The Meta Settlement Isn’t The Victory You Think It Is
Sources
Lorenz, Taylor. Kids Aren't Addicted to Phones -- Here's the Data [VIDEO]. July 10, 2026. https://youtu.be/dFKwpjKGYyU?si=PJmG_qlM79IkpBkd
Lorenz, Taylor. The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all. The Guardian. March 2, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/02/ban-children-social-media-biometic-data-surveilled
Landmark trial on Meta’s impact on children’s mental health begins in US. Al Jazeera. August 18, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/8/18/landmark-trial-on-metas-impact-on-childrens-mental-health-begins-in-us
Tauber, Olivia. Say goodbye to doomscrolling and Stories? Some of Meta’s biggest features are on trial. Mashable. August 25, 2026. https://mashable.com/tech/meta-lawsuit-doomscrolling-instagram-stories-beauty-filters
Vanian, Jonathan. Jury in Los Angeles finds Meta, YouTube negligent in social media addiction trial. CNBC. March 25, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/25/meta-youtube-los-angeles-california-verdict.html
Novak Jones, Diana. Meta rejects claims it sought to hook children to Facebook, Instagram. Reuters. August 18, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/meta-faces-29-state-trial-that-could-reshape-instagram-facebook-2026-08-18/
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Kerr, Dara. Meta and YouTube designed addictive products that harmed young people, jury finds. The Guardian. March 25, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/mar/25/jury-verdict-us-first-social-media-addiction-trial-meta-youtube
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Kerr, Dara. Meta agrees to major changes to Facebook and Instagram as it settles US trial over teen addiction for up to $18bn. The Guardian. August 26, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/26/meta-social-media-addiction-trial-settlement
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Transcript
Did you ever hear the story of the exploding Ford Pinto? I promise this is related to yesterday’s Meta settlement, hang on. It’s May 28, 1972, 52 year old Lily Gray is driving down the interstate outside San Bernardino, California in her brand new Ford Pinto. She’s got 13 year old Richard Grimshaw in the car with her and they’re on a little road trip to meet up with Lily’s husband. Now even though this Ford Pinto was new, it had already given Lily and her husband tons of issues in the 6 months since they’d purchased it. It would occasionally just stall out while it was being driven. Lily had just re-entered the 15 interstate highway after filling up her gas tank in San Bernardino and was traveling down the middle lane when suddenly her car stalled out and she rolled to a stop in the middle lane of the interstate. The car immediately behind her was able to swerve but the next car wasn’t so lucky. It crashed directly into the back of Gray’s Ford Pinto, though it had managed to slow to around 35 miles per hour by the time of the collision.
Immediately upon impact, the car burst into flames. Both Lily Gray and Richard Grimshaw were engulfed in the fire. Both managed to exit the vehicle, but Lily died of her burn injuries a few days later. Richard lived, but he lost multiple fingers and would undergo 60 separate surgeries to reconstruct his face and body after the crash. Grimshaw and the family of Lily Gray sued Ford, saying they knew their Ford Pinto was prone to explosions and should pay damages both to compensate Grimshaw and the family of Lily Gray for the damages they incurred but also should pay punitive damages to punish Ford for its negligence and dissuade it or any other car manufacturer from ever constructing such a faulty vehicle again in the future. And the plaintiffs won. In a case called Grimshaw v. Ford, Richard Grimshaw and the family of Lily Gray were awarded $125 million dollars in punitive damages from Ford Motor Company, equivalent to about $650 million dollars today and the largest punitive award ever made by a jury in a personal injury case. Even the plaintiff’s lawyers were surprised at the figure. But the evidence against Ford was pretty damning.
Back in 1970, Ford knew that small, subcompact cars from Europe and Asia were all the rage, and they wanted to be able to compete in the market. Hell most of their competitors had had subcompact cars for years. Rivalry and infighting on the board pushed back development, and when the team finally decided to move ahead with designing Ford’s first subcompact car, they went in with a move fast and break things mentality. Frankly the move fast break things mentality should really be rebranded to the Ford Pinto mentality. A process of designing and building a car that typically took around 4 years at the time was shoved into 2. Most damning of all, however, were the internal documents that revealed that Ford knew that its Pinto cars could explode into flames on impact. It even knew the solve. It even knew that the solve would cost $10 to 15 dollars per car to install. And these internal documents revealed that the company did a very sinister cost benefit analysis: which would be more expensive–paying to install this safety feature or paying for the lawsuits resulting from the people who die from the lack of this safety feature. The internal documents showed that Ford looked at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s calculation of the monetary value of a burn death, $200,000, and of a burn injury, $67,000, and calculated that oh maybe they’d see 180 burn deaths and 180 burn injuries, which for them to pay out would cost around $50 million. But to add the 10-15 dollar part in 11 million cars in order to prevent those deaths would cost about $137 million, according to their estimates. And so Ford opted for death as just part of the cost of doing business. It’s a case of such extraordinary negligence that law students still read it today. Ford knew the design of its product was defective, could cause serious injury and death, and yet decided to move ahead with it anyway.
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The Ford Pinto case was a tragic story that led to an individual taking on a giant corporation, uncovering their willful, sinister negligence, and winning the day. The same can’t be said for the lawsuits against the tobacco industry. Individuals and classes of individuals spent decades attempting to bring hundreds of lawsuits against major tobacco companies for their cancer-causing, inherently addictive products. In a patchwork of lawsuits across the country, individuals sometimes won but mostly lost against Big Tobacco. They would say “these cigarettes caused my cancer” and big tobacco would at first say what are you talking about, cigarettes don’t cause cancer, here are the scientists we’ve paid to say so. And a lot of times that was enough, even when the science was too strong to deny that smoking causes cancer, it was still a strong defense to say “well sure but it didn’t cause THIS person’s cancer.” It is REALLY hard to prove direct cause and effect that passes muster in court when it comes to physical diseases. Cancer takes a long time to show up in the body, it can be caused by any number of things. But if that denial by the tobacco industry, that this cancer wasn’t caused by our cigarettes, if that didn’t work, they pivoted, and instead would say yeah everyone knows cigarettes cause cancer, that’s on you, we didn’t force you to smoke. It’s a thing called assumption of risk–you knew the risks, you did it anyway. Or contributory negligence–yes maybe we were negligent in creating this dangerous product, but the consumer is as guilty if not MORE guilty of negligence for using the product while knowing the risks, so we should be off the hook. And the argument would work more times than not. This argument wasn’t available for Ford in the Ford Pinto case because they deliberately hid the fact that the Ford Pinto exploded when rear ended. Consumers didn’t know. In these tobacco cases, on the other hand, the tobacco companies sometimes benefited from the open knowledge that their products caused cancer.
By the 1990s, public sentiment had turned against smoking and against the giant tobacco companies who made fortunes off peoples’ addiction and health problems, and over 40 state attorneys general, that is the highest lawyer in each state, brought lawsuits against the major tobacco companies, citing not to negligence and individual cases of cancer or death but instead to state consumer protection and antitrust laws. They argued the companies created dangerous products, knew they created dangerous products, didn’t properly warn about the dangers of those products, and their negligence cost states huge sums of money in public health costs. And this activity, attorneys general would argue, violated the consumer protection laws of their state, the laws meant to protect us, consumers, from fraud, from being lied to, from being manipulated, and from being taken advantage of in order to turn a profit.
A typical state consumer protection law bars companies from doing business in the state and using fraud, misrepresentation, lies, confusing or misleading information, unfair trade practices like anti-competitive behavior, or concealing or suppressing material information with the intent that consumers rely upon that fraud or lie or concealment when purchasing a product or even being advertised to about the product, the laws finding that those acts by businesses would cause substantial injury to consumers that consumers couldn’t reasonably be expected to avoid.
And those state consumer protection laws didn’t provide for defenses like assumption of risk or contributory negligence, those weren’t available defenses for the tobacco industry when state attorneys general got involved and started suing under these consumer protection laws.
And so, in order to make all these pesky state cases go away, a historic settlement was reached. In 1998, 46 states entered into a settlement agreement with four of the largest tobacco companies in the country, and the Master Settlement Agreement set out the terms of the agreement. Tobacco companies agreed not to advertise to children. They agreed to pay annual sums of money to states as compensation for the increased medical costs associated with smoking, at a minimum of 206 billion dollars over the first 25 years. The settlement created the National Public Education Foundation, a public education organization aimed at increasing public awareness especially in children of the dangers of smoking. And the tobacco companies agreed to dissolve three of the largest tobacco industry organizations that were suspected of anti-competitive practices. In exchange, the states agreed to stop bringing these state lawsuits against tobacco companies. Individuals have continued to sue tobacco companies on an individual basis, with varying degrees of success, and now with the rise in vaping there’s a whole new wave of activity, but the states, through their attorneys general, reached their settlement back in 1998 with the help of lawsuits using consumer protection laws as their basis.
Okay now WHY did I just spend 10 minutes talking to you about exploding cars and cigarette settlements from the 90s when I promised you a video about yesterday’s major Meta settlement about the addictive quality of social media amongst the youth? Well because Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media companies like TikTok have all been facing lawsuits for years brought by individuals using similar claims to the Ford Pinto argument, that these companies knowingly created a product that harmed users, and those lawsuits have had varying degrees of success, but mostly have been unsuccessful. The Ford Pinto case was so seismic because of the smoking gun revelation that its executives had literally done a cost benefit analysis and found they were okay with a few hundred deaths if it meant they didn’t need to make a $15 repair on all their cars. That, combined with the fact that cause and effect are REALLY easy to determine with an exploding car–the car exploded, Lily Gray was lit on fire, she died a few days later, there’s no question as to what caused her death–made that Ford Pinto case an outlier in personal injury cases. Individuals bringing lawsuits against Meta are more like the tobacco cases and less like the Ford Pinto case. Just as it is really hard to prove cause and effect with diseases like cancer which take a long time to appear in the body and can be caused by numerous things, it is really hard to prove that a person’s use of Instagram directly caused their mental health issues or even their self harm. And as with the tobacco lawsuits, these major tech companies have the defense first that it’s not true that their products cause harm, and then second that the plaintiff suing them knew of the risks when they signed up, they were the ones who negligently used those products, they assumed the risk or are just as negligent as the tech company in how they used the product, so the tech companies shouldn’t be punished. And sometimes those defenses work.
Those defenses are less successful in the case of children. It’s harder for a tech company to argue that a child knew and assumed the risk of their social media use or were negligent themselves in their social media use. And the weakness of that argument was on full display in a jury verdict out of Los Angeles last March, which found Meta and Youtube liable for negligence in their failure to warn users of the dangers of their platforms and awarded $3 million dollars in punitive damages to a young woman using the initials KGM, who alleged that she became addicted to social media as a child. KGM, who is now 20, alleged that she suffered from body dysmorphia, depression, and suicidal ideation and that those issues were caused by her constant use of social media apps and the notifications and features that were designed to make it impossible for her to break away.
Executives from Meta and Youtube, including Mark Zuckerberg testified at the trial back in March, arguing that they created safety features for teens, clearly doing what they could to stem negative use of their products, and even so there’s no such thing as “social media addiction” and their products aren’t inherently addictive, attempting to undermine plaintiff’s arguments. YouTube vice president of engineering Cristos Goodrow testified that YouTube was “not designed to maximize time” spent on the platform which lemme just stop you there buddy, I’ve been creating content on the platform of YouTube for over half a decade now and THE central tenet I have known from the start and that gets drilled into content creators is that the goal of the algorithm is to keep people on the platform for as long as possible, so whatever you can do in your content to keep people there you will be rewarded by the algorithm. It’s common knowledge among the people who make content for the platform, but now its chief engineer is claiming that’s not the case?
Anyway, either way the testimony wasn’t convincing, and the jury in this LA case in March awarded the plaintiff nearly $6 million dollars total to compensate her for the emotional distress caused to her as a child by these social media companies. But that case is an outlier, most individuals bringing lawsuits against social media companies aren’t successful, at least not in court–Meta and other social media companies have reached small settlement agreements outside of court, because a settlement tends to be far less messy and public. A calculated part of the cost of doing business, one might say. But I think this case out of LA earlier this year, along with another attorney general lawsuit out of New Mexico at the same time that Meta lost, represents the shift in public sentiment that we’ve seen especially since the rise of TikTok and exacerbated by the rise of AI, where people are more and more aware of the centrality of the role that social media plays in our lives and how maybe that’s not such a good thing. Gone are the days of the Obama presidential campaign, touted for its positive use of social media and Facebook, of social media companies championing democracy, and positioning themselves as the arbiters of that increased democracy and civil engagement. That sense of hope is gone, replaced by the feeling that we’re no longer willingly engaging in discourse online via these platforms and are instead being fed them via a feeding tube that’s been forcibly shoved down our throats while the owners gloat and rub their hands together like cartoon villains and build their bunkers to prepare for the global climate wars to come, hoping we’ll all be too distracted to notice until it's too late. We hate it, and yet we still can’t seem to look away, leading many of us to intuit that these are addictive and bad for our brains. Because they feel really bad to be on. And so when a teenager sues Meta saying Meta caused her to want to literally off herself, it doesn’t seem like a far flung accusation today in the way it would have 15 years ago. And that public sentiment can have a powerful impact on how these tech companies decide to move forward. Just like with big tobacco in the 90s, it might entice big tech to agree to a major settlement to make it all go away and buy themselves some good PR. Or at least get the states off their backs.
And that’s why this trial against Meta, which started last week and settled yesterday before the trial ended, is so consequential. Not only did it present some novel legal arguments as applied to big tech–they’re not arguing that specific content caused harm but instead that the entire product is designed to willfully cause harm–but it also presented Meta with the opportunity for what some were calling a Big Tobacco-style settlement that could make all these state lawsuits go away.
Here’s the background: Arizona, along with 28 other states, sued Meta, seeking up to 1.4 TRILLION dollars in damages, almost the entirety of the value of Meta, claiming that its platforms including Facebook and Instagram, were designed to hook children and cause them harm. The opening arguments for the plaintiffs summed it up as “hook, hold, harvest, and hide.” “Hook the users, hold them for as long as they can, harvest their data, and then hide the truth from the public.” The complaint alleges quote “Meta has developed and refined a set of psychologically manipulative Platform features designed to maximize young users’ time spent on its Social Media Platforms. Meta was aware that young users’ developing brains are particularly vulnerable to certain forms of manipulation, and it chose to exploit those vulnerabilities through targeted features.” Those features include the algorithms for recommending content, the “like” feature, incessant notifications and alerts, filters that promote body dysmorphia, and infinite scroll, which the lawsuit claims is “designed to discourage young users’ attempts to self-regulate and disengage with meta’s Platforms.” And the lawsuit claims Meta knew these features were manipulative and could harm especially young users and lied about it, denied it was so, and claimed that their features were not manipulative or designed to promote unhealthy, prolonged engagement with the platforms. And in making those representations, Meta engaged in false and misleading trade practices that harmed users, according to the plaintiffs.
The lawsuit had numerous counts against Meta, mostly stemming from the consumer protection laws in all of the states that have sued, plus they sued Meta under the federal law known as COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, which requires tech companies to get informed consent from parents before collecting the personal information of children online. For kids under the age of 13, the law requires Meta to get verifiable parental consent before collecting their personal information IF Meta knows the user is a child OR their service is directed at children. The complaint says Meta’s products are marketed to and directed at children AND often Meta knows the users are under 13 and still doesn’t even attempt to get verifiable parental consent before allowing the children to use the service and collecting their information in the process. Verifiable parental consent means notice to a parent of Meta’s personal information collection, use, and disclosure practices AND authorization, from that parent, before Meta collects, uses, or discloses that child’s information. Instead, Facebook and Instagram just have a nominal ban on users under 13.
Like I said, Meta for its part argued that it DID attempt to create safety features for teens, clearly indicating that they care about youth wellbeing, that social media is not an addictive product, there is no DSM-5 “social media addiction” diagnosis, and so there is nothing about their products that would lead to the harms being alleged in the complaint. Now just a note about how these cases work–parties can agree outside of court to settle their disagreement at literally any time. They can talk to each other, negotiate, agree, and then tell the court hey actually nevermind we figured this out we no longer need you to make a ruling here. So settlement negotiations are ongoing throughout the course of a lawsuit, which usually takes years to go to trial. So this means that Meta thought they had a shot of winning through months if not years of negotiations, discovery, trial prep, likely tens of millions if not hundreds of millions in legal fees, but a week and a half into the trial they decided that settlement was a better option. Reminder there were 1.4 TRILLION DOLLARS of damages being threatened here, though courts often award far less than plaintiffs request. So this final settlement for $18 billion dollars is FAR less existential than the threat of a trial that ends badly for Meta. $18 billion dollars is also FAR less than the settlement reached by Big Tobacco and the states back in the 90s, so despite what some were saying, this wasn’t exactly Big Tech’s Big Tobacco moment.
And the settlement means some changes to Facebook and Instagram especially for young users in the United States. Settlement agreements tend to be confidential but the basics of the agreement have been disclosed via press conferences since yesterday. In exchange for settlement, Meta has agreed to making changes to its platforms especially for young people: time limits, pausing notifications during school hours, blocking the app overnight, bans on filters that could cause body dysmorphia, and more. The $18 billion dollars is to be paid out over the course of 10 years and divided among the states that sued. It’s unclear how Meta will roll out these new features, how it will impact the experience of using the platform for all users, and how effective these changes will actually be for teens. Meta has called on other platforms like Snap, YouTube, and TikTok to also make these changes as well, though they are under no obligation to do so and will actually probably benefit if Instagram goes dark for teens all night, causing them to turn to Meta’s competitors.
And that is just one of the many MANY challenges that present themselves when talking about kids social media usage and general mental health concerns related to social media for everyone. This settlement also largely lets Meta off the hook. $18 billion dollars is a lot of money to you and me and even to some of these states. But, especially paid out over a DECADE, that’s fucking peanuts for Meta. In 2025, Meta’s profits in the US alone hit a record of $79 billion dollars, which was TWENTY PERCENT HIGHER than it made the year before, which was also a record year. At the same time as they’re making money hand over fist, their federal tax rate has hit an all-time low. In 2025, they paid an effective federal tax rate of 3.5%. The federal corporate tax rate in the US is technically 21%, and that is the rate that small business usually pay, that’s the rate I’ve historically paid, but huge companies like Meta usually pay far FAR less than that as a share of their profits because of the numerous tax loopholes, some that have been on the books for a while, some that were created by Trumps big beautiful bill act. According to the institute on taxation and economic policy, if Meta had paid that 21% tax on its profits in just 2025 alone, they would have paid in $16.5 billion. In one year. Instead they paid just $2.8 billion, using loopholes and tax breaks to avoid $13.7 BILLION DOLLARS in federal income taxes in one single year. Reminder that the settlement they just signed was for $18 billion dollars.
And it gets worse if you look at what Meta paid to states where it does business. The company’s total state tax bill amounted to $745 million dollars in 2025, meaning they paid an corporate state income tax rate of 0.9%. The average state income tax rate is around 6%. That tax income at the state and federal level, if those loopholes were reduced, would dramatically outweigh the settlement reached by Meta and could go towards programs that ACTUALLY have been shown to improve teen lives.
Because the reality is that the science actually is not conclusive that social media causes mental health problems in teens, and many experts say it probably doesn’t. Journalist Taylor Lorenz has done a TON of reporting on this, my sources are linked in the description as always. Basically, the issue is correlation vs causation. Studies have found there is a correlation between teen mental health issues and social media use. When a person has higher rates of mental health issues like depression and anxiety, they also tend to use social media a lot. But that does not necessarily mean that social media use causes these issues. For many teens, social media use is a coping mechanism that is being used to help with pre-existing mental health issues. For many teens, too, these social media platforms in fact offer a vital social lifeline. Studies have found that many teens are using social media not for mindless doomscrolling but instead for their direct messaging and group messaging features with their friends. Especially for kids that came of age during a global pandemic where their worlds were severely limited outside of the internet, it makes sense that the internet would be the place where they developed habits around communicating with their friends. Social media can also be an incredibly important lifeline for LGBTQ+ folks, especially those who are looking for resources for help, for how to cope, for connecting with other similar kids.
That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t horrific things happening to kids being facilitated by the internet. Bullying, harassment, trafficking, those are all things that the internet helps to facilitate. Anyone who uses social media can attest that spending too much time on it often makes you feel bad. It facilitates self comparison, it can reinforce negative stereotypes, it can lead down a horrible rabbit hole of misinformation, fake news, and radicalization that we’ve seen and we know can be very very dangerous. However, as much as I am loathe to agree with big tech, it is really really hard to directly link mental health outcomes as being CAUSED by social media usage. For example, I had raging, horrific body dysmorphia LONG before the advent of social media. I didn’t need Instagram to help me with that. Instagram certainly helps to make it worse, but it didn’t cause the underlying phenomenon. I have depression and anxiety because of childhood trauma. Is social media a tool I use to help me dissociate from it sometimes, you bet your sweet ass it is, but it didn’t cause the underlying phenomenon.
That being said, even if you can’t point to social media and say it’s an exact comparison to tobacco, for example, in terms of addictiveness, you might be able to say it’s a pretty close comparison to gambling. Same manipulation of dopamine seeking behavior, same random rewards that make you keep coming back for more. And we don’t let kids gamble. But I think that comparison, too, underestimates the importance of social media as a tool for communication and connection for all of us including teens. And regulating gambling doesn’t have as profound an impact on free speech as regulating social media does. And that’s where you also start to get into the weeds. How much do we want the government to be stepping in and regulating the platforms where we exercise our free speech? How much power are we willing to hand to the federal government? What should the government’s role be in relation to our access to social media? We have now seen from the Trump regime what it looks like when authoritarians take control and attempt to wield social media as a weapon against dissenters. They have been sending out endless streams of subpoenas against social media users who speak out against ICE, for example, a really basic exercise of free speech, in fact one of the central and most important aspects of free speech: criticizing the government. What happens if we empower the government to order sweeping changes from these social media companies? What kind of power are we really handing over?
The reality is that even if these changes to the Meta platform do seem designed to help teens, first and foremost, teens will just jump to tiktok or youtube instead, so these platform-specific reforms don’t do much, but also that these are problematic band aids to larger issues that don’t actually solve the underlying problems, especially those plaguing the youth of today.
During the trial that was just settled between the states and Meta, protestors stood outside the courthouse with a giant, many foot long banner listing the names of young people who died due to social media harm. It had hundreds of names on it, representing individual tragedies of a truly unthinkable magnitude. But the reality is that the leading cause of death for young people in the United States isn’t social media usage. It’s gun violence and accidents.That giant banner listing all the young people that died from social media harm represents about the number of kids who die from gun-related incidents every. Single. MONTH. In the United States. According to Johns Hopkins University, over 2500 children died from gun-related incidents in 2022 alone, amounting to about 7 children dead per day. PER DAY. Attempting to fix dangers to youth by barring teen access to social media might do literally nothing, while comprehensive gun reform could literally save hundreds of kids every single year.
As I already said, there is no good science decisively linking teen social media use as a CAUSE of teen depression and anxiety. And the stats show that a lot of the harm perpetrated against teens online is perpetrated by a known person from school, church, or family. There is also reason to believe that it is the mental health of parents that has a much more profound impact on the mental health of the kids than any access to social media ever would. For example, during the 2008 financial crisis, teen mental health suffered because of the instability caused by financial collapse and the emotional turmoil of the parents. There are systemic fixes to these issues that are actually backed up by science and that would actually have a profound impact on teen thriving more than any social media regulation or ban ever could. Mental health issues have, for years, been conclusively causally linked to things like childhood poverty, childhood access to basic resources like a safe home, food, and early education. Funding initiatives aimed at improving these resources for children, and supporting their parents along the way, would do SO much more good than any social media ban ever would. And we have the data to prove it. And hey what do you know if you removed all the tax loopholes given to giant companies and to their ultra-rich owners, those initiatives would be affordable, too.
And I think these individual and state lawsuits against Meta for harming children, and the resulting settlements and court wins, offers the public a misplaced sense of redemption, or of vengeance. Yes we’re finally holding these big companies accountable. The problem is that we’re actually not. Not only because the settlement is pennies for these guys, absolutely calculated into the cost of doing business, but also because it doesn’t actually really benefit the public in the way that it could. This is barely a slap on the wrist. And it absolves everyone of responsibility for doing the things that would actually benefit teens or actually hold these big tech companies responsible.
There are two areas where we would actually get some real accountability from big tech, above and beyond them finally paying their fair share in taxes. One is anti-trust enforcement. These companies are swallowing up smaller competitors and conglomerating just like all of our media companies are, which stifles competition, allowing them to get away with any number of abuses and provide shittier and shittier products and services because they don’t have to compete. Enforcing anti-trust laws that are already written, are already on the books, breaking up these companies and barring them from continuing to conglomerate, would go SO much further in ensuring some level of accountability and competition, making them more likely to WANT to not do shit that pisses people off because we could much more easily jump ship and go to a different competing service, because under capitalism the only way to make companies do anything is by impacting their bottom line.
But even so, we can’t trust them to do everything right, and the other area where we’re seeing this have major negative impacts on children and adults alike is in issues of privacy. We have WOEFULLY few laws on the books or actual enforcement mechanisms for the laws we do have that protect personal information from not only hacks and breaches but also from abuse by the government, as is becoming more and more clear the more the Trump regime and others abuse user information for mass surveillance or crackdowns on dissident behavior. Anonymity on the internet allows for a lot of abuses to happen, that is absolutely true, revenge porn, child exploitation, these issues are really REALLY difficult to prosecute because it is really hard to positively identify the user online perpetrating the abuse. In a court of law, just because an IP address matches a computer, doesn’t mean you can definitively prove THAT person was the one using THAT computer at that time. Anonymity on the internet makes internet-based crimes really difficult to prosecute, and so it is really difficult for victims to even make it stop let alone get redress for their very real injuries. This is true. AND ALSO.
De-anonymizing the internet through things like requiring teens to disclose that they are teenagers or, conversely, requiring all of us to positively prove that we are not teens, can also have profoundly devastating consequences. By requiring us to link our face and name and maybe a government ID or document or two to our online profiles in order to prove we are not teens and allow us to use these platforms means all of our data online can be linked to us, which sure can be used to advertise to us which is annoying, but can also be used to target us for our activity online. And Trump has made this a reality instead of a far-flung dystopian idea from a sci fi movie. If the government is able to get ahold of information that links your social media activity, your internet activity, your face, your phone, your movement with your phone, across devices across websites across geography, especially when paired with the powerful AI tools being developed by all these major tech companies with extensive government contracts, that has PROFOUND implications for your ability to move through the world, to speak out against your government, to exercise your first amendment rights, to be free from political persecution. I remember studying privacy law in law school in like 2018 and it all feeling like this kind of dystopian fearmongering, like ok so what if Meta has my Minnesota drivers’ license, what’s a hacker going to do with that? I’m not doing anything, I have nothing to hide. I’m not committing crimes, the government isn’t going to come after me or something. Welp, jump ahead to 2026 I moved across the ocean because I didn’t trust what the government might do to me because of my exercise of my free speech rights. These concerns are very real, and a lot of times the protections that the government or even the social media companies themselves are attempting to put forward to keep kids safe online not only don’t address the root causes of teen death and harm and suicidality, which all existed long before the internet, but they also create a very dangerous landscape that empowers both big tech and the government to know everything about you and infringe on your fundamental rights in the process.
Okay this is all very fucking bleak, so what do we do? Well, first and foremost I think it is important to know that anti-trust laws, increased taxation, and privacy infrastructure are really important. Those things require a functioning government, so they’re not going to happen in the US anytime soon but they’re important to know about for if and when they ever become a viable option to hope for again.
IN THE MEANTIME it once again unfairly falls on our shoulders as individuals being failed by the system to do the work. This means understanding how to protect yourself and your identity online, which isn’t easy, and relying on the still existing anonymity of the internet to make sure the government or private actors or whomstever can’t track you, ESPECIALLY if you are an activist or an organizer or a journalist or really anyone exercising your free speech rights openly in the United States of America in a way the current regime might take issue with. I am not an expert in this area. One person making a TON of helpful, free or low cost resources for this very thing goes by Liz the Developer, you can find her on instagram or youtube or anywhere, but her website is lizthe dot dev. There’s SO MUCH info, but if you click on “cybersecurity guides” thats a good place to start, and if you’re completely new, I’d go to the “Home for the Holidays, Help Grandma” guide which breaks it down into steps even your grandma could follow.
And then also if you are a parent of a teen this is especially difficult, it’s hard to know what to do for them, it’s hard to know what’s going on in their heads which usually contains an entire universe you’re not privy to, I know both from my experience as a teen and my experience currently being a step parent to a teen. It can be easy to just assume it’s the screen time and the social media causing any of their issues. But the reality is that taking a hardline approach, threatening to take away their social media, making them feel guilty for using it, isn’t going to stop them from using it and will probably make them hide any issues they might be having if they come up in the future out of fear that you might take their social media away. Making assumptions about what they’re doing online isn’t usually helpful, and a lot of times while you’re doomscrolling mindlessly, they might be engaged in deep conversation with their friends or playing a communal online game or something else that’s actually benefitting them, even if sure in a perfect world maybe it would be better if they were offline with their friends in person touching grass. Maintaining open lines of communication about social media is a far preferable approach than just getting angry and trying to shut it down or take it away. And often if there are underlying mental health issues, there’s likely some root cause that isn’t just looking at Instagram. Some of those root causes you have control over, some of them you don’t. But it’s important to try to see your teen as a whole full person who needs your guidance and not as a problem that needs fixing via harsh reactionary rules that tend to backfire. Easier said than done, of course.
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Be sure to check out my video from Wednesday all about how the US has always wanted to annex Canada.
