product rollout because of the way it would reveal the shortcomings of this senior man I worked with.”

ON MY AUTISTIC BURNOUT

[32:16] “I experienced a catastrophic medical event in that I almost overnight lost my ability to form words, to move my arms and legs, to get out of bed.”

[32:41] “Autistic burnout is a complete collapse of capacity to function. That often comes either in response to a moral injury or when demand exceeds capacity.”

ON WHY I REFUSED TO SIGN AND HOW MISOGYNY GETS CODED INTO PRODUCTS

[37:40] “I was thinking about the children that were in the product exposed to harm...and I just thought, I can’t sign this [hold harmless agreement].”

[42:39] “I believe that misogyny and that disregard for people gets coded directly into the products when these practices exist within companies.”

ON THE LAWYERS WHO TRIED TO TALK ME OUT OF IT

[43:08] “It was initially just a string of dudes saying, ‘Could you be so stupid?’ Like, every detail about your life is going to be exposed. Every mistake you’ve ever made is going to be pointed to. They are going to drag you through the coals and make an example out of you…It just pissed me off more.”

[43:31] “I almost died. In what world would it make sense that I would be more concerned about my reputation than about doing what’s right, when my kids almost grew up without their mom because of practices like this.”

ON NOT HAVING TO BE PERFECT TO TELL THE TRUTH

[44:18] “If I’m going to be made an example, I hope that I can be made an example that you don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to have no skeletons in your closet to be able to tell the truth of your experiences and to be able to hold companies like Meta accountable.”

ON WHAT THE PUBLIC STILL DOESN’T GRASP

[53:28] “If we actually accept that there are individuals leading these companies who are becoming among the wealthiest in the world doing so, and they’re getting there by deceiving us about the harms to everyone, but kids especially, it requires that we confront our own roles in these systems.”

ON ADVERTISER ACCOUNTABILITY

[59:59] “The cheapest most effective CPM in the world is not worth enabling sexual trafficking, enabling suicide in young people. That’s actually what’s happening.”

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF TELLING MY OWN STORY

[1:15:29] “If I can write about that and get that story out and own that narrative, not only does it help take that power back and away from a company like Meta, but I hope that it also sets an example that we all have our differences, and that does not mean there’s not one size and shape of standing in your truth.”

Thank you to Titania, Bark, and their entire team for making the space for such an important conversation.

Juries in Los Angeles and New Mexico delivered what history will record as a turning point: accountability has arrived for Big Tech.

Car seat manufacturers and furniture companies can’t sell products that crush kids without consequences, neither can Mark Zuckerberg.

A California jury found Meta and YouTube responsible for the depression and anxiety of a young woman who compulsively used social media beginning in early childhood, awarding her $3 million in compensatory damages, and another $3 million in punitive damages. The jury found that both companies acted with malice, oppression, or fraud.

One day earlier, a separate jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million for failing to protect young users from child predators on Instagram and Facebook, finding that Meta had flouted state consumer protection laws.

I spent nearly 15 years at Meta. My career ended after I raised alarms about harm to children. I watched leadership prioritize protecting the company over protecting kids. I provided sworn testimony to the FTC, and my lawsuit against the company is currently in discovery in Federal Court.

What these juries saw in those internal documents is what I witnessed firsthand: a company that studied harm, documented harm, calculated the revenue from harm, and then tried to ensure those documents were never seen.

Documents that detailed things like a 13-year-old valued at $270 in lifetime advertising revenue. An internal Meta analysis titled “Long Term Retention: The Young Ones are the Best Ones” found that children who join Facebook as tweens have three times the long-term retention of adult users, and explicitly directed the company to “prioritize tweens over all other age groups.”

When Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri took the stand, he compared Instagram addiction to binge-watching Netflix, in a courtroom filled with families who lost children to Instagram. He testified that he earns approximately $10 million per year, much of it tied to performance indicators like stock price. When asked about teen safety, he claimed it was more important than growth. The jury got to weigh that claim against internal documents where his own employees described the platform as “a drug” and themselves as “basically pushers.” They got to weigh it against evidence that both Mosseri and Zuckerberg failed to act when whistleblower Arturo Béjar personally notified them of harm to teens, on body image, mental health, and exposure to predators.

Jurors found Meta and YouTube negligent in the design or operation of their platforms and determined that their negligence was a substantial factor in causing harm to the plaintiff, Kaley, a young woman who first started using YouTube at age 6. Instead of a case about content, this lawsuit was about the product design itself, the infinite scroll, the algorithmic feed, the engagement loops deliberately built to maximize time on platform regardless of the cost to children’s lives.

When Meta whistleblower Brian Boland, who spent more than a decade at the company as Vice President of Partnerships and later Vice President of Advertising Technology, testified that products were routinely launched without meaningful safety testing, and that senior leadership rebuffed him when he suggested studying the impact of News Feed on people who use it, he was describing a culture I recognized. One where I was told directly to avoid taking any notes on Meta’s knowledge of kids using Horizon Worlds or create any record discoverable, one where I was asked to silence other concerned employees as a test of my skill.

The verdict validates what whistleblowers, survivor parents, and advocates have been saying for years. The companies knew. They profited. They lied about it in public, in Congress, and in courtrooms. Mark Zuckerberg told a Senate Judiciary Committee in 2024 that the science doesn’t support a link between social media and harm to children. The jury in Los Angeles disagreed. Meta bears 70% of the responsibility for Kaley’s harms, according to the jury’s findings.

And this is only the beginning. This bellwether verdict may influence the outcome of thousands of other pending lawsuits.

To the survivor parents who have been advocating for years, turning grief to action, many of whom traveled from across the country to sit in that courtroom holding photographs of their children: you led this. To Kaley, who had the courage to put her story on the public record, and the legal team supporting her: you changed history today.

Meta’s response to this trial has been like its response to every accountability moment. Announce a new safety feature. Generate thousands of pieces of press. Offer parents the appearance of control. A recent independent evaluation of Instagram’s Teen Accounts tested 47 of 53 listed safety features and found that 64% were either no longer available or ineffective. Only 17% worked as described. When the tobacco industry faced evidence that cigarettes caused cancer, it responded with light cigarettes and cartoon mascots. Teen Accounts are the modern equivalent: a sop to worried parents and regulators, designed to preserve profit while avoiding real accountability.

The science has said that teens struggle to self-regulate because their brains aren’t finished developing. The evidence has shown these companies won’t self-regulate because their business model depends on addiction. Today, twelve ordinary people in a Los Angeles courtroom answered the question we’ve been asking for years: whose side are we on? They chose the kids.

The verdict today is also a question directed at every brand that has ever run a campaign on Instagram or YouTube. The advertising industry has spent years obsessing over brand safety, ensuring an ad doesn’t appear next to objectionable content. But what if the content doesn’t matter because the system itself is harmful? The issue was never whether a sneaker ad appears next to a pro-suicide post. It’s whether the media subsidizes the infinite scroll that delivers it. When you fund platforms that exploit children by design, you are signaling that addiction, lost sleep, anxiety, depression, and sex trafficking are acceptable costs in pursuit of a cheap CPM. Today, a jury answered the question brands have been avoiding. Advertisers and their agencies need to answer it too: pull your spend from platforms found liable for harming children, or own your role in funding the system that does.

Now, Congress must act. I am urging members of Congress to vote no on the House version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would preempt state laws on AI and social media, and would nullify thousands of cases from states, school districts, and families like these. We cannot hand Big Tech a legislative get-out-of-jail-free card the same week juries have finally held them to account.

The courtroom doors must stay open. The truth must keep coming out.

Laura Marquez-Garrett, a key member of Kaley’s legal team and child safety advocate, said to me this afternoon, “Today we take a deep breath. Tomorrow we fight twice as hard.”

Today is the beginning of the end.

Here are the questions that jurors needed to answer:

• Was Meta negligent in the design or operation of Instagram?

• Was this negligence a substantial factor in causing harm to Kaley?

• Did Meta know that design or operation of Instagram was dangerous when used by a minor?

• Did Meta know that users would not realize the danger?

• Did Meta fail to adequately warn of the danger?

• Would a reasonable platform, designer, or operator, have warned of danger or instructed on safe use?

• Was Meta’s failure to warn a substantial factor in causing harm to Kaley?

The answers?

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes.

I will report more on this later today, for interviews with parents and reactions outside the courthouse, follow Nicki Petrossi on LinkedIn.

Update 10:37am PST: Meta and YouTube were both ordered to pay $3M in compensatory damages, and there may be additional punitive damages coming. Stay tuned.

Update 12:30pm PST: Meta (Instagram) was found 70% responsible and Google (YouTube) 30%, jurors are currently deliberating on punitive damages for these $1.5 and $3.5 trillion dollar companies.

Update 1:30pm PST: Meta and YouTube were also ordered to pay an additional $3M in punitive damages.

For my full statement on this verdict:

A New Mexico jury found that Meta violated state law and ordered them to pay $375,000,000 in damages. In its ruling, the jury found hundreds of thousands of instances where Meta engaged in unfair, deceptive, or unconscionable trade practices.

Jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized profits over safety. The jury determined Meta violated parts of the state’s Unfair Practices Act on accusations the company hid what it knew about about the dangers of child sexual exploitation on its platforms and impacts on child mental health.

-Mercury News

Thank you to New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez and his entire team for standing up to such a behemoth that must be held accountable.

As a potential rebuttal witness in this case, I have not followed it closely or commented on it, but I was aware that my friends and former colleagues Arturo Bejar and Brian Boland testified for the State of New Mexico. They’re courageous beyond courageous. Thank you, Arturo and Brian.

“The jury’s verdict is a historic victory for every child and family who has paid the price for Meta’s choice to put profits over kids’ safety,” Torrez said in a statement. “Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew. Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough.”

Separately, jurors in Los Angeles are on day 8 of deliberation in the social media addiction trial, the initial bellwether case of a set of 1,600 lawsuits alleging Meta and other Big Tech giants knowingly addicted kids and preyed on vulnerabilities. For the latest updates in that case, I recommend paying close attention to Nicki Petrossi who has been reporting from the courtroom every single day. Thank you Nicki!

This morning, I spoke with Times Radio about algorithms and algorithmic harm as the UK Parliament’s Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee prepared to question senior leaders of Google, Meta, and X, and TikTok about social media misinformation.

I said:
Algorithms are not inherently harmful. Chronological feeds are algorithms. Search is an algorithm. The problem is specifically engagement optimization; when the metric being maximized is time-on-platform and interaction volume, and the training data rewards outrage, fear, and conflict because those generate more clicks and more time.

What we need to do:
- Transparent optimization targets - give people, researchers and governments visibility
- The right to a reset and/or chronological feed
- Crisis protocols
- Advertising supply-chain accountability

We need it all:
Auditing without liability is theater. Liability without transparency is unenforceable. User controls alone without advertising reform just shift the burden to users. The reason this problem has persisted is that each individual solution can be gamed, and the full package requires political will that governments have consistently flinched from applying to companies this large and this influential.

There are human beings, the billionaires who run these trillion dollar companies, who could step in and say we have to consider things like the wellbeing of folks and their rights. But media tech giants are more concerned with how to make the company more money without regard for the consequences.

When host Stig Abel said “We’re living in the age of the triumphant tech bro,” and asked if legislators or regulators were not powerful enough to stop companies like Meta, X, and TikTok, I said:

“You’d be surprised. You’re absolutely right, we’re living in the age of the tech bro… but at the end of the day, it’s all about incentives. We have to change the incentives that allow for extractive and exploitative business models to persist.”

Thank you, New Mexico.

Very mixed feelings developed. On one hand, this would mean fewer children exposed to predators in virtual reality, fewer virtual sexual assaults, less race and gender based bullying and harassment.

And at the same time, I could envision the faces of so many earnest and creative world-builders I came to know, people who deeply believed in the future of digital worlds and bet their careers on Meta’s promise of investing deeply in the Metaverse via Horizon in VR.

Meta has the power and resources to actually fix these problems, to create a safe product for the people using it, and to empower those building it. Instead, they threw their hands up.

“Meta told creators to build. To invest. To belong. They fed us the fantasy that our work would matter inside their ecosystem. Then they gave us a termination date. Not for a feature, but for the entire medium our work was made in,” Dr. Ruth Diaz, social scientist, immersive reality leader, and former Meta employee said on LinkedIn. “Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta to claim transformation. What he has actually done is strip-mine the trust and labor of every creator who took that promise seriously. That should sit on his record permanently.”

“I cannot overstate the scale of institutional betrayal this represents.”

Katie Burke, a futurist and nearly 20-year employee of Accenture who lead-writes for their annual trends report, also reacted on LinkedIn, “When Meta rebranded, the world went wild. The hype quickly shifted the focus to technology. The user experience was minimised, and the grifting picked up steam on social media. The false prophets were everywhere…None of it made sense…We need to evaluate technological acceleration through a more balanced lens. What benefits does it create? And what does it destroy?”

Then on Wednesday, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth took to Instagram Stories to say, effectively, “nevermind!” While relaxing in his mansion, Boz casually explained that Meta would “keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for existing games…for the foreseeable future.”

VR Writer, Ian Hamilton, shared the story on Substack, and said “My heart goes out to the creators who built the first versions of Horizon Worlds from primitive shapes during the global pandemic… Today, like so many others before them, they experienced how Meta treats people as users rather than humans.”

This resembles a broader pattern of ecosystems-first courting followed by sharp policy or product support reversals that strand creators and developers. Some other examples that come to mind:

• Meta Spark AR (announced August 2024; effective January 14, 2025) ended third-party AR effects and the tooling pipeline that supported a global creator economy, while Meta’s own effects would remain.

• Facebook Instant Articles (launched 2015; deprecation announced October 2022; support ended April 2023) was pitched as a proprietary, fast-loading in-app format for publishers, until Meta told partners it would no longer support it, forcing rapid strategy and workflow rewrites.

• Instagram’s Reels Play bonus incentives (rolled out in 2020; pulled back in U.S. by 2023) similarly illustrate a monetization “rug pull”: creators who’d invested significantly in Reels publicly asked why payouts that reached “thousands of dollars” disappeared, while Instagram leadership characterized the earlier spend as “burning cash” and financially unsustainable.

Meta loves creator dependency and has no regard for abrupt impact: creators are encouraged to specialize their content, tooling, and customer acquisition inside a platform, and then a strategic pivot changes rules faster than small businesses can re-platform. A recurring feature is asymmetry: third-party creator output is curtailed (Horizon worlds, Spark AR effects, publisher formats) while first-party surfaces or priorities remain (Meta-owned effects, mobile-first distribution, or broader strategic focus), leaving creators to absorb the experimentation and transition cost.

It’s anti-innovation empire building.

“They glommed onto the term ‘metaverse’ without really understanding the concept,” said Wagner James Au, author of Making a Metaverse that Matters, to New York Times reporter, Mike Isaac, “Their efforts on their metaverse strategy seemed completely indifferent to what previous platforms had learned.”

Wagner and I have discussed this before, and I’d like to see Meta make Horizon adults-only and then open source the software. But as I said to him yesterday, at the very least, “accounting for safety issues effectively and providing more creator rewards and incentives would be very very meaningful.”

As I told Wagner last year, no one at Meta loved the product, referring to the senior leaders responsible for steering it. Putting people in charge who are most focused on making a product look successful instead of taking real care of the users and builders of it is a technology leadership failure.

Dr. Ruth wrote an essay this morning on Ian Hamilton’s publication, Good Virtual Reality:

A few days ago Meta announced a kill date for Horizon Worlds VR. Then, after hundreds of XR and tech professionals joined together to share their horror and outrage at what Meta was doing to its creators, they walked it back on an Instagram story. That is not an apology. Let me show you what one looks like…

Whoever inside Meta felt something when hundreds of XR professionals lit up in horror, I am speaking directly to you right now: take another step. And another. Because walking back a kill date on an Instagram story is not accountability. It’s the first inch of a mile you haven’t started walking yet.

I am not grateful for a stay of execution. And I am not trying to burn down whatever nerve is still alive inside Meta. I am here to say: prove it. Because right now, “for the foreseeable future” dropped casually on an Instagram story could mean you’re listening. Or it could mean you’ll do this again, quieter, when the world is not watching. Show us which one it is.

Dr. Ruth Diaz

She goes on to share stories and profiles of the creators and experiences that Horizon is walking away from. She also outlines a framework for Meta to actually begin to repair with creators.

A, Acknowledge what happened. Not “we’re separating platforms for focus.” Say what you did. You told creators their life’s dreams and thousand of hours building community and environments would be inaccessible in 90 days. You did this through an email and forum post. You did this after years of telling them to build, invest, trust, and belong.

M, Map the impact. Creators like Lacey and Bizerka found a medium where their bodies and conditions weren’t barriers. Communities that used VR for healing, connection, and cultural expression. People who can’t even locate their own creations in your broken search engine. Don’t tell us what you’re “focused on.” Tell us you understand what you broke.

E, Express understanding. Not “we heard your feedback.” Show that you understand why announcing the demolition of embodied spaces where people healed is not a product update. It is institutional harm. The fact that you didn’t know that before you made decisions and posted it is the problem.

N, Name what needs repair. Specifically:

• Fix your search engine. Creators cannot find their own worlds. That has been broken and that is unacceptable before, during, and after any transition.

• Repair and maintain the basic creator tools so the people who built your platform for you can continue to access and maintain their work.

• Give creators full ability to export and move their worlds, complete and intact, to other applications. Unwall the gardens before you abandon them.

• Release the application to the community as a cooperative open-source project, the way Tilt Brush turned into immortality for its creators by using open source to become, through community, MultiBrush and Open Brush, a VR art tool that thrives because Google let the community steward it. If you don’t want to steward what creators built, let the creators steward it themselves. BridgeMakers Cooperative would volunteer to help coordinate this effort.

• Give creators a seat at the table where these decisions get made. Not a community forum where they find out after.

• Issue a public apology taking responsibility for the egregious treatment of creator content, for breaking promises, and for the psychological safety you manufactured to get creators to trust you after years of broken commitments. Not a product update. Not an Instagram story. An apology.

• Share a plan of action. With timelines. With names attached. With accountability built in.

D, Demonstrate change. Don’t reverse course only when people get loud. Change the structures that made this possible. How are creator investments protected going forward? What happens when you pivot again in six months? Show us the policy, not a response to press. Not an Instagram story.

S, Stay in the conversation. This is the one Meta has never done. You don’t get to announce, retreat, drop a casual “for now” on an Instagram AMA, and go quiet. The people you harmed are still here. The conversation doesn’t end when the news cycle does.

Dr. Ruth Diaz

And I’d add, don’t ask creators to build and invest in a product that is harmful and exploitative to vulnerable users, to kids. Don’t instruct researchers to delete evidence, don’t retaliate against the employees trying to speak up.

You owe it to kids, to families. You owe it to lawmakers. You owe it to an industry you gobbled up only to gnaw on and spit out. You owe it to creators.

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What Else I’m Paying Attention To:

Verdict Watch in the Los Angeles Social Media Addiction Trial

Today is day 6 of jury deliberations in the landmark trial happening in Los Angeles.

As I’ve said before, whether Meta wins or loses, they’re losing, because the public gets to see what I and so many others experienced firsthand — the gap between public statements and internal practice. The knowledge of harm to kids, and the lack of adequate action.

But it’s also beginning to seem more and more like they might literally lose, too. A ruling in favor of the defendants, Meta and YouTube, would likely have come much faster. A ruling in favor of the plaintiff, Kaley G.M., requires the jury answer 7 specific questions.

Nicki Petrossi gives us a rundown of the 7 questions earlier this morning:

• Was Meta negligent in the design or operation of Instagram?

• Was this negligence a substantial factor in causing harm to Kaley?

• Did Meta know that design or operation of Instagram was dangerous when used by a minor?

• Did Meta know that users would not realize the danger?

• Did Meta fail to adequately warn of the danger?

• Would a reasonable platform, designer, or operator, have warned of danger or instructed on safe use?

• Was Meta’s failure to warn a substantial factor in causing harm to Kaley?

And the jurors will answer the same 7 questions for YouTube. If the jurors answer “yes” to #2 or #7, they’ll move onto a damages form where they put a monetary amount of damages. Jurors would also need to designate responsibility percentages (out of a total of 100%) between Meta and YouTube.

“What we can say with confidence is that the answers aren’t all no’s, we’d have already known that. So now we wait… hopefully not too much longer,” said Nicki.

Senators to Zuckerberg: You’ve Got Two Weeks

Last September, Senators Grassley, Hawley, and Blackburn issued a letter to Mark Zuckerberg that demanded answers to child safety concerns, including those in Horizon Worlds. They quoted directly from my statement to the FTC.

Last week, they followed up to that and an earlier letter in April demanding answers regarding what Sarah Wynn Williams revealed about child safety issues in Instagram.

“To date, Meta has failed to fully and completely respond to Chairman Grassley’s questions and document requests…

Despite Meta failing to provide the requested information, our offices have obtained, through legally protected whistleblower disclosures, a list of document titles and descriptions that we believe would provide records responsive to our oversight requests.

So that Congress may conduct objective and independent oversight of the aforementioned allegations, please provide answers to the following no later than March 25, 2026.”

From Senators Grassley, Hawley, and Blackburn’s March 11, 2026 letter to Mark Zuckerberg

Your Attention Please Premieres at SXSW

I was honored to be invited by Kristin Bride to a private pre-screen of this film last November, where I also met director, Sara Robin.

It is an extremely compelling deep dive into the threats our kids face online, the “why” and “how” of resulting corporate disregard, and how these threats impact real families and society.

Congrats to this team for the SXSW premiere. I’m including the trailer below, and encourage everyone to watch the film when available.

New Superhuman Podcast Episode

I’ve written before about survivor parent Aaron Ping’s incredible podcast created in the wake of grieving his son, Avery. It’s called Superhuman. Aaron also writes on Substack.

It’s worth listening to the whole series, but especially the latest episode, Muted Cases. Aaron published it on March 11th, the day the man who found Avery on Snapchat was sentenced.

“It’s the most important one of my series,” Aaron told me.

From the episode description:

The episode expands beyond one family’s loss into a repeatable pattern: teen networks, platform mechanics, and legal structures that struggle to name what’s happening in plain language. Through an anonymous former teen witness, the Chapman family’s push for Sammy’s Law, and a second youth perspective from Cole, “Muted Cases” makes the case that these aren’t isolated tragedies—they’re predictable outcomes of a system that prioritizes speed, scale, and plausible deniability over child safety and public warning.

Thank you for reading and supporting my work through your comments, hearts, shares, subscriptions (free and paid), DMs, emails, and attention. I so appreciate you!

So much has been going on, so unlike my typical articles and essays, I’d like to do a roundup of several important updates. Today, I’d like to cover:

• Tomorrow’s KOSA markup and why my position on KOSA has changed

• The Social Media Addiction Trials in Los Angeles

  • Visiting the courtroom last week

  • The latest in the case

  • Clips from media I’ve done regarding the case

  • How to stay updated

• Meta’s latest child safety theater in Teen Accounts

Why I’m Urging a “No” Vote on KOSA Tomorrow

Tomorrow, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will debate, amend, and vote on the final language of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) before it goes to the floor. I wrote in December about how the latest House version of KOSA includes sweeping preemption of state AI and kids safety laws.

It now also includes the nullification of thousands of cases from states, school districts, survivor parents, and young people on social media harms.

“The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s package fails at its goal of keeping children and teens safe. This is a Trojan horse for bad policy, bad politics, blanket preemption, and an industry bailout in the courts. We are urging all members to vote ‘no’ because Congress should pass the Senate’s bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act, which already has a filibuster-proof level of support and would hold Big Tech’s feet to the fire…

By advancing this package, House Republicans are giving Mark Zuckerberg and other Big Tech CEOs what they want – a get-out-of-jail-free card”

- Tech Oversight Project Executive Director Sacha Haworth in a statement this morning

If this fires you up, please contact your House Rep today and ask them to vote “no” on the House version of this bill.

While the Senate version included the important duty of care requirement without the soulless preemption and nullification clauses, this standard is actually lower than product liability laws. The current bellwether case in Los Angeles on Social Media Addiction is providing damning evidence of corporate negligence and this standard is higher than the duty of care provision in KOSA. We need to keep the courtroom doors open to those harmed and refuse to accept legislation that’s coupled with clauses to weaken rights of both victims and states.

From the Tech Oversight Project— key evidence made public to date includes:

• Meta internal documents showing executives explicitly targeted teenagers, with one stating that “the lifetime value of a 13-year-old teen is roughly $270 per teen” and another describing how “engaging the vast majority of teens in a school … is crucial.”

• A Meta internal study finding that “teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to,” and an internal chat message in which Meta employees described the platform as “a drug.”

• Meta’s own scientists acknowledging that “the best external research indicates that Facebook’s impact on people’s well-being is negative” and internal documents showing that Instagram’s primary goal was to maximize use time, contradicting what Mark Zuckerberg told Congress.

• Internal Meta documents showing Zuckerberg “explicitly communicated a motivation to not notify parents of children’s activities on Facebook,” and company efforts to identify students’ specific school affiliations even after they opted out of sharing that information.

• YouTube internal slides stating the company’s “goal is not viewership, it’s viewer addiction,” alongside internal research confirming that “YouTube is built with the intention of being addictive” and that YouTube’s own researchers felt the platform “isn’t safe.”

• YouTube internal documents showing the company knew its autoplay feature disrupts sleep patterns and that students were circumventing restricted mode – and internally debated whether it was “worth our time to fix.”

• TikTok internal documents acknowledging that “compulsive usage on TikTok is rampant” among younger users, and a TikTok Trust and Safety memo documenting the harms of beauty filters, including what the company called “Snapchat dysmorphia.”

• Snap internal slides showing that 64 percent of Snapchat users aged 13 to 21 use the app during school hours, that the company focused on acquiring 13-year-olds, and that Snap’s map featured geolocated students whose data was sold to advertisers.

• Expert reports finding that these platforms were not designed to be safe, that companies did not provide effective warnings to teens and parents, and that parental controls offered by the platforms are ineffective.

Updates on the Case in Los Angeles

I had the opportunity to spend a day in Los Angeles thanks to 9News Australia. This included spending a couple of hours in the courtroom (thank you to Mahsa, mom of Finale, forever 18, for sharing a pass with me!) during Meta’s cross examination of one of the plaintiff’s therapists, Victoria Burke.

Watching Meta try to trap and bully Ms. Burke was disheartening and infuriating. But I also got to watch the faces of the 12 jurors who clearly weren’t fans of this bullying, and I got to watch Judge Kuhl stop the proceedings to presumably speak to Meta’s counsel about their behavior. He returned with an apology.

The morning I was there, survivor parents and advocates organized a press conference where Nikki Iyer of Design it For Us, Lennon Torres of the Heat Initiative, and survivor parent Julianna Arnold (mom to Coco, forever 17) spoke about the case. It was an honor to stand behind them.

Later, Lennon and Nikki held signs with other young people that said “We are K.G.M.,” flanked by survivor parents Mahsa and Amy (mom to Alex, forever 14).

The testimony from Ms. Burke and other witnesses continue to make it harder for Big Tech to wave away plaintiff K.G.M.’s harms as caused by “just parenting” or “just a complicated kid.”

Dr. Kara Bagot, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and longtime addiction researcher (including work on the NIH-funded ABCD Study), testified to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that specific design features, including infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendations, and notifications, directly caused or substantially contributed to a cascade of diagnoses for K.G.M.: social media addiction, major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety, OCD, body dysmorphic disorder, and ADHD.

She described a biological process: reward circuitry getting reorganized, a new baseline getting set, withdrawal symptoms, and a kid whose coping skills got hollowed out until she was hiding in a bathroom at work just to scroll. Meanwhile, even defense exhibits landed like admissions, including evidence that Meta launched “cosmetic surgery” filters, pulled them in 2019 after recognizing mental health risk, and then brought them back in 2020.

YouTube’s Vice President of Engineering, Cristos Goodrow, also took the stand, attempting to portray YouTube as a benign video platform rather than a system engineered to maximize engagement. That framing grew harder to sustain as internal documents were introduced showing explicit company goals to increase watch time, habit formation, and user retention.

At one point Goodrow volunteered that he allows his own children to spend five to six hours a day on YouTube, later saying that he supervises all of this time. Uh huh.

The economic engine behind those design choices became clearer through the testimony of data scientist Dr. John Chandler, who walked the jury through millions of pages of internal records produced in discovery. Chandler explained how the advertising model works in practice: the longer people stay on a platform and the more data they generate, the more precisely ads can be targeted and the more revenue the platform earns. That dynamic applies whether the user is an adult or a teenager.

Internal presentations showed that retaining young users was especially valuable because they remain on the platform longer over their lifetime, generating more data and more advertising revenue. One document estimated that failing to capture enough teens would cost Meta $150 million in lost revenue in 2019 alone, with the loss projected to compound to $1.8 billion by 2030. In other words, the platforms’ financial incentives point in one direction: bring young users in early, keep them engaged as long as possible, and turn their attention into profit.

I spoke with CGTN about the trial:

My friend, Meta whistleblower Brian Boland, provided inside testimony about how those incentives operate within the company itself. Boland spent more than a decade at Meta, serving as Vice President of Partnerships and later Vice President of Advertising Technology, working closely with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. He testified that there is a direct relationship between time spent on Meta’s platforms and the company’s profits, explaining that the systems optimizing engagement are “incredibly sophisticated” and relentlessly tuned to increase Average Revenue Per User.

According to Boland, products were often launched without meaningful safety testing, reflecting a culture that never truly left behind the company’s original “move fast and break things” ethos. He also described how senior leadership prioritized youth growth internally, pointing to discussions among the company’s top leaders about the need to “get the kids” and “get the teenagers.” Boland’s testimony reinforced what many of the internal documents show: the drive to capture young users and maximize their time on the platform was not accidental, it was a strategic priority discussed at the highest levels of the company.

I spoke with Al Jazeera about the trial:

And then K.G.M. herself testified. She started using YouTube at age 6, created accounts by lying about her age, and cycled through multiple accounts to chase engagement. Autoplay kept her watching when she wanted to stop. Notifications felt like a “rush.” Instagram arrived at age 9, with a routine that sounded like compulsion, not choice: daily use morning, after school, and at night; multiple accounts to boost likes; layered beauty filters; distress when photos weren’t filtered; and a reported 16-hour day on the app.

The defense strategy has been consistent: isolate every stressor in her life and insist the platform is incidental. But the through-line from witness to witness is that the platforms were the “snowball” that turned ordinary adolescent stressors into a crisis by stripping away sleep, focus, and resilience.

Next up, the jury is expected to hear from the plaintiff’s mother, and then Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar (former senior leader on security, safety, and protection).

For regular updates on the case from two of my favorite people in the world, subscribe to The Heat is On.

Meanwhile, Meta Continues Child Safety Theater

I told NPR’s Amy Juravich that Mark Zuckerberg took the stand and per usual “lies, tap-dances, and does pirouettes around reality.”

The same is true for Meta’s PR response, which has included thousands of pieces of media promoting Teen Accounts, a “product” that’s been proven to not work as described and that I’ve written about before, saying “Teen Accounts seem less about protecting teens and more about protecting Meta. Less cure and more sugar pill, meant to make parents and lawmakers feel better without adequately addressing the issue.”

In an attempt to cool their hot seat, last week Meta announced a new updated to Teen Accounts, stating that they would notify parents if kids searched repeatedly for self-harm or suicide related content on Instagram. They said that similar “protections” for AI chat-bot conversations are coming later this year.

As a mom, I’d like to be notified the first time my kid searches for terms like this. I’d also like Meta to ensure that Teen Accounts actually work. And I’d like them to do something about the endless scroll and algorithmic feed that delivers the harmful content in the first place, to do something about their harmful product design.

“This isn't even a Band-Aid. It's Ford Motor Companies sticking a broken fire extinguisher in an exploding Pinto and calling it a day,” said Laura Marquez-Garrett on LinkedIn. They go on to say, “Stop telling children that these strangers are their ‘friends,’ stop promising them popularity and rewards if they connect with these strangers, and stop sending them "school blasts" and other notifications at rates and during times of the day you know are causing harm. In fact, stop sending notifications entirely if they don't want them.”

Addiction and predation are the issues. Not searches children are running by their own choice.
- Laura Marquez-Garrett

I’ve written before about Silicon Valley’s Child Safety Playbook and this latest announcement follows the pattern:

Enough is enough.

By March 20th, the jury in K.G.M.’s case will cast a verdict. Whether Meta wins or loses, this is the beginning of the end. They’re losing. They’re losing because the world gets to see what I experienced firsthand while working there—greed that causes harm, and internal knowledge of that harm.

Please email your reps and ask them to vote “no” on the latest version of KOSA. We must keep the courtroom doors open so that more and more of this damning truth can come to light.

This trial is different from every previous legal challenge to Big Tech because it does not focus on content. It targets the product design itself — the algorithms, the infinite scroll, the notification systems, the engagement loops deliberately built to maximize time on platform regardless of the cost to users. For the first time, these companies cannot hide behind Section 230 immunity.

I spoke about the case with Al Jazeera this morning, saying, “it’s not about the content, it’s about the algorithm and the endless scroll delivering whatever is going to keep someone scrolling and making money for Mark Zuckerberg without consequence for the impact on their lives or their family’s.”

In the clip, I talk about Mason Edens’, who turned to his algorithmic feed in the wake of a breakup, searching for inspirational quotes. He was fed a steady stream of pro-suicide content until he took his own life. While the tech company may not have uploaded the pro-suicide content, they knew what would keep a sad kid hooked and fed it to him endlessly.

This trial is a watershed moment. For the first time, a jury of ordinary people will examine whether tech companies deliberately engineered addiction into products they knew were being used by children — and whether there are real consequences for that. The Ford Pinto case changed automotive safety. The tobacco settlements changed public health policy. This trial has the same potential to change what’s acceptable in tech.

Mark Zuckerberg will undoubtedly lie, just as he did in 2024 when he told the US Senate Judiciary Committee that social media harms aren’t proven.

“I think it’s important to look at the science. I know people widely talk about [social media harms] as if that is something that’s already been proven and I think that the bulk of the scientific evidence does not support that.”

- Mark Zuckerberg, US Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis” (2024)

The 2021 Facebook Files investigation by WSJ revealed that both external studies and Meta’s own internal research consistently linked Instagram use to worsened teen mental health—especially around body image, anxiety, depression, and social comparison. Internal findings showed harms were platform-specific, with evidence that the app amplified self-esteem issues and eating-disorder risk among adolescents, particularly girls, while design features encouraged prolonged engagement despite those risks.

While Meta’s defense is that these harms are a parenting failure, these platforms are specifically engineered to override parental authority. Parents are offered controls that regularly fail third party testing and are lied to about the company’s knowledge of harm to kids.

Unsealed evidence includes Exhibit 373, where a Meta employee emails Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer, saying that the company needs to optimize for teens being able to sneak a look at their phones under their desk while at school.

In the 2024 Senate hearing, Zuckerberg turned to survivor parents holding up pictures of their dead children and made commitments to keeping kids safe.

“No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered and this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer.”

- Mark Zuckerberg, US Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on "Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis" (2024)

But Meta’s post-hearing investment in teen safety measures have been a PR stunt. A report conducted a comprehensive study of teen accounts, testing 47 of Instagram’s 53 listed safety features, finding that:

• 64% (30 tools) were rated “red” — either no longer available or ineffective.

• 19% (9 tools) reduced harm but had major limitations.

• 17% (8 tools) worked as advertised, with no notable limitations.

While I expect Zuckerberg to continue lying about Meta’s knowledge of harms, lying about Meta doing everything they can to keep kids safe, and lying about prioritizing young children to maximize profits, this isn’t going to be fixed with a huge PR investment.

It is the first time a jury gets to look at these companies’ own documents and ask: did you know? Yes. Did you profit? Yes. Did you warn anyone? No.

Meta said in their opening statement that the plaintiff’s issues are to blame on her challenging home life, but lead trial attorney for the plaintiff, Mark Lanier, responded by emphasizing the findings of a study, “Project MYST.” The study, conducted by Meta, found that children who experienced “adverse events” like trauma and stress were particularly vulnerable for addiction; and that parental supervision and controls made little impact.

When Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, a dad of 3, took the stand last week, he compared Instagram addiction to binging a show Netflix in a courtroom where families who lost children to Instagram were sitting. And the jury got to experience the gap between public testimony and internal documents, like the piece of evidence where Mosseri’s own people wrote that Instagram is ‘a drug.’ They described themselves as ‘basically pushers.’ Or the fact that Mosseri and Zuckerberg failed to act when notified by whistleblower Arturo Bejar of the harm to teens on Instagram, both in terms of body-image, mental health, and exposure to predators.

Even though Mosseri himself has discussed Instagram addiction in the past, on the stand he said that he previously misspoke, that it’s better characterized as “problematic use.”

“I don’t know that I have a good name for it. Maybe I probably should, now that you say that. But I think that problematic use, for that, whether or not you call it addiction, I think that’s probably reasonable to call it.”

-Adam Mosseri during a March 2020 NBC Podcast Interview

The first witness called by the plaintiffs was Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and the author of Dopamine Nation. After reviewing thousands of pages of Meta’s internal documents, she told the jury that the design features of these platforms are addictive, and that Meta has been using the phrase “Problematic Internet Use” internally as a deliberate synonym, and that they’re “working hard not to call it addiction.”

Nicki Petrossi, who was in the courtroom, reported that Meta’s attorney attempted to discredit Dr. Lembke by discrediting and humiliating her.

“It got ugly, it was hard to watch… they basically took her book, Dopamine Nation, where Dr. Lembke was very vulnerable about personal struggles that she’s had in her life in order to relate to her readers and Meta cherry-picked small quotes from her book without context to try to defame her, to try to call her a liar, it really got dirty.” Nicki reports that Mark Lanier was able to later offer the jury context around Meta’s line of questioning.

-Nicki Petrossi on Scrolling2Death

The internal documents that are now public record don’t show a company that was surprised by harm. They show a company that studied harm, documented harm, and calculated the revenue from harm — a 13-year-old was valued at $270 in lifetime advertising, driven by the fact that children have three times the long-term retention of adult users.

Nicki Petrossi was in the court room during today’s testimony, and told me, “Zuckerberg acknowledged internal documents estimating millions of under-13 users on Instagram, but stressed the platform’s policy forbids them and argued the issue is around difficulty with enforcement and users lying about their age, not permission.”

One piece of unsealed evidence, Exhibit 313, is an internal Meta analysis from 2018 titled “Long Term Retention: The Young Ones are the Best Ones.” It found that people who join Facebook as tweens (aged 10-12) have the highest long term retention out of all age groups, at a 3x multiple compared to adults. The document asserts, “prioritize tweens over all other age groups.”

Lembke also testified that children are rarely able to self-identify a social media addiction; they typically can’t recognize it until they’re, as she put it, “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Teenagers, she said, aren’t there yet. They don’t have the insight.

The science says teens struggle to self-regulate because their brains aren’t finished developing. The evidence says these companies won’t self-regulate because their business model depends on addiction. So whose side are we on?

When asked about how much money he made working at Meta, Adam Mosseri testified to earning about $10 million per year, much of it determined by performance indicators like the stock price.

“When you have Adam Mosseri claiming that safety is more important than growth, but he is financially incentivized to increase growth over safety, that threatens his own stance here.”

-Nicki Petrossi on Scrolling2Death

Expert evidence from Dr. Seth Noar, a Distinguished Professor of Health Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, concludes that platforms in question failed to provide any effective warning to adolescent users or their parents about documented risks including addiction, depression, eating disorders, self-harm, and child sexual exploitation. His opinion: effective warnings would have reduced or avoided many of the harms children suffered, and the companies had both the knowledge and the technology to implement them. He compared social media to the tobacco industry.

The tobacco comparison is structurally accurate. The companies knew. They documented harm. They suppressed the research. And they specifically targeted young people because addicting them early meant higher lifetime revenue.

The companies documented everything themselves and then tried to make sure it was never seen. This trial is about making it seen.

According to my conversation with Nicki, today Zuckerberg agreed companies should help—not exploit—vulnerable users. He said that “if a company causes harm, it should reevaluate its values.”

No, if a company causes harm they should be stopped. And held accountable.

I spent nearly fifteen years at Meta, convincing brands and agencies to invest in our efficient media until I led product marketing for Horizon Worlds, where we were asked to create no discoverable record of our knowledge of kids exposed to harm.

Now, I can tell you exactly how platforms like Instagram and TikTok deliver such efficient CPMs: they count on children carrying the costs, creating endless inventory with their endless-scroll.

In my college marketing class, a professor held up a Forever 21 t-shirt and asked: “This costs $10 instead of $50. Who actually absorbed that $40 difference?” The answer was exploited garment workers, polluted rivers in Bangladesh, overflowing landfills.

When you run a campaign targeting teen girls on Instagram and achieve a $0.50 cost-per-click, who is absorbing the difference between that artificially low price and the true cost of reaching that audience responsibly?

The landmark trial beginning in Los Angeles will expose who pays: A now 20-year-old woman who developed depression and suicidal ideation from platforms designed to be addictive.

Meta’s own internal documents, my federal testimony and discrimination lawsuit, and multiple other whistleblowers like Arturo Bejar, Cayce Savage and Jason Sattizahn show executives know their platforms harm children and do nothing. According to unsealed discovery documents, one Instagram employee called the app “a drug,” with a colleague joking “lol, we’re basically pushers.”

For years, platforms have hidden behind Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act, claiming they can’t be held liable for user-generated content. “We just host it,” they say, “we don’t create it.” Despite the fact that teenagers are shown self-harm content every 2.6 minutes on TikTok, this lawsuit doesn’t target any single harmful post or video. It targets the product design itself; the engineered addiction that makes media buys so efficient. The infinite scroll. The autoplay. The algorithmic amplification of whatever keeps kids most engaged, even if that’s self-harm or pro-suicide content.

The efficient media buys are only efficient because the platforms have exploited these regulatory gaps and kids’ yet-to-be-developed prefrontal lobes.

We need legislative reform, yes. We need civil cases to prevail, of course. But the most powerful lever in this fight might not be the lawmakers or lawsuits. It’s in the hands of brands and the media agencies that fund this operation. When you fund platforms that exploit children by design, you’re signaling that addiction, lost sleep, divergent brain development, sex trafficking, anxiety and depression are acceptable costs in pursuit of cheap media.

The trial in Los Angeles will force Meta and YouTube to defend their design choices to a jury. Brands don’t need to wait for a verdict to make a change. The evidence has been public for years: leaked internal documents showing executives knew their platforms harmed children, UNICEF reports documenting digital exploitation and mental health impacts, the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory warning about social media for young people. Australia banned access for kids under 16. France and Spain are following. Lush Cosmetics deleted their social media accounts in 2021 over youth safety and survived just fine.

The advertising industry has spent years obsessing over brand safety—ensuring their ad doesn’t appear next to objectionable content. What if the content doesn’t matter because the system itself is harmful?

The issue isn’t whether a sneaker ad appears next to a pro-suicide post. It’s whether the media subsidizes the infinite scroll that delivers it.

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During my conversation last month with Lennon Torres, I shared that “Tech companies fund many of the groups opposing KOSA, and their lobbyists constantly cite LGBTQ+ concerns in their talking points. There’s evidence that Big Tech has spent over $50 million lobbying against KOSA. Some argue they’re exploiting LGBTQ+ fears to protect their profits. I got a taste of this when working at Meta - when I was first pitched the idea of leading go-to-market for Meta Horizon Worlds, the “hero story” was about the “isolated gay kid in Kansas” who could finally find community. When in reality, as I discovered once on the job, there was rampant bullying, harassment, and the implication of parental controls where they didn’t exist.”

While connecting online can be a critical mechanism for community, it's also true that queer kids are more likely to experience online harms like unwanted adult interactions and bullying.

And it’s also true that they’re increasingly disregarded by Big Tech’s biggest players.

Restricting predatory, addictive features like endless scrolls that deliver pro-suicide content, or holding tech companies to a duty of care is protective for all kids, especially LGBTQ+. Proposed legislation such as KOSA's duty of care requirement or WA SB 5708's addictive algorithmic feed restrictions do not limit their access to lifesaving content and community.

Because of these misunderstandings, I've compiled peer-reviewed research, government data, NGO surveys, investigative reporting, and opinion pieces focused specifically on LGBTQ+ youth and social media.

Sources were included if they document social media’s impact on LGBTQ+ youth (both positive and negative) including mental health impacts, exposure to harassment or discrimination, or platform policies affecting LGBTQ+ safety and expression.

Access the resource here:

Social Media and LGBTQ+ Youth Data

The same companies that have spent tens of millions to convince LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations that regulation is harmful have also unilaterally rolled policies meant to protect these kids.

Since January 2025, every major social media platform has either rolled back LGBTQ+ protections, censored LGBTQ+ content, or both. These changes appear coordinated with the Trump administration's anti-trans executive orders and align with Project 2025's explicit instruction to delete "sexual orientation and gender identity" from official documents. GLAAD's 2025 Social Media Safety Index gave failing scores to all six platforms evaluated.

I've included these details in my data compilation as well. Here is a sense of what the database currently covers, and I plan to continue updating and expanding as I have capacity and new inputs or research develop.

Please share this resource with policy makers, parents, and advocates.

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If there's anything missing or you have suggestions to make this resource more valuable, please let me know.

For the first time, hundreds of families, teens, and even school districts are taking the world’s largest social media companies to court, accusing them of intentionally designing their platforms to be addictive and harmful to children.

The case will put Meta and YouTube before a jury to answer whether their apps fuel excessive use and mental health issues in young people. The proceedings will force CEOs, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram’s Adam Mosseri, to face tough questioning under oath, an unprecedented accountability moment for Big Tech, comparable to when tobacco executives were grilled in the 1990s.

The Bellwether Case: A Test for Thousands of Lawsuits

A bellwether trial is a test case selected from a large group of similar lawsuits to gauge how juries might respond to the evidence and arguments. The term comes from the practice of placing a bell on the lead sheep (the “wether”) in a flock—where it goes, the others follow.

In mass litigation involving hundreds or thousands of plaintiffs with similar claims, courts use bellwether trials to establish patterns: What damages might juries award? Which arguments resonate? How strong is the evidence? The outcomes help both sides assess the strength of their positions and often drive settlement negotiations for the remaining cases.

The first case centers on a 19-year-old California woman, identified as K.G.M., who says growing up on apps like Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok made her addicted to social media. She alleges the platforms’ design led to years of depression and even suicidal thoughts. K.G.M.’s lawsuit is the first of about 22 bellwether trials selected from hundreds of similar cases accusing social media companies of harming youth. Roughly 1,600 plaintiffs have coordinated their claims in this California proceeding.

“The fact that a social media company is going to have to stand trial before a jury … is unprecedented,” Matthew Bergman, head of Social Media Victims Law Center and a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told The Guardian.

Jury selection began this week, and the trial is expected to last about six to eight weeks, making it the first time these tech giants have ever defended their products before an open courtroom jury.

Why This Case is Different

For years, social media companies have hidden behind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, claiming impunity for whatever users post on their platforms. We don’t create the content, they argue, we just host it. A bill was introduced this year in the U.S. Senate, proposing to sunset Section 230.

This trial and these lawsuits don’t focus on any single piece of harmful content; they target the product design itself. As such, for once, Big Tech can’t claim Section 230 immunity.

Whether or not a self-harm video gets uploaded, these companies have engineered systems that actively deliver it to vulnerable kids because they know what keeps them hooked. These platforms connect children with adults selling counterfeit fentanyl, rewarding them for accepting friend requests from unknown adults and then showing their location to these predators on a map. They fail to address sextortion schemes that have driven teens to suicide. They amplify dangerous viral challenges.

Their own internal research confirms their products fuel body image crises and depression—and they launched them anyway.

The scale of harm is staggering. According to the Tech Oversight Project, TikTok pushed self-harm content to young users every 2.6 minutes and eating disorder content every 8 minutes. Meanwhile, 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited on Facebook, with another 14% on Instagram.

While Instagram publicly claimed a “zero tolerance” policy for child sexual abuse material, the platform did not offer users a simple way to report such content. Internally, the company operated a “17x” strike policy for accounts flagged as engaging in sex trafficking.

It’s not about content.

Snap and TikTok Settle, Zuckerberg Still Heading for Hot Seat

In the days leading up to trial, two defendants have bowed out: Snap Inc. (owner of Snapchat) and TikTok reached last-minute settlements with the plaintiff. Snap settled on January 20 and TikTok followed on the day before jury selection. The terms of these deals are confidential, and both companies denied wrongdoing as part of the agreement.

But the timing speaks volumes. “The companies are feeling pressure, they don’t want to be part of these litigations,” Heat Initiative CEO Sarah Gardner told social media reform advocate Nicki Petrossi yesterday, “it’s our job to continue to expose what we’ve found in the discovery documents… the public needs to know what was in those documents and how damning they were.”

One reason this trial is being so closely watched is the prospect of tech CEOs on the witness stand. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl has ordered Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram’s Adam Mosseri to testify, finding that their personal knowledge of any harms (and any failure to act) is “uniquely relevant” to establishing negligence. (Snap’s Evan Spiegel was also originally ordered to appear, but his testimony was averted by Snap’s settlement.)

Meta’s lawyers fought hard to spare Zuckerberg and Mosseri from live testimony, arguing it would “set a precedent” for future cases, but the judge denied their request.

Setting precedent is the point of all of this.

Despite Zuckerberg’s history of lying under oath, he may be less able to deceive and deflect in the courtroom than when he testified for the U.S. Senate.

Social Media’s Tobacco Moment: Parallels to Big Tobacco in the ’90s

K.G.M.’s lawsuit explicitly claims that the companies “borrow[ed] heavily from the behavioral and neurobiological techniques used by slot machines and exploited by the cigarette industry,” embedding features “aimed at maximizing youth engagement to drive advertising revenue.”

The Big Tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s exposed cigarette companies’ deceptive practices and led to a massive 1998 settlement and new marketing restrictions. K.G.M.’s lawyers have adopted a similar strategy:

• Addictive By Design: Just as tobacco firms were accused of manipulating nicotine levels, social apps are alleged to use “an array of design features” – from infinite scroll feeds to video autoplay – to create a habit-forming experience. One unsealed internal document even shows an Instagram employee bluntly calling the app a “drug,” with a colleague joking “lol, we’re basically pushers”.

• Targeting the Young: The 1998 tobacco settlement forced cigarette makers to stop marketing to minors. Likewise, these lawsuits claim social media companies intentionally targeted children (they do!), designing products that appeal to and ensnare young users to boost engagement and thus profits. The complaint argues that teens were not “collateral damage” but “intended targets” of harmful design choices.

• Internal Knowledge vs. Public Denial: A core issue is whether company leaders knew their platforms were harmful, yet publicly downplayed or ignored the problems – a scenario eerily reminiscent of tobacco CEOs denying nicotine’s addictiveness while their colleagues died of cancer. Troves of internal documents are set to be unsealed during trial, and attorneys say these will show that social media executives were aware of the addictive nature and mental health risks of their products. Former employees and whistleblowers (myself included!) have already alleged that companies knew children were being harmed and “did little-to-nothing” to stop it.

The Tech and Society Lab at NYU Stern launched a site, Meta’s Internal Research, earlier this month dedicated to compiling vast evidence of Meta’s knowledge of its products harm to kids.

Just as the tobacco trials created a public archive of industry documents and forced a moment of reckoning, this social media trial is poised to put evidence of their poison on the public record. The testimonies of affected teens and parents and the unsealing of internal memos could significantly reshape public understanding of social media’s impact.

What to Expect in the Trial

Over the next two months, the Los Angeles jury will hear accounts from young users and parents, expert analyses of app psychology, and the tech companies’ defense of their practices.

Tech companies fought to exclude over 5,000 pages of expert testimony on social media harms and addiction, and the judge not only denied their request but unsealed the documents.

On the other side, the companies will highlight the safeguards and parental controls they’ve introduced (like screen time limits, content filters, and age restrictions) and argue that they never intended to harm users.

I’ve said before that these safeguards are too little, too late, and rarely work as designed. Sugar pills for parents.

Implications for Parents and Lawmakers

For many parents, this trial is a validation of concerns they’ve harbored for years. “Every parent is struggling with their kids and these platforms. Every parent,” says Juliana Arnold of the advocacy group ParentsRISE!, where I’ve recently joined the Advisory Council.

Arnold’s teenage daughter, Coco, tragically died after an incident linked to Instagram.

Should the trial reveal that platforms intentionally employed harmful design to boost engagement, parents might feel more justified in setting stricter screen-time rules, delaying social media, seeking mental health support for affected teens, or even joining legal actions themselves.

For legislators and regulators, the proceedings in Los Angeles are a potential catalyst for policy change. In recent years, bipartisan concern has grown over social media’s impact on youth – with multiple Congressional hearings grilling tech executives over topics from bullying and body image to the spread of dangerous challenges. Notably, more than 40 state attorneys general have already filed lawsuits against Meta for allegedly harming young people via addictive design on Instagram and Facebook. A high-profile trial verdict could lend credence to these claims and increase momentum for legal reforms.

Australia recently implemented a forced delay of social media use for all kids under 16. French lawmakers recently approved a ban on social media for kids under 15 without parental consent, and other countries are debating similar measures. In the U.S., bills like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) have been under consideration – this trial might provide the real-world evidence needed to overcome industry bribes and lobbying in order to turn it into law.

There’s also a broader public record being established. If internal documents enter evidence, they could become accessible to Congress and regulatory agencies, informing antitrust and consumer protection inquiries.

A Watershed Moment – Whatever the Outcome

Even before a verdict, the fact that Meta, Google, and others have been dragged into court and forced to open up internal discussions is significant.

“Is social media the new Big Tobacco?” has transitioned from a rhetorical question to a concrete legal battle. And like the tobacco saga, the impact will extend beyond the courtroom.

If the companies prevail, they will still have had to publicly confront uncomfortable truths and may approach product design differently to appease public concern. If the plaintiffs prevail, Silicon Valley could face a reckoning on par with Big Tobacco’s fall: substantial payouts, binding commitments to change practices, and a loss of public trust.

As Bergman put it, this time is “going to be different” – unlike past lawsuits that fizzled under legal shields, the design-focused approach of this case means social media giants can no longer hide behind neutrality laws and their $90 million of lobbying dollars.

Edited 3/5/26, updates on the case:

Why Washington Is Done Waiting for Big Tech to Regulate Itself

In the last week, I’ve testified before the Washington State Senate commitees in support of two bills aimed at protecting children online.

One addresses addictive social media design. The other regulates AI companion chatbots.

They cover different technologies, but they respond to the same underlying problem: the tech industry has had decades to regulate itself, and it has chosen growth over safety every time.

I know this because I spent nearly fifteen years inside Meta. I joined the company early, when it still spoke sincerely about connection and community. I rose from an hourly employee to a director, earned repeated top-tier performance ratings, and believed the industry line that safety was being handled responsibly. That everything possible was being done to keep kids safe.

That belief ended in 2022, when I joined the leadership team for Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship virtual reality platform.

Testifying on SB 5708: What “Voluntary Compliance” Looks Like in Practice

Inside Horizon Worlds, it was an open secret that a significant portion of users were children.

Leadership knew Meta was violating its own policies and federal law, collecting children’s data, and exposing them to unknown adults without parental consent or meaningful controls.

What mattered most was not fixing the problem, but managing exposure.

There were organization-wide directives to avoid taking notes or creating records that could be discoverable. When leadership decided to play test the product ourselves, we couldn’t hear one another over the sounds of screaming children. The response was not to address child access, but to move the test to a private instance.

At the same time, my job was to help expand the product. To new countries. To mobile. Officially to teens and kids as young as ten. The plan of record was to imply the existence of parental controls even though they weren’t ready.

When I raised the problem, I became the problem. I was told to silence other worried employees as a demonstration of my skill. I refused. I was removed from meetings required to do my job.

This context matters when companies tell lawmakers they can be trusted to self-regulate.

SB 5708 does not regulate speech or viewpoints. It limits the most addictive and exploitative design features for minors: algorithmic feeds, endless scroll, and push notifications designed to pull kids back at all hours.

The tech lobby says this legislation would limit parental agency. In reality, platforms already stripped it away by obscuring known harms and optimizing engagement in ways families cannot see or meaningfully consent to.

Watch the full hearing on SB 5708 here.

But What About Tech’s Profits?

At the end of my testimony, Senator Wilson asked this question:

“Thank you, Madam Chair, and with your indulgence, I’m going to ask a question that may be fairly obvious to a lot of us… Is it your opinion and your belief that this type platform still will allow, if they followed responsible action, still would allow them the opportunity to remain profitable, which is obviously a quest to them? Can this be done and the safety measures be enacted and respected still make a profit?”

Brian Boland, who was also testifying, and I both said “absolutely.”

Brian added:

“Having actually built the revenue business to the 100+ billion dollars per year that they generate currently in profits, there’s plenty of margin that this type of change would not make them have any challenge generating revenue.”

I closed with:

“I consider it to be extraordinarily disgraceful that this is even an argument, because, let’s say that taking measures to protect the safety and stop kids... from dying due to their quest for profitability... I can’t imagine another circumstance where we would say ‘let’s make sure we don’t kill this company’ instead of ‘let’s make sure we don’t kill kids.’”

Testifying on SB 5984: When Child Safety Threatens the Business Model

I also testified in support of SB 5984 because I’ve seen what happens when child safety threatens legal or financial exposure.

Meta approved internal chatbot rules allowing sexualized interactions with minors, including romantic and sexual role play and praising a child’s body. Those rules were approved not just by legal and communications teams, but by the company’s Chief Ethicist.

These facts alone should permanently end the idea that voluntary safeguards are sufficient.

SB 5984 prohibits sexually explicit or suggestive content for minors, bans manipulative engagement tactics, and mandates real detection and response protocols for self-harm and suicidal ideation.

It does not ban speech. It regulates a category of commercial products that simulate intimacy, retain emotional context, and adapt in ways that can profoundly affect vulnerable users.

Watch the full hearing on SB 5984 here.

The First Amendment Argument, and Why It Keeps Failing Kids

During the SB 5984 hearing, my friend Aaron Ping testified and spliced his testimony alongside a representative from an organization aligned with the tech industry. Watch the video here:

Superhuman Podcast

Influence First, Immunity Second

Read more

7 months ago · 2 likes · Aaron Ping

Aaron’s son, Avery, is gone. Predators used digital systems to reach him, manipulate him, and erase evidence.

“After that, you learn the difference between slogans and safety.”

The opposing testimony followed the script Aaron predicted: AI companions are “expressive tools.” Regulation equals censorship. Regulating design is regulating speech.

Aaron had already named this sleight of hand:

“They’re not defending free speech. They’re defending the right to run relationship-simulation products on minors without responsibility.”

He described what the bill actually regulates, in concrete terms:

“This bill does not ban ideas. It doesn’t police viewpoints. It regulates a commercial system that simulates intimacy, adapts emotionally, retains personal context, and can keep a child engaged for hours, precisely when that child is lonely, anxious, ashamed, or spiraling.”

This is the core fallacy in the First Amendment argument. AI companion chatbots are not town squares. They are not forums for public discourse. They are commercial products designed to make psychological contact at scale.

Calling that “speech” stretches the First Amendment into what Aaron called “a corporate immunity shield.”

He went further:

“Since Citizens United, the influence machine runs almost 24/7. When they cite free speech to block child safety rules, it isn’t constitutional principle. It’s a business strategy.”

And finally:

“The point of constitutional rights was to protect the people, not constitutionalize a business model.”

Washington Wants More Than Sugar Pills

In both hearings, industry representatives acknowledged harm while arguing regulation is unconstitutional, too complex, too burdensome, or premature.

I heard those same arguments inside Meta.

When companies claim compliance is too difficult, lawmakers should ask where their resources actually go. This industry is capable of laying deep-sea fiber around the globe in pursuit of growth. Of flying drones over Africa to increase market share. They’re the boy-wonders, innovators, capable of extraordinary technical coordination, unless profit is at stake.

Industry representatives said that tech companies are already solving these issues with parental controls, even though these “parental controls” have been repeatedly proven to be ineffective, effectively making them sugar pills for parents to feel safer without actually making their kids safer.

Voluntary compliance fails because it asks companies to act against their own business interests. When safety threatens engagement or market share, safety loses.

Washington’s proposed legislation is not radical. It is measured. It responds to documented harm. It does not assume bad intent. It assumes reality. It’s based on repeated behavior.

Children deserve more than promises. Parents deserve transparency. And lawmakers deserve better than being told, once again, to trust systems that have already shown they will not change on their own.

The era of voluntary compliance should be over.

Testifying on Principle, Not Payouts

As I shared on LinkedIn, my 5708 testimony was shared on Blind:

No I haven’t been paid by random sponsors to testify (wouldn’t that be nice?). This work has been at a huge personal cost—in all the ways.

No payouts for FTC testimony, meetings with congressional staff, state level advocacy, or anything else.

I didn’t sign their hold harmless which meant no severance, and I left millions in awarded but unvested stock on the table.

My current only source of income is from paid subscribers on Substack, where I’m earning about $3k annualized. (THANK YOU!)

Believe it or not, as far as I know, whistleblowers are standing up to Meta on principle and privilege.

Turns out it’s not okay to kill kids for profit, or to retaliate against the individuals—largely women—who speak up about it.

Every time I post about KOSA, I get emails from young LGBTQ+ people asking why I would support something so harmful to queer kids, so I’ve dug deeply into this.

This tension sits at the heart of one of Big Tech’s most effective deflection strategies: positioning child safety legislation as a threat to queer community and expression. It’s a framing that exploits legitimate fears to protect trillion-dollar business models.

Lennon Torres knows both sides of this equation intimately. As a young dancer who gained national visibility on shows like Dance Moms, she built a following of hundreds of thousands on social media, and with that visibility came death threats about her queer identity and targeting by predatory adults through predatory product features. Now a key leader at the Heat Initiative and co-author of a piece in The Atlantic with Jonathan Haidt examining how tech companies use LGBTQ+ concerns as a regulatory shield, Lennon brings so much credibility to unpacking this manufactured divide and I am so grateful that she agreed to chat with me!

Subscribe to Lennon’s substack:

The Diary of a Palatable Trans Woman

Hey! How’d you find my diary? Well, since you’re here… welcome to Diary of a Palatable Trans Woman. This is where tea is spilt — sometimes with grace and occasionally all over the floor. Essays, culture critiques, and a lot of "did she just say that?"

By Lennon Torres

The entire video is shared above, and I’ve pulled some key insights below.

If you can’t watch the entire thing, here is a guide so you can jump to what you’re most interested in:

• 00:00 - Introduction to Lennon and the discussion

• 02:23 - How Kelly and Lennon met

• 03:07 - Lennon’s background as a child performer and early experiences online

• 05:01 - Holding dual realities: finding community and experiencing harm

• 07:45 - What unsafe online interactions look like (content warning: grooming, CSAM)

• 13:33 - Big Tech funding opposition to KOSA

• 15:00 - Senator Blackburn’s 2022 comments and original concerns about the bill

• 17:15 - The FTC workshop conflict and showing up for bipartisan work

• 22:01 - How KOSA evolved from content to design focus

• 24:30 - Fears about giving power to a hostile administration

• 27:31 - Kelly’s experience at Meta Horizon Worlds

• 28:45 - How Big Tech uses LGBTQ+ community as a shield

• 34:00 - Tim Cook vs. Mark Zuckerberg avoiding accountability

• 36:01 - Meta’s recent policy changes as a favor to Trump

• 37:00 - How to differentiate genuine concerns from industry propaganda

• 38:14 - Why Lennon broke up with her iPhone

• 46:11 - Comments from Aaron and Ava on platform dynamics

• 49:06 - Sylvia Rivera, palatability, and burnout

• 53:06 - How to reclaim the narrative

• 57:36 - Messages to lawmakers and Big Tech employees

Please, please, please subscribe to Lennon’s Substack,

Content vs. Design: How the Bill Has Evolved

The fears around KOSA aren’t unfounded. Early versions of the bill did include content-focused provisions that could have been weaponized to censor LGBTQ+ expression. And Senator Marsha Blackburn, one of the bill’s champions, made a 2022 comment in a YouTube video about protecting kids “from the transgender.”

The political landscape adds to the unease. The FTC led a workshop on social media harms to young people last summer, and they were running a workshop the following week on the dangers of gender-affirming care for minors.

As Lennon put it:

“What a slap in the face because I show up every day to advocate for all children. And I sit across the table from… Blackburn staff. And I go to her office. I shook her hand at an event last June. And I respect the work that she’s done to protect kids online. And it may be hard for some folks to hear that. And trust me, I feel you because she’s not traditionally an LGBTQ+ ally. And for that, I won’t sit down and have dinner with her. But I will show up to the meeting that is supposed to be about protecting all kids online.”

What Lennon points to is how the bill changed. The content provisions were removed. The Senate version that passed 91-3 focuses on design, targeting the predatory features and engagement-maximizing systems that harm kids, not the content they access. Even Blackburn compromised:

“She was willing to let go of some really, in my opinion, outdated and bigoted points of view to allow the bill to move forward because she realized that a design bill [like the current Senate version of KOSA] would help all kids. And therefore, it was in everyone’s best interest to pass it because we all want to protect kids.”

Some argue they supported the bill under the Biden administration but fear giving power to a government now hostile to queer people.

Lennon’s response:

“I think the administration that is in place right now is going to continue to harm LGBTQ+ people no matter what we do with Big Tech regulation... But at the same time, I totally hear the narrative that you don’t want to give the government any more power. But when I look at a design bill like KOSA, I don’t see it giving the government power. I see it holding the Big Tech companies accountable for the wrongdoing and the ability for a government, just or unjust, to take action against those companies to make their products safer for kids.”

“The bill can only do what the bill says.”

During confusing debates over the House version, Lennon called attorney Laura Marquez-Garrett in a moment of doubt:

“I need you to talk me down because I’m starting to believe it. I’m starting to believe the noise, like walk me down because I’m losing it… I’m afraid of the government too. I’m not invincible. Holy crap, what are we doing? Is this the right thing?”

What grounded her was going back to the text itself:

“They pulled up the bill and they started showing me and they said, this is what it says in the bill. ‘This is why they couldn’t do this’ There was no discrepancy. I wasn’t reading someone else’s analysis of it or I wasn’t asking a lobbyist what they think of the bill.”

Following the Money

Meta has spent over $50 million lobbying against KOSA. And they’ve found willing messengers in the very communities most harmed by their platforms.

“Big Tech knows that they can sell people who are struggling, who need community, who need connection. Oh, well, we’ve got it. We’ve got it and we’re going to give it to you with with sugar before and sugar after so it tastes really good and you’re going to want to come back for more.”

“Mark Zuckerberg’s passive income is our active scrolling. Like that is legitimately the business that they have created is the business of mining our attention.”

The exploitation runs deeper than advertising:

“They can mobilize an entire base that has the infrastructure to be loud and to break through noise because we’ve had to over and over and over again. And it makes me really... I was going to say sad, but today just really pisses me off that they will use that advantage to spark fear and spark some reactions. And, and then it just explodes because they’re prepped and ready...”

Lennon points to the absurdity of watching Tech CEOs fight each other while avoiding accountability:

“Tim Cook put a call in to the governor of Texas like ‘stop the App Store Accountability Act’ and was pushing forward KOSA the next day. And Meta endorsed the App Store Accountability Act [but lobbies against KOSA]... and it’s it’s like Tim Cook up here Mark Zuckerberg up here and they’re just yelling at each other, ‘you take responsibility!’ ‘no you take responsibility!’ ‘no!’ and it’s like, grow up and use the money you’re sitting on and pick yourself up and do the work.”

The Cost of Showing Up

Lennon is clear about what it means to be a trans woman advocating alongside legislators who have historically opposed LGBTQ+ rights:

“I’m not dying to go knock on Marsha Blackburn’s door. Like, I’m just not. And that’s OK. But I’ll still go to the meeting and I’ll still do the work because that’s what matters. And I have the capacity and the safety to do so.”

She doesn’t ask everyone to make the same choice:

“I want to remind you that your safety and your well-being should be the number one priority. And if that looks different than the choices that I’ve made, I respect it. And I want you to make those choices... we are in a very hard time and we’ve got to take care of ourselves and queer people need to be reminded sometimes that they have the agency to protect themselves a lot of the time. But sometimes they don’t. And to those people, I want to say stay strong and stay fighting because unless I disappear into the ether, I promise you there’s at least someone out there working for you.”

For those trying to sort through the noise, she offers a simple framework:

“Watch what people do. That’s how they feel. Watch what people do, not what they say. People can say a lot of crap.”

“If these people cared about kids, their actions would be so different. And that’s all I want people to pay attention to.”

Lennon’s Calls to Action

To lawmakers:

“Get to work, please get to freaking work, get to work, get to work, come on, like we work for the people, get to work, and stop taking money from Big Tech... It will come back and it will haunt you and stop the cycle. Just don’t do it. Don’t take money from Big Tech. Just don’t do it.”

To Big Tech employees:

“This isn’t about you. It’s about the system that you’re a part of. And if you know and are continuing to do harm, that’s on you, dog, and you got to leave.”

To allies:

“Be the one that raises your hand and says, ‘what is this going to do to the queer community?’ ‘Have we had a queer person in this room?’... be loud and raise your hand and like ask the questions because sometimes we get tired.”

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

Shoutout to Aaron’s incredible podcast unpacking many of the various strategies of Big Tech’s shields at Superhuman Podcast

Superhuman Podcast

Companion Proof Hub to the Superhuman podcast—documents, timelines, transcripts, and expert notes on how platforms became legally “superhuman,” plus concrete steps to protect kids and fix the system.

By Aaron Ping

The companies swear they’re improving our lives. They commission glossy studies, buy politicians, and wrap their product in the language of freedom. Critics are painted as hysterical, alarmist, and anti-progress. The companies insist responsibility belongs to individuals, not industry. If people get sick, something else is to blame.

And even when the evidence mounts—disease, addiction, death—these companies continue insisting the problem is overblown. CEOs testify under oath that their product does not cause harm. They hooked a whole generation before we could process how deep the damage runs.

Of course, it’s not 1960 anymore. I’m not talking about cigarettes—I’m talking about social media.

I once loved both. Yes, even though I was the kid who was teased at school for smelling like my mom’s cigarette smoke, the kid whose job it was to wash the walls of our apartment every time we moved. Off-white turning to drips of yellowy-brown, trying to catch them before they stained the carpet below.

When I finally tried a cigarette in my 20s, the ritual offered relaxation, the nicotine offered focus with a buzz. After years of occasional use, I became addicted—but I knew enough to know the habit needed to be dropped. I could weigh the risks against the social stigma, the data: the grandfather with complications from his COPD, even my mother and grandmother who smoked more than a pack a day for decades managed to quit. The vascular surgeon I briefly married even said, “some people have the genetics to smoke like chimneys and never die, we call them cockroaches.”

“Am I a cockroach?” I wonder as I burn one.

I was also the kid in April of my senior year of high school, begging through taps on my Compaq Presario for my .edu email address early so that I could join Facebook, which at the time was only available to college students.

When I began working there shortly after getting my degree, Facebook had around 150 million active monthly users. When I left the company–now called Meta–15 years later, 3 billion people were firing up one of our products at least once per month.

That was good, I thought for a time. I’d played a part in that growth, practicing my pitch in the shower, the hot water running cold. “We’ve solved the oldest problem in advertising: knowing exactly who wants your product before they know it themselves.” I believed, completely, that social media was a net positive in the world. That we were making the world more “open and connected” as Meta’s mission once was, and creating opportunities for businesses, communities, and individuals to organize around what mattered most.

Smoking used to be considered a socially positive thing, too. Normal, even aspirational: modeled by doctors, pregnant women, and teachers. High school cigarette vending machines, airline ash trays. Then there was a cultural and regulatory reckoning, when doctors and brands weren’t able to cosign any longer, where standing with big tobacco became a big taboo. We created separate smoking sections, and eliminated them in schools. We regulated cigarettes such that children could not purchase them.

Social media is the air we breathe now: birthdays, neighborhood groups, politics. The messaging is the same strategy as it was for tobacco; connection, community, choice. Behind it, a familiar playbook: addiction for profit and denial of harm for as long as possible. The former U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, noted in 2022 that these platforms leverage addictive design: “It is time to require a Surgeon General’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.” In her 2025 book, Careless People, former Meta Policy Director, Sarah Wynn-Williams, described how Instagram sold beauty advertisers access to teen girls at their most insecure moments, like after deleting a selfie. Suicide, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, anxiety, sleep deprivation are all on the rise. Social media might not stain our walls, but it’s staining society.

We’re missing the collective mistrust and disgust as our health and culture is mined for profit. We’re missing support from our regulators who make millions off of social media company funded donations.

I get it. I was working there when Frances Haugen told the Senate that Meta’s products harm children, sow division and undermine democracy. I was there when the United Nations and Amnesty International said that Facebook played a significant role in the genocide of Rohingya. When reports trickled in about the erosion of attention and society. I was there when former Meta executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, told the Verge in 2017 that he feels “tremendous guilt” about building Facebook. His own children, he declared, “aren’t allowed to use that shit.”

Under the same internal propaganda and using the same justifications that big tobacco employees must have heard sixty years ago, I discounted much of the external criticism as misunderstanding and misdirections. Yes, there were some problems, but this company was focused on solving them. On putting people first. For the vast majority, I thought, the benefits were overwhelmingly positive.

And maybe some of us are social media cockroaches: able to consume without damage. Maybe my genetics are protective, but I know that I’m rolling the dice every time I light up, and I wouldn’t even think about offering it to my kids.

Especially not after confronting the cruelty and lack of responsibility of the industry first-hand. In 2022, when leading go-to-market for Meta’s flagship virtual reality software, Meta Horizon Worlds, I was the only woman on a team of male leaders who all appeared cooly unconcerned with the fact that children were a significant portion of our product’s users despite laws that prohibited this—despite publicly claiming that kids weren’t allowed to use the product. We witnessed the bullying, sexism, and racism happening on the platform and as such, I don’t know any colleagues who let their kids anywhere near the product we marketed to yours.

When another senior woman had concerns about marketing with implications of safety and parental controls even though they were lacking, I was tasked with silencing her. When I wouldn’t, I was retaliated against. My colleagues were more concerned about minimizing risk to the company, obscuring the fact that we had actual knowledge of kids on the platform behind privileged documents and clear directives to otherwise avoid taking notes on their presence. Even though we knew it took, on average, 34 seconds for someone in a black or brown avatar entering Horizon to be called a n-word or a monkey. Even as employees posted internally about the harms they’d witnessed and experienced. Even when we had to move executive play tests to private worlds because we could not hear one another over the cacophony of children using the product. Even though we were building something in the likeness of Roblox, a proven hunting ground for predators.

They only cared about profit.

Since leaving the company and becoming a federal whistleblower myself, Horizon Worlds has been opened up officially to kids as young as ten. Internal documents from tobacco companies infamously spoke of teenagers as “replacement smokers” needed to sustain profits as older customers died off or wisened up. Likewise, social media’s largest long-term growth depends on capturing the next generation of users as early as possible.

I believed social media was different than the critics said. It was easier to accept that they had some other self serving agenda than to consider that the company I’d devoted everything to would knowingly cause harm. And in a matter of a few months with the veil lifted, watching these decisions get made in real time, experiencing the resistance to valid concerns, I learned how wrong I was. How willing executives were to trade a generation’s wellness for their financial security. How similar the strategies and tactics used to suck us in are the same used by the companies that decades ago needed us to suck down their poison.

Dr. Murthy’s landmark advisory synthesized mounting evidence: adolescents who spend over three hours daily on social media face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms. But the average American teen spends nearly five hours per day scrolling. The platforms don’t just steal time from sleep, exercise, and face-to-face relationships, they fundamentally alter how young brains process social information.

We’ve traded nicotine for more accessible, even cheaper dopamine. The developing brain literally reshapes itself around the intermittent reinforcement schedule of notifications, creating what Dr. Anna Lembke calls in her book, Dopamine Nation, “a generation of unwitting addicts.”

During adolescence—when the brain undergoes its most dramatic rewiring since infancy—social media platforms hijack crucial developmental processes. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for impulse control and decision-making, doesn’t fully mature until age 25. Meanwhile, the limbic system, which processes emotions and rewards, develops earlier, creating what researchers call a “developmental mismatch.” This biological vulnerability window is precisely when most teens receive their first smartphone. As such, the APA has published research and advisories on young brains’ vulnerability to social media.

It’s not just minds at stake. The Social Media Victims Law Center has filed wrongful death lawsuits for thousands of families whose children died from social media-related harms like viral challenges, direct connection to sexual predators and drug dealers, unchecked bullying and harassment, and algorithmic promotion of suicide content to vulnerable teens seeking support.

To be clear, social media is not identical to smoking – one doesn’t develop tumors from Instagram or emphysema from Snapchat. But when it comes to addiction, mental health harm, societal impact, and evasive corporate behavior, the two look uncomfortably alike.

Both disproportionately affect youth. Both grew through normalization by culture and convenience. Marketed as social connection and status. Defended by profit-driven industries and the politicians bought by them. Denied by adults who partake themselves.

The anti-smoking movement started with individuals understanding the harm and saying “enough.” We know better and it’s time for our generation’s “enough” moment. You might reconsider your child’s social media or smart phone access. Or join parents and educators organizing for phone-free schools. These issues are active in our current state and federal legislative sessions – you could call your representatives to demand regulation that will protect kids.

We must make social media use as socially unacceptable for children as offering them cigarettes.

Otherwise, fifty years from now, our kids will be the ones scrubbing the residue off the walls. What will that look like? How do you wash away the social division, the anxiety, the fractured attention? The years of sleep lost to blue light, of worth measured in hearts and thumbs? Will they forgive us as they visit the graves of their friends lost to proven social media harms like bullying or sextortion-induced suicide or preventable viral challenges?

They’ll wonder: why did you model this? Why didn’t someone protect us? They’ll ask us, just as we asked our parents: You knew?

Share

And I’m thinking so much of the families I’ve met and stories I’ve come to know in the last year. Thinking of how brutal it must be to endure the grief of a child through the holidays. Picturing these faces, forever-teens and pre-teens lost to social media harms, but as eager little kids. Faces lit up while opening presents on Christmas morning or glowing as they light the menorah from right to left.

They should be here if not for decisions made in conference rooms and sprint meetings and quarterly reviews. Decisions about what gets recommended and what gets buried, what’s worth fixing and what’s worth the risk. They should be here if not for the language of “trade-offs” and “edge cases” that lets corporate greed sleep at night. If not for an industry that’s optimized for growth and engagement and profits, that treats harm to kids as a liability to be managed rather than a reason to stop.

After working at Meta for nearly 15 years, I saw this with my own eyes. I was expected to put what was best for the company ahead of what was best for kids while fellow leaders who wouldn’t let their own kids use the products we marketed to yours spoke in theoretical terms about inevitable consequences of innovation.

But these kids weren’t acceptable losses or statistics. They were whole people, and someone’s whole world. They had favorite holiday traditions and wish lists and dreams about what they wanted to be. They made ornaments in second grade and danced in the nutcracker, just like my kids and maybe yours too.

I’m asking you to read these thirteen stories and hold two things at once this season: the joy of your own family and the grief of these families.

We can honor these kids, remember these kids, say their names out loud, and look at their beautiful faces. Grace. Coco. McKenna. Selena. Matthew. Carson. David. Riley. Griffin. Erik. Alexander. Mason. Alex.

We can remember that they represent a tiny sliver of the thousands of families impacted by preventable social media harms.

Let their stories make you a little less credulous. A little more willing to question big tech’s child safety theater, to call your representatives and ask what they’re doing about the Kids Online Safety Act and Section 230 and AI preemption.

Because these families are spending the holidays without their children. And they’re still showing up, still telling their stories, still advocating for our kids out of their love and loss.

I asked them what they wanted people to remember about their kids this time of year.

Here’s what they told me.

Matthew Minor

Described by his parents as “an adorable kid with fantastic curls, dimples, and an infectious smile,” Matthew loved to be dancing, spending time outdoors, or helping others, from kids at school to homeless community members. “He always asked how we could help them.” Matthew wanted to grow up to serve our country in the Army and then work in the federal government, like his father and grandfather.

With a birthday 5 days before Christmas, the holidays were extra special for Matthew and his family. He loved to decorate the tree with Christmas movies and music playing in the background. He loved baking cookies for Santa and eating his Gi Gi’s and Aunt Pauline’s homemade cakes and cobblers.

“A year before Matthew passed, we threw him a ‘Spiderman into the Spider-Verse’ movie-themed party at the local movie theater. The movie had just come out in theaters, and he loved it and knew all the words to the movie track song ‘Sunflower’ by Post Malone.”

The Minors’ collection of Matthew’s favorite ornaments, some with his name and pictures, keep him feeling close. And still, “those around us don’t know, and hopefully never will, the strength it takes to decorate or even find happiness in the moment during the holidays while still in the pain of grief.”

“Life is the most precious gift from the creator, more valuable than gold and diamonds. Please don’t take it for granted. Spend it with family and those who matter.”

“Matthew would brighten the room, making everyone laugh and smile. He had a way of making you forget a tough day at work, cares, or worries. The joy he brought to everyone, his happiness, and his love for us were lasting. We miss how he would hug his family and let them know how much he loved us. It was a genuinely unique skill.”

“He would hug us with all his strength,” Todd and Mia shared, “as if it were his last hug in the world.”

Matthew E. Minor Awareness Foundation

Grace McComas

The McComas family had a Christmas Eve tradition of taking photos together on the church altar after mass. “They in their finest attire, eyes sparkling and so excited for the arrival of Santa and the celebrations with family ahead,” Grace’s mom, Christine, shared.

Grace had a bubbling personality and “big blue eyes that sparkled with mirth,” Christine shared, “my blueberry-eyed girl.” While some parents remind their kids to use their indoor voice, Christine would find herself saying, “Grace, use your indoor laugh!"

Known for her kindness and compassion, for standing up to bullies on behalf of her friends, Grace lost her life after relentless cyber bullying. “I want change,” Christine says, “Certainly the urgently needed protections that KOSA will bring, but also, from the beginning I have advocated fighting cyber-abuse and incivility. My mother’s heart aches to witness the hardness of heart and ugliness that is so evident in our country right now, which is fed in large part by social media and others who have something to gain by keeping the meanness and outright lies swirling.”

“Remember G.R.A.C.E.: Giving Respect And Compassion to Everyone”

Christine described how everything from ornaments specially chosen and inscribed with Grace’s name, to deeply treasured memories, remind her over the holidays of the huge injustice of Grace’s absence.

“There will never be any form of justice, other than making sure it doesn’t keep happening to other families.”

Grace K. McComas Memorial Page

Selena Rodriguez

“Selena’s light was brighter than any Christmas lights you’ll ever see,” her sister Destiny says. Born with her eyes wide open and her head up, ready to take on the world from day one, Selena’s family describes her as eccentric, adventurous, fiercely honest—the kind of kid who’d tell you the truth whether you could handle it or not.

Her mom, Tammy, jokes that she was born in the wrong decade. “We could definitely see her being a hippie with no shoes on.” Even in New England winters, Selena often went barefoot. She loved dancing, being silly, and looking out for the underdog.

One freezing winter night, Selena spotted a homeless man asking for money at a stoplight. She started yelling that they had to go back, had to do something. “So like always, I went with Beena’s gut feeling,” Tammy says. They circled back, and Selena shouted, “Give him your coat, Mom!” Before Tammy knew it, she was handing her own coat out the window.

With a December 13th birthday, Selena’s celebration rolled into Christmas. Birthday parties meant Christmas light rides, one year at a trolley museum all done up for the season. Her favorite dessert was pumpkin pie, once eating an entire pie in the back of the van before anyone realized what was happening.

When Tammy needed back surgery on Christmas Eve, Selena was determined they’d still have their tree. She dragged it up to their second-floor apartment by herself and put it up. This year, the family put up a small tree; their first since losing her.

“I want people to remember her for how caring, loving, silly, helpful she was. The way she cared so deeply about others. The best type of friend—one who cared enough about even her bullies that she would check on them.”

“Memories are all that we have left,” Tammy says, “so please don’t be afraid to talk about our kiddos. It makes us happy knowing someone else remembers those moments. That they remember our kids were here.”

Erik Robinson

“Erik loved life and wanted to know everything about everything," his mom Judy says. He talked early, walked early, and never slowed down. He had strong opinions and a loud voice and a mind that was always working.

At 11, he was already corresponding with West Point’s admissions department to make sure he’d be in shape to meet their entry requirements. He was preparing for his bar mitzvah when he died. He played on a traveling baseball team and loved the strategy of it, equally happy counting pitches in the dugout as playing on the field.

He loved trains. Judy kept enough Thomas the Tank tracks to stretch across their apartment, the only toy she refused to give away when they’d clean things out. “I said they were going to go to his kids.”

He celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah, and spent years trying to prove Santa wasn’t real. One year he slept in front of the tree; Judy and a friend snuck presents out after he fell asleep. Another year, she had her apartment manager leave a gift on the coffee table while they were away in New York, a head-scratcher he never solved.

The holidays meant his great-grandmother’s Passover cake that he and Judy baked together, his great-aunt’s special stuffing at Thanksgiving, and cookies and milk left out for Santa.

Erik loved giving as much as receiving. He enjoyed picking out presents for others, and every November 1st he’d do “reverse Halloween” at school, giving candy back to send to kids in the hospital.

“People don’t understand that your kid is always part of your life, especially at the holidays,” Judy says. “Just because they’re not physically here doesn’t mean they’re forgotten. Just the opposite.”

“I continue to talk about him and refuse to let others squelch that for me. When we go around the table at Thanksgiving and talk about what we’re grateful for, I always bring him up.”

Erik's Cause

Alexander Neville

Alexander was brilliant, intense, sensitive; an active, inquisitive boy whose interests drove what his family did together. His love of history took them to Civil War reenactments. His obsession with Lego made them regulars at Legoland and World War Brick. For Alexander, video games were a full-body sport. He ran and jumped and broke a sweat portraying his characters.

He envisioned himself becoming a director at the Smithsonian, where he could pursue his love of history. A born entrepreneur, he started an eBay business at 13, selling his childhood toys and biking them to UPS himself.

Alexander was always the first one up on Christmas morning, and his mom Amy would hang out with him in his room, keeping him occupied so his dad and sister could sleep a little longer. There was never a shortage of ideas on his wish list. The family set up elf “traps” trying to catch the elves that put candy in the advent calendar.

His last Christmas, Alexander took the initiative to put up and decorate the tree himself. It’s the reason his family has continued to put it up each year since. On New Year’s Eve, Amy lights a candle in his honor and keeps it burning into the new year. “It’s my way of bringing him with me into the New Year.”

“I desperately want to talk about my kid,” Amy says. “Especially at family gatherings where he would be showing up if he was here. Someone bringing him up, sharing a memory, is a true gift to me. Unfortunately most people are worried they will upset a bereaved parent. Being upset is how we start each day.”

“I really just hope that people remember him and think about him from time to time, any time of year.”

Alexander Neville Foundation

Carson Bride

Carson was active and creative; as a child he spent hours at his train table playing with wooden Thomas the Train characters. He was also a great writer and artist who talked about using his skills in marketing or advertising someday.

He loved climbing up on his dad’s shoulders to put the star on the Christmas tree. Every Christmas Eve, his dad Tom would read Carson and his brother Jack The Night Before Christmas on the couch before bed—a tradition started by Tom’s father. Carson’s mom Kristin would take photos, sometimes video, telling both boys they’d need to continue the tradition with their own kids.

The Bride family did fondue on New Year’s Eve, which Carson loved. He also loved a dessert Jack made called “The Bomb,” layers of Ho Ho’s, ice cream, chocolate sauce, and crumbled Oreos.

Since Carson died, Kristin hasn’t been able to get out the Christmas decorations or the ornaments she made each year for her sons, ornaments representing whatever they were into that year; a specific toy, a soccer ball, Legos. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to look through those boxes again.

“Losing a child is painful every day, but during the holidays it is so much worse. We long to have Carson back so that our family is complete. And yet we know that we can never have that again.”

But the family has kept up their annual photo Christmas card. They always represent Carson with one of them holding an apple, symbolizing his last request: to have his ashes spread under an apple tree so the fruit would be his forever gift to them.

“I hope people will remember that Carson just wanted to be accepted and experience kindness,” Kristin says. “Reach out to people during the holidays and remember that in the end, only kindness matters.”

The Carson J. Bride Effect

Griffin “Bubba” McGrath

Bubba was a sweet, mild mannered child. He loved doing puzzles, and reading books and Scooby Doo magazines when he was little, “so much so that we went to the libraries multiple times a week to look for more,” said his mom, Annie. He also loved swimming, Spider-man, and playing catch and later baseball with his dad. “He truly touched everyone he met with his sweet disposition, and genuine kindness.”

Despite being in 8th grade, Bubba already had his sights set on Oxford to study quantum physics. He dreamed of becoming an engineer and living in Seoul, South Korea someday.

His last Christmas, Bubba was deep in preparation for an upcoming National Science Bowl competition. He and his team would place third in January. His science teacher had been tutoring and coaching the kids on his own time, nights and even Sundays. Bubba was so grateful that he wanted to give him something extra special.

Annie had bought boxes of chocolates for his teachers, but Bubba asked if he could also wrap up a shark’s tooth, one he and Annie had picked out together on a special mom-and-son day at the geology museum during spring break. She knew how much it meant to him.

“It warmed my heart that he wanted to give it to his teacher,” Annie says. “Still does.”

Alex Peiser

Full of fun and energy, Alex loved his Thomas the Tank Engine trains and would play with them for hours, creating different configurations of tracks. His mom, Sharon, would take Alex to Barnes & Noble every Friday night where Alex would play with the trains and they would buy a book, or sometimes another train.

Alex started acting in first grade and never stopped. He continued performing until his death. “I suspect that if he had lived, he would have taken dramatic arts in college, which no doubt would have been a point of contention between us,” Sharon says. “However, I would give anything to have Alex living with us as an unemployed actor right now.”

One summer at camp, Alex took only culinary classes and really enjoyed them. From then on, he would help Sharon with the holiday cooking. “It was so fun to be in the kitchen with him. My husband doesn’t enjoy cooking, so it was our special time together.”

One of Alex’s friends wrote to Sharon after he died and said Alex was the sweetest person he had ever known. He was incredibly generous, buying extra gum and ice drinks to share with everyone at school.

“Alex has been gone eight years now, and every Christmas season has been different,” Sharon says. “You learn that grief ebbs and flows. A strategy that helped last year may not help this year. You learn to be gentle with yourself.”

“Don’t be afraid to talk to someone who is grieving. If think you might have said something that caused some pain—ask them—grief bursts come up for all sorts of reasons and can be triggered by even innocent conversations.”

Riley Basford

Riley still feels like a little kid to his mom Mary. “Dimples for days!” she said. He loved to cuddle and read, always had a big smile with the cutest mischievous streak. Teachers loved him not because he was a great student but because he was a charming, funny kid.

He hugged and kissed his mom constantly. Even as a teenager, he would still hold her hand and want her to cuddle with him.

Mary describes Riley as brave, socially intelligent, and funny. In their family, he created hype, became the entertainment, was the life of the party. He made things silly, “I never knew what crazy thing he would say or do next.”

Riley loved snow days, which meant school closed and the sleds came out. He could play for hours in the snow without getting cold. He loved decorating sugar cookies at Nana and Papa’s, and waffles anytime. He was happiest with family and cousins, outdoors on the farm, hunting and fishing.

“We were in the heart of maple season when he died. Only 24 hours earlier he was making syrup with his older brother and so damn happy. He couldn’t wait for the next trip to Florida and the upcoming bird hunting season.”

The family moved into a new home on Christmas Eve 2005. Riley was six months old. “We had the most delightful teeny tiny family Christmas, just the five of us. I’ll always remember with the most bittersweet heart the time that I held him and nursed him and he was all mine.”

Mary wants people to accept that not everyone grieves the same way. “There’s not something wrong with people who don’t want to celebrate like you.” Her advice: don’t offer to help, just show up. “Pick them up for coffee, stop by for a walk, go with them to the cemetery, take their kid to practice. Show up, and show up, and show up.”

“Always, always, I want people to know that Riley did not want to die. He loved life. He wanted to be a dad. He loved his pets, his parents, and his friends.”

David Molak

David was the youngest of three boys and always wanted to be like his big brothers who he idolized. He was funny and happy, loved watching sports on TV, especially football. David knew every single stat of every football player and dreamed of becoming a football general manager someday.

David’s favorite holiday tradition was finding the wildest, ugliest Christmas sweatshirt every year. He would spend hours searching for the perfect one.

When David was little, he and his mom Maurine would decorate sugar cookies together. He loved sprinkling glitter sugar on top and making a mess, using his fingers to clean up the spills until his hands turned red and green. As he got older he didn’t care much about decorating, but had no problem eating most of them and laughing about his lips turning green.

Every Christmas Eve the family would open one present: new matching pajamas. They’d wear them and play board games together. David loved Monopoly and would dominate them all.

The family has a nativity scene with a box that opens and closes with a baby inside. David would open it on Christmas Eve to welcome Baby Jesus into the world. His faith gave him joy at Christmas, and it gives his family hope now.

Maurine’s older sons, now men, still wear David’s ugly Christmas sweatshirts. This year there’s a new grandbaby, six months old, whose middle name is David. She couldn’t find an ugly sweatshirt in his size yet, but plans to introduce the tradition when he’s older and learns about his Uncle David.

“Missing a child on Christmas is like missing an organ from your body,” Maurine says. “But we try to hold on to happiness and gratitude, and pass that down.”

David's Legacy Foundation

McKenna Brown

McKenna was loving, funny, and fearless. Her spirit was magnetic. She had a smile that lit up a room and the best hugs. Her mom Cheryl would get home from work and wherever McKenna was in the house, she would stop what she was doing and sprint to the front door screeching in her high-pitched voice, “Mommy!” and jump into her arms. “I can close my eyes and hear her sweet, enthusiastic voice and feel her arms around me at any moment.”

McKenna wanted to be a psychologist and help people talk through their troubles. She was an empath who cared about others more than herself. She was the biggest champion for her special-needs sister McKinley, who was just a year older. They were always in the same grade, and McKenna was fiercely proud of her, always looking out for her. She was the friend people confided in, the one who helped pick a girl up off the bathroom floor when she was struggling with anxiety, the one who walked another girl to her car after school for two weeks just so she would feel safe.

McKenna’s favorite holiday tradition was her role as “first elf.” It started with her insisting on helping wrap presents Christmas Eve. Her older brother MacCallum played Santa every Christmas morning, passing out gifts. When McKenna was finally old enough, he crowned her with the magical elf ears hat. “I can still see that smile. She still looked up to her big brother, and for him to bestow that honor on her was huge.” From then on she sat next to him every Christmas morning as chief elf.

She loved Christmas Eve service at their church, singing holiday favorites and lighting candles. “Some of the best memories in my life were sitting next to her singing worship songs. She would boldly sing with outstretched hands, proud, not embarrassed of her faith.”

She loved her grandmother’s Christmas sugar cookies and lemon meringue pie. She loved the tradition of special Christmas pajamas every year. One year Cheryl accidentally bought adult medium instead of kids medium. McKenna pulled the pants up almost to her neck, hysterical, but she was going to wear them one way or another. She later tied them to her brother’s bunk bed and used them as a hammock. The knot was so tight they had to cut them off. “Those Christmas PJ pants got a lot of mileage and a lot of laughs.”

The family keeps McKenna’s presence alive. They set a place for her at the dinner table with a ceramic plate bearing her picture. They keep a memory candle lit through the holidays. They visit her suicide awareness memorial bench at the local ice rink and share McKenna stories.

“Say our kids’ names and share stories and memories of them,” Cheryl says. “So often people are afraid to mention their names because they think it will make us sad. What makes us even sadder is the thought of others forgetting our kids. We have a finite, limited number of memories. Anything you can add to that memory vault is cherished.”

The McKenna Way

Mason Edens

Mason’s mom Jennie remembers him as a silly baby with the cutest giggle. He loved chasing around the family’s little chihuahuas and picking them up to snuggle them. He loved working in the garden with Jennie, even at two years old. They would get up every morning and the first thing he wanted to do was run out and check the tomatoes. Then he would load them up in his wagon and take them to the neighbors.

Mason was dyslexic and worked hard to overcome it. He worried that his spelling would hold him back, but he talked about becoming a lawyer and only taking on clients who were “good people” so he could help them. He also thought about the military or the police academy. The one consistent thing he said was that he wanted to help people and give back to the country he loved. He was buried with the American flag that had hung in his room.

Thanksgiving was by far his favorite holiday. He and his brothers would get into heated debates about Thanksgiving versus Christmas, and Mason always said Thanksgiving was better because the whole family was together, all the family friends came over, and the food was better. That boy loved good food, especially turkey and stuffing and deviled eggs. He was adamant about not putting up a single Christmas decoration until after Thanksgiving. “It took away from Thanksgiving and the attention it deserved.” Even driving down the road, if he saw neighbors’ Christmas lights up too early, he would just shake his head.

The family had a tradition of opening one present on Christmas Eve. It took the boys a few years to realize it was always matching pajamas. At first they hated it, then they loved it. One year the pajamas from Amazon were way too small, but they still wore them just so they were all matching. “I remember Mason shaking his booty in his super small pjs and laughing about it.”

The family still hangs Mason’s stocking over the fireplace. They have an angel tree just for him with no presents underneath, a reminder that they have one less person to exchange gifts with. His best friends, now 19, still come over regularly. The other night two of them broke down crying in his memorial garden. “It broke me to see two 19-year-old young men, one about to ship off to the Army, crying about Mason.”

“There’s an emptiness that is so loud and everyone feels it,” Jennie says. “Be kind to those who are grieving such a deep loss. We won’t always be the best versions of ourselves. Forgive us for not wanting to be super social or going to all the Christmas parties. Our home is what brings us the most comfort during this season.”

Coco Konar

Coco was born with a mind of her own. From the very beginning, she questioned everything: rules, routines, expectations that didn’t make sense to her. Her mom, Julianna, describes her as exceptionally perceptive, sensitive, and observant, absorbing the world around her in a way most children didn’t.

Coco was drawn to meaning, truth, and authenticity. At different moments she imagined herself as a global investigative journalist, a comedian, a storyteller, someone uncovering injustice and giving voice to the overlooked. More than anything, she was working toward belonging in a world she found hypocritical and often cruel, trying to reconcile her depth and sensitivity with a society that didn’t always make space for it.

“Coco was a whole, extraordinary person, not just a cautionary tale,” her mom Julianna says. “She was brilliant, creative, deeply empathetic, funny, rebellious, and magnetic. She had immense light, and she struggled not because she lacked depth or love, but because the world didn’t always know how to meet her where she was.”

“The holidays don’t soften the grief. The world becomes louder, faster, more celebratory, while grief remains steady and ever-present underneath. You’re expected to move forward in joy while carrying something that never leaves.”

“It’s possible and necessary to hold gratitude and grief at the same time. Love doesn’t disappear because a child is gone. Silence, presence, and patience are often far more meaningful than trying to make things feel better.”

“What stays with me most is how much Coco taught me about patience, presence, non judgment, and unconditional love. She showed me that there is perfection in imperfection, that we are all on our own paths, and that loving someone fully means accepting who they are, not who we wish them to be.”

Remember the empty chairs

Thomas trains. Matching pajamas. Christmas cookies with glitter sugar. Elf traps and ugly sweater contests and The Night Before Christmas read aloud on the couch.

These kids could be your kids.

Social media harms aren’t a phenomenon that happens only to someone else. This is an epidemic of disregard for regular families around the world, because taking child safety seriously is too expensive for the same companies working so hard to get your trust without earning it.

Show up for the grieving parents in your life. Leave the job that suggests harms like these are inevitable. Call your representatives about KOSA.

As the chairs fill around your table this year, please remember the empty ones at theirs.

Thank you so much to the families who trusted me with these stories and memories. I will keep saying their names and telling the truth of the extractive and exploitative systems that harmed them until these companies are forced to change.

It’s only been five days, and the reaction has been both mixed and predictable: some kids experiencing withdrawal symptoms, other kids focused on thwarting the system, tech lobbyist led “concern” for kids’ “speech” and parental rights, the same insistence that parents should somehow outsmart products built by trillion-dollar companies.

I encourage you to put in a pair of headphones and listen to the entire conversation, but here are a few highlights:

1) “If they wanted to, they would.”

On “shouldn’t this be an issue for tech companies to fix?”

Well, yes. But they won’t. While kids are up against:

• Mental health impacts like depression, anxiety, and suicide

• Addictive design and compulsive use of exploitative algorithms

• Bullying and online harassment, also leading to suicide

• Grooming and online predators

• Body image issues and disordered eating

• AI Chatbots sexually grooming kids and encouraging suicides

We’ve had years of warnings. Surgeon General advisories. Whistleblowers. Families with harmed kids fighting for change. And still, the platforms keep doing the bare minimum that protects their brand and protects revenue.

Australia attached real financial consequences to noncompliance. That’s why this is different.

Brian talked about how markets punish companies for missing profit targets but barely flinch when evidence of harm surfaces. When whistleblower revelations caused a brief dip in Meta’s stock, the market shrugged and moved on.

So executives at these companies learn one lesson: safety doesn’t move the needle, but revenue does.

2) The parenting excuse, dismantled in one metaphor

Brian compared social media to a playground with a pit of spikes under the monkey bars, and if instead of having local regulations that said “no spikes under the monkey bars,” we just said, “no! leave the spikes there, it’s a parent’s job to keep kids safe.”

And I reminded us later that billionaires put those spikes there, trillion-dollar-companies profit from those spikes existing.

That’s the whole scam of the “parent responsibility” argument. Yes, parents matter. But it’s not a fair fight when the product is designed to pull kids in, keep them there, and connect them to risks at scale.

I also talked about something I hope the “just parent better” crowd will hear: the parents I’ve met who lost kids are not disengaged or self absorbed. See this clip:

Brian made another point that stuck with me: parents are being asked to do an impossible job at an impossible scale. No parent can realistically monitor dozens of platforms, shifting features, dark patterns, and algorithmic changes that update constantly.

He said this is supposed to be a partnership. Parents should be involved, yes. But products should also be designed so they don’t actively work against families.

We regulate playgrounds, buildings, seatbelts, and food safety without calling it “government overreach.” Online spaces shouldn’t be exceptional.

3) “Free speech” is cover for “we want your minutes”

This was one of Brian’s sharpest points.

These platforms aren’t a town square enabling true democratization of speech, but a loudspeaker system where tech companies determine who gets the mic through algorithmic distribution. They decide who gets boosted, and the deciding factor is engagement, because that drives profit. Outrage, fear, sexual content, self-harm content, extremism. Whatever keeps people scrolling.

So when a platform suddenly starts waving a free speech flag, it’s because regulation threatens the business model.

and Meta’s support for speech is conditional, which is not the spirit of the principle.

“…the company that just used Freedom of Speech to defend their cowardice has blocked the promotion of Careless People.”

From Caring About Careless People

Furthermore, kids aren’t criminalized for speaking; they can still read news online, visit websites, and communicate digitally in other ways.

Many under 16s were technically already barred based on platform policies (most social apps set 13 as minimum age) yet these rules were poorly enforced. Australia’s financial penalties to tech companies who don’t comply with this regulation might finally force compliance.

4) The “kids will just go elsewhere” argument misses the harm reduced by even an imperfect system

I pushed back on the idea that this will drive kids to the “dark web.” Most kids aren’t hunting for the darkest possible content. They’re looking for normal kid stuff and getting served dangerous content anyway because the algorithm doesn’t care why you showed up, it cares that you stayed.

And the network effect matters. Social media is powerful partly because everyone is there. Raising the barrier to entry and reducing that default “everyone’s on it” pressure is harm reduction, even if some kids route around it.

Also: the Australian approach is built to be adjusted. The list of covered services can change. The enforcement mechanisms can tighten. That flexibility is a feature.

5) The privacy objection is valid, but it hasn’t stopped us from using the platforms that have long know more about us than what’s published on government ID

We talked about the concern that age assurance could require uploading ID.

Two things can be true:

• People have a legitimate reason to distrust Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. with sensitive data.

• These companies already build shockingly accurate profiles on people without needing a driver’s license.

So yes, let’s talk seriously about privacy and data rights. But using privacy as a reason to keep the status quo for kids is backwards. And Australia isn’t starting with “upload your ID.” It’s a staged approach that begins with age estimation and can rely on privacy-first third parties.

And none of this would be necessary if social media companies designed with harm reduction and safety in mind from the beginning.

Brian agreed that data collection deserves serious scrutiny, but he was clear that this is the wrong moment to pretend these companies don’t already know who their users are. The profiles built by large tech companies are often more detailed and predictive than any government ID. Age estimation, behavior modeling, and inference have been part of the system for years.

Why have we tolerated mass data extraction and identity inference is used for advertising, but draw the line when that same capability is used to protect kids?

6) The “undue burden” argument is backwards

There’s a lot of hand-wringing right now about whether complying with this regulation is too burdensome for tech companies. Whether different rules in different countries are “unfair.” Whether it’s too hard for business.

On one side, you have billionaire-owned, trillion-dollar companies with enough money, engineers, lawyers, and lobbyists to fly drones over entire continents in the pursuit of growth.

On the other side, you have a child alone in their bedroom, a device glowing in their face.

And what we’ve been doing, over and over again—asking that child and their parents to absorb the cost of inaction. The emotional cost. The developmental cost.

Calling regulation an “undue burden” only makes sense if you ignore who’s been carrying the burden up to now.

It’s a choice about who we expect to bear the risk: a trillion-dollar company with near-infinite capacity to adapt, or a kid whose brain hasn’t fully developed.

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What I’m watching for next

When evidence shows a product potentially harms children, society has a duty to act. Australia has taken a huge step forward, and Brian and I both agreed that this is just the beginning.

You won’t see the impact in a week. You’ll see it in sleep, anxiety, depression, cyberbullying, school outcomes, and suicide rates over months and years.

And you’ll see it in how fast the platforms “innovate” on safety once there’s threatened revenue and spooked shareholders.

See Ricky’s recap here:

Future Media

Meta insiders break cover on Australia's under-16s ban

Welcome to Future Media and an exclusive pod with two former leaders of Meta who are breaking their silence on Australia’s world first under 16s social ban…

Listen now

8 months ago · 6 likes · Ricky Sutton, Kelly Stonelake, and Brian Boland

Soon after I came out with my lawsuit and first-hand experience of the lengths Meta leadership was willing to go to cover up their harms to children in order to maximize profits, I heard from Nicki—she invited me to tell my story on her podcast.

Since 2023, Nicki’s built a multi-pronged advocacy operation: co-founding the Tech-Safe Learning Coalition, launching the S2D Foundation, and has become a regular presence on Capitol Hill pushing for meaningful legislation.

In large part thanks to Nicki’s connector nature, I’ve had the opportunity to join these advocacy efforts on Capitol Hill and formed many meaningful relationships with survivor families and other advocates.

And today, I’ve joined her again as part of The Heat is On, Scrolling2Death’s miniseries in partnership with the Heat Initiative to expose Big Tech’s most powerful companies. The series features other experts like whistleblower Arturo Bejar, Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt, and advocate and attorney Laura Marquez-Garrett.

Part 2 on Meta will be out next week!

Inspired by Nicki and her advocacy, I also had some burning questions for her which she graciously agreed to answer!

We discussed the stories that keep her up at night, what’s broken about the legislative process, and why she’ll never download TikTok.

Here is that conversation:

On what every parent deserves to know:

Kelly: After leading a successful social media marketing company, you made the choice to walk away and publicly challenge the industry. What was the turning point that prompted you to launch Scrolling2Death?

Nicki: I would say it was more of a slow progression, rather than a single turning point. I knew I hated my job. Targeting people on social media and manipulating their thoughts and decisions did not feel good. Especially when, personally, I wasn’t active on social media at all. From 2020 to 2023, I didn’t engage on social media personally in any capacity. My life was never better. My relationships were never stronger. I was raising my kids; being present with them.

But when I looked around me in the world, I saw everyone else addicted to their devices and to social media; grandparents, parents, children of all ages. I wondered, didn’t these people know about the latest Surgeon General’s warning about social media? Don’t they know that smartphones and social media is super unhealthy for kids?

That’s when I started to dig further and found the story of Carson Bride, a 16-year-old who had been cyberbullied relentlessly through anonymous apps and Snapchat. It was so bad that he took his life. Carsons’s mom, Kristin, was speaking out about online harms and warning parents.

I thought: If research says it’s bad, and children are actually dying from social media…shouldn’t every parent know about this?

I made it my goal to tell the stores and to share the research so that parents everywhere can make safe decisions in their home. That was where Scrolling 2 Death started, and Kristin was one of my first interviews.

“I first heard Nicki tell Carson’s story in Sept 2023 in one of her initial podcasts. I was so impressed with the respectful manner in which she handled his story and my advocacy work. I could tell that she genuinely cares about our kids and what Big Tech has put them through.

Nicki’s videos have grown so much over the last few years due to the sad fact that the online harms to our kids are growing exponentially. Her daily video posts have become an invaluable resource for so many parents and are ultimately saving young lives.”

- Kristin Bride, mother of Carson Bride, forever 16, founding member of ParentsRISE!, and Executive Director of the Carson J. Bride Effect

On the hard questions driving Nicki’s work:

Kelly: You’ve said this journey started with asking “why” questions, like why we spend so much time on platforms that leave us feeling bad. What were some of those “whys” and what answers have you uncovered to those initial questions since immersing yourself in this work?

Nicki: Why do we use platforms that make us feel bad? Well, it’s because we’ve been manipulated into this life. Our attention has been sold and tech companies make billions on keeping us scrolling.

Why do parents give access to smartphones and platforms that we know, deep down, are bad for them? Because our kids get teased and left out if we don’t.

Why are we losing this fight? Because we didn’t quite understand the intentionality of the harm. We thought we were accepting a little bad with a lot of good, and that it was bad people on the platforms sneaking through. Turns out, the platforms are also the bad guys.

In the first year or so of the Scrolling 2 Death journey, I was fact-finding; answering “why” questions and investigating the problems that these companies cause. I took the time to educate myself and others on where the harms lie, and who is at fault.

Then, it was time for solutions. Solutions in the form of lawsuits, legislation and direct pressure on these negligent companies.

Kelly: What pressing questions about youth and digital culture have come up since starting this work, and what do you think society still isn’t confronting?

Nicki: I often hear, “It’s just the way it is. We can’t change it.” Or…”Technology is here to stay.”

It’s not about getting rid of technology and its benefits. It’s about challenging the business practices of companies who harm children. Engagement at all costs doesn’t align with a child’s well-being. Period.

So the digital culture of young people living their entire lives online…it’s not working. It’s not good for them. We know it. They know it. So, we have to change it.

Parents, advocates and most importantly, youth,are fighting back. Working together across generations will be the key to putting humans back in the driver’s seat.

On what every member of Congress needs to hear:

Kelly: Across all of the tech experts, young people, and survivor parents you’ve interviewed, what one moment, story, or theme sticks with you the most? What’s the story you wish every member of Congress could hear before they vote on any tech legislation?

Nicki: There are so many. Too many.

Snapchat allowing a speed filter for 8 years, rewarding users for driving fast and causing many car crashes and deaths.

YouTube and TikTok pushing choking challenge videos to children too young to even be on their platform, causing their deaths.

OpenAI and Google’s chatbots suicide-coaching children.

Children falling victim to sextortion, leading to suicide within 2 days of signing up for Instagram.

Teen test accounts on Pinterest and Snapchat turning into a constant stream of pro-self-harm and suicide content. I’m talking cut wrists, blades and nooses.

I could go on and on. But what sticks with me most is the survivor parents. I think of them every day; the grief and sadness they live with. I would ask every member of Congress (and our President, for that matter) to sit down with a parent who has been affected by social media harms. This should be a requirement before drafting or passing any related legislation.

On fighting a system many of us exist within:

Kelly: It’s near impossible to succeed at podcasting without relying on community and distribution from exploitative online platforms. How do you think about these tradeoffs and what advice do you have for others trying to build digital businesses who are struggling with this tension?

Nicki: If my target audience were minors, teenagers, I would not be on Instagram. I don’t believe in promoting content to consumers who are overwhelmingly harmed on that same platform.

My audience is parents. Parents are on Instagram. And not to say that parents aren’t addicted to Instagram, too. But I will continue to reach parents where they are, with hopes that a safer option for connection will reveal itself in 2026. I’m actually in talks with several safer platforms and am looking forward to sharing more.

I think it’s a balance and sometimes it feels good to take down a company from within. When an Instagram post about how bad Instagram is hits 1 million views, it feels like a win. 1 million people – parents – becoming more aware of the harms of that platform and keeping their children off.

I do draw the line at TikTok. That is a platform I will never download to my devices. And you will never see me monetizing through Meta’s platforms.

So I would recommend content creators define their own values and stick to them.

Kelly: I’ve experienced my own guilt and conflict about having contributed to the very system I’m now fighting to reform. Has this also been your experience? What insight does your own experience give you into how well-intentioned people become entangled in harmful tech practices, and what would you say to others in the industry who suspect something is wrong but feel stuck or fearful about speaking up?

Nicki: I did work in the social media management space; helping tech companies reach their customers through social media content. In my case, the customers were other businesses and decision-makers at those businesses. Definitely not minors and most of my work was done on LinkedIn and Twitter.

So fortunately, I don’t fight the guilt about contributing to the system. But I have spoken to many whistleblowers, like you, Kelly, who worked within the system, found their way out and now fight back. Some are louder than others.

Early on, I often wondered…how could someone possibly work at Meta? Or Snap? How do they sleep at night?

I see now that those were naive sentiments (unless we’re talking about the top execs). Many of the people who work at the tech companies want to help consumers; want to help children. They hope that their work can make a difference. Apparently, though, it doesn’t take long for them to realize that any real safety measures will get shot down from the top.

So what do they do then…with kids and a mortgage? Leave this company and take a much lower salary? Speak out and risk being “unemployable”? It’s a tough choice these people are making and I’m in awe of the whistleblowers who have done the right thing; the brave thing.

We need more people speaking out.

On making an impact from content to Capitol Hill:

Kelly: In addition to Scrolling2Death, you’ve co-founded initiatives like the Tech-Safe Learning Coalition to tackle school-issued devices, and launched the S2D Foundation to support advocacy work. Considering your fight from content to Capitol Hill, what has surprised or challenged you most about trying to change tech culture broadly?

Nicki: I’ve been shocked at how these companies straight-up lie and scheme.

The amount of money they spend lobbying lies to lawmakers is astounding.

The PR campaigns are elaborate and timed specifically to drown out bad press.

And this applies to tech companies across the industry, whether their focus is social media, messaging, hardware, EdTech or AI.

You think to yourself, “These are human beings with children. Mark Zuckerberg has kids. Surely he won’t keep making decisions that cause harm to children.”

Unfortunately, he will. And he is. That is what shocks me most.

Kelly: How have your experiences hosting Scrolling2Death influenced your approach to legislative advocacy and vice versa?

Nicki: I’ve learned a lot about the legislative process, some of it frustrating. I’ve learned that bills are often “watered down” by lawmakers who are influenced by tech company’s lobbyists. It’s pretty hard to get a good bill that actually puts children over Big Tech profits.

And when that does happen and it passes one chamber, a single person (like the Speaker of the House) can throw a wrench in the whole thing.

I’ve learned that even if a law passes, the tech companies sue the government and hold the law up in court for years.

I’ve learned that even if a law passes, the President can sign an Executive Order pushing back enforcement for months or even years.

Suffice it to say, I’m not overly impressed with the legislative process at the moment. There are so many hurdles and loopholes and backdoors.

There is progress being made more quickly on the state level, but now we have the federal government threatening an Executive Order restricting states from passing AI-related laws.

So I’ve turned a lot of my efforts to the legal and direct action work, which seems to be more promising when it comes to real change that will stick.

On authenticity in digital spaces and 5 am recordings:

Kelly: One issue you’ve raised is how social media encourages us to present an edited, “fake” version of ourselves. For young people still figuring out who they are, what do you think constant exposure to these filtered, performative online lives is doing to their sense of self and mental health? How do you think about your own authenticity and real connection while showing up in a digital culture that often rewards the opposite?

Nicki: The ability for young people to present a filtered, edited version of themselves is extremely harmful. I often talk about the egregious harms like suicide or eating disorder content, but more commonly, children are losing their confidence and sense of self when they can edit how they look online.

How would you feel when you look in the mirror, if every photo of yourself was flawless?

This applies to adults, too. I pride myself on presenting as my “regular” self, a tired mom of 3 who sometimes films an update at 5AM with bags under my eyes. I actually got a comment once from a woman saying she “appreciates my natural face.” That made me laugh, but also validated my thought that authenticity is key when interacting online.

Imagine if beauty filters didn’t exist, and we just saw each other for who we really are?

On the practical steps we can take to protect kids:

Kelly: What kind of digital world do you hope today’s children will inherit as they grow up? You often talk about letting kids “be kids, for as long as possible.” In practical terms, what would that ideal look like, and what changes (in tech design, laws, or cultural attitudes) do you think are most vital to make that vision a reality? Do you see any signs of progress or reasons to hope that we can turn the tide and create a safer online landscape for the next generation?

Nicki: Here’s what I would envision, give the thousands of hours of conversations I’ve had with affected families, doctors, whistleblowers, researchers and other online safety experts:

At school:

• Get 1:1 devices out of elementary and middle school. Introducing tech at appropriate times for tech-specific lessons only.

• Never allow school-related clubs or sports to communicate via social media.

• Offer digital safety lessons in all grades and extend the education to parents.

• Implement bell-to-bell phone free schools at all states and districts

At home:

• Restrict all solo media use through childhood. This means, kids shouldn’t be holding tech and using it alone. Adopt a “tech together” mentality for the family.

• No devices in bedrooms, ever.

• See iPads for what they are – large iPhones - that do not belong in a child’s hands, at all. Ditto for other digital tablets.

• No use of AI companions. I think it’s even time to rethink Alexa and Google Home.

• No smartphones until 16. Teen-safe devices are OK but should be restricted until high school. Before then, watches suffice if needed and landlines for home communication.

• Restrict video games through childhood, unless played together with parents in a common space with strict time limits.

From tech companies (led by legislation):

This is not an exhaustive list but gets us moving in the right direction:

• Create separation between children and adults in online spaces.

  • For example, online games for children should be for children only. Social media spaces where there are children shouldn’t allow adults.

• Age-gate adult spaces i.e. pornography

• Use AI technology to proactively scan user-generated content for topics that go against policy, then remove it.

• Restrict multiple accounts per device ID.

• Respond to subpoenas from law enforcement within 24 hours

• Stop deleting data on the back-end (Snapchat)

• Tech companies should have a duty of care to protect children

I hope we can create a world where our kids’ health is prioritized over the profit of technology companies. This will require action from all sides.

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Thank you, Nicki!

You can subscribe to new episodes of Scrolling2Death and learn more about supporting Nicki’s legislative efforts here, or book her for speaking events here.