Hello friends.
You may have read that recently juries brought down two verdicts in one week against Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. The companies were accused of allowing, abetting and causing harm to children.
The cases revealed massive dangers to children that are going criminally unaddressed in our society. But not necessarily the ones on trial.
In the New Mexico Meta case, the state attorney general developed fictional Facebook profiles, using photographs of real children without their knowledge or consent, to lure would-be predators. There was no apparent attempt to apprehend these predators once they identified themselves; the state was only interested in suing Meta.
In the Los Angeles case, the now-20 year old defendant, known as K.G.M., accused YouTube and Instagram of making design choices that were a substantial factor in her severe mental distress. (TikTok and Snap, also named defendants, settled before the trial began.)
This is a big deal. This is the first time that social media companies have been held liable for harms caused by their products. These findings pierce the veil of Section 230, a clause in a law that had, until now, shielded Internet platforms from liability on free speech grounds.
I’m not writing this to plead the case for Instagram, Facebook or YouTube. For the record, I think it’s fine and good for social media companies to be called to account, pay some money, lose some social standing. Evidence shows they have sought to grab and hold onto attention with no regard for people’s well-being. And, that like many consumer companies, they favor younger customers because they perceive them as forming loyalties and being the engine of growth.
But I’m not on board with the measures currently being proposed in Congress to mitigate that behavior. I have questions about the alignment of the money and interests pushing those measures.
More importantly, in centering a debate on technologies, like social media and increasingly chatbots, we are ignoring far more weighty, real and addressable causes of harms to children and adolescents’ mental health. When you start to dive into what those causes are, it raises the question of who benefits from the focus on platforms.
Just to explain where I’m coming from on this: I published a book in 2018 on kids and screen time, so I’ve been part of this conversation for a long time. While I’m still involved (I did a Reddit “ask me anything” just a couple weeks ago and published a white paper on school phone bans this month), you’ll know if you read this newsletter that I mostly focus day to day on other areas. That’s because I believe that factors like the climate crisis and political instability are generally more impactful to the fate of the next generation than social media consumption.
We have all seen kids getting stuck in their phones or iPads, getting bullied, seeing gross or exploitative or violent videos. For some people the solution is obvious: get kids off social media. It feels simple. It feels clean. It’s not.
The Kids Online Safety Act, KOSA, now in the Senate, mandates certain automatic safety protections for minors alone.
This requires somehow verifying the age of all users.
Truly verifying age could require that every platform on the Internet—your dating site, your knitting forum, your dragon role-playing game—would have to gather private, personally identifiable information. On every user. Like in Louisiana, where you now have to hand over your driver’s license to watch porn on the Internet.
Can you see how that might be a problem?
In the name of keeping kids safer, we could create an Internet of total surveillance. This, in an age where our government is openly wielding technologies like facial recognition to kidnap residents and scare citizens.
It’s happening already in the UK, where “third party age verification companies used by leading social media platforms, include a firm tied to Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel, and another firm set up by former Israeli intelligence officers.” And in Australia, which banned social media for people under 16 after a politician’s wife read The Anxious Generation.
There is a better way: require that these platforms get better and safer for all users by, for example, implementing stronger content moderation and regulating the use of design choices intended to be especially “sticky”, such as the infinite scroll.
To say the least, the people advocating for KOSA, and cheering on these lawsuits, are not people that progressives usually find themselves aligned with.
For example, the Heritage Foundation, the authors of Project 2025. And the “Alliance for a Better Future”, which just launched to advocate for AI safety, consisting of Heritage, the Family Policy Alliance (Christian nationalist, anti-trans), the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) (conservative anti-pornography group), the Institute for Family Studies (dubbed a “right-wing propaganda machine” maligning gay parenting, promoting heterosexual people to get married as young as possible and have lots of children and homeschool them) and American Principles Project (anti-trans, homophobic).
When these people talk about making the internet safer for kids, here’s what they mean. KOSA would “[protect] minor children from the transgender in this culture” and give parents the right to sue social media platforms that exposed children to “transgender content.” Those are the words of Sen. Marsha Blackburn, lead sponsor of this bill.
Translation: they don’t want queer and trans kids to find material online that reflects their experience and identity. Material that in the case of kids with unsupportive parents, can be lifesaving.
As reported in detail by Taylor Lorenz, who attended some of the trial, and seemingly no one else, the story at the center of the Instagram/YouTube trial is a lot more complicated than it seems.
K.G.M.’s father was described as abusive and violent; he left the family at age 3. The girl used social media in part to vent about and to document harsh treatment by her mother, including posting videos of her mother screaming, cursing at her, and ordering her out of a car on the side of the highway. She accused her mother of hitting her, calling her fat, and making her weigh herself daily. She had moved out of the house, but mother and daughter reconciled very soon after the mother made contact with a personal injury attorney who was looking for a case to use to attack Youtube and Instagram.
Now, the jury heard all this testimony. I did not. They decided the social media companies bore the brunt of blame for K.G.M.’s suffering anyway. Maybe they’re right.
What I do know is that abuse and harsh parenting are strongly and decisively correlated with mental health problems in teens, including “depression, suicidality, aggression, conduct disorder, and hyperactivity.”
Tech or social media use, on its own, is hardly correlated with those same problems in teens. “The estimated effect size is indistinguishable from zero” says expert Candice Odgers at UC Irvine. That’s according to an analysis of 226 studies.
Abuse is not rare. An estimated half of parents engage in harsh treatment like hitting or yelling, and in some studies it’s far more. One in 4 girls and one in 13 boys experiences child sexual abuse. Half a million children nationwide had substantiated claims of serious child abuse or neglect in 2023, which researchers say is a likely undercount (it’s also, happily, down slightly in the last few years). About 2000 children die each year from abuse and/or neglect.
Where are these children’s nine-figure court settlements? Where is their wall-to-wall national news coverage?
Mike Males, a tireless advocate for child rights, argues on these same lines.
His recent analysis of CDC data shows that the worse teens’ home life, the worse their mental health, and the more time they spend online. This definitely seems to describe the experience of K.G.M., who spent hours a day on social media from elementary school.
For his analysis, Males ranks teens’ responses to questions about the frequency and severity of parental/adult violence, emotional abuse, parent’s mental health problems, or parents’ drug/alcohol abuse. A shocking 73% of teens experience at least some level of adversity on this scale.
In the Meta case, the state of New Mexico is holding the platform responsible for a fictional scenario of a mother trafficking her own 13-year-old daughter—a crime, by the way, that age-gating can’t prevent. The State Department estimates that 40% of child trafficking cases involve a family member or caregiver. Is that really a social media problem? Or is there something really wrong with…adults?
It’s easier to talk about holding tech companies to account than to examine the fact that we live in a society where people routinely hit, yell at, and even traffic their own children. That’s painful and uncomfortable to confront.
And yet, we’re not helpless. Child abuse and maltreatment can be prevented. Many times when there is child mistreatment, there is domestic abuse, substance abuse, mental illness, poverty, and/or a parent acting out their own history of trauma and abuse.
Prevention efforts aimed at stabilizing families and reducing parental stress can reduce trauma and resulting mental health impacts on children. When you cut food stamps and Medicare, and eliminate targeted subsidies like the child tax credit, you are raising the risks that a child will get yelled at or hit. When you force immigrant families into the shadows and maximize the pressure on them economically and in every other way, you are driving up the risk that household stress explodes into instances of domestic abuse and child mistreatment with no one to witness or report it.
When you open free childcare programs, offer affordable housing, parenting classes, counseling, support to parents, you are lowering that risk. When you make communities more resilient to weather disasters, reducing displacement and economic ruin, again, you are once again lowering that risk.
All these groups that are gunning to cut public services, hate trans kids, hate a woman’s right to choose, are pushing for women to get married young and have lots of kids—their vision of America is one with more child mistreatment, and more adolescent mental health problems, not less.
We can do better. Here’s a thought: instead of fighting a cascade of individual lawsuits, maybe social media companies could pay a reasonable corporate tax rate so all families can get the publicly funded supports they need to really protect kids.
After the paywall, my most controversial take on kids and screens, featuring a video game that's being banned nationwide.