NEWS ALERT: META AND YOUTUBE LOSE SOCIAL MEDIA ADDICTION CASE
On Wednesday, a jury found Meta and YouTube harmed a young user with design features that were addictive and led to her mental health distress (TikTok and Snapchat settled before the case went to trial).
Mark Zuckerberg leaving the court house after a jury found his company knowingly designed features that were addictive and harmful.
This ruling confirms something that has become obvious to parents and teachers like me and my husband. Social media companies have created products that are as addictive as cigarettes and digital casinos. The trial uncovered that Meta and other social media companies know that features like infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations are leading to anxiety and depression, but they don’t care. As long as they can increase profits.
The Problem: What the hell is Congress doing!?
Many of us have watched incredulously as Congress turns a blind eye to the public health crisis unfolding across our country. How can it be possible that lawmakers can’t reach a consensus on something that is blatantly obvious to anyone who has spent more than five minutes with a child over the age of 10?
Well, here’s your answer: Meta alone spent over $25 million lobbying Congress in 2025. And to make matters worse, our politicians are as addicted to social media as the rest of us… maybe even more!
What we’re seeing in these cases is ordinary people, moms, dads, and schoolteachers saying the obvious: these products are harming our kids. That’s the key. As Alvaro Bedoya, a former Democratic commissioner at the FTC said, “You can’t lobby a mom or a dad or a schoolteacher who are responsible for the well-being of a child.”
Parents celebrating the ruling by holding pictures of the children whose deaths they blame on social media.
I am that mom. I am that teacher. Social media billionaires can’t lobby me to turn a blind eye to the harm they’ve done to our young people, our small businesses, and our democracy.
The Plan: Let’s be real.
The legal strategy used by these young people and their parents takes a page from the strategy used against Big Tobacco, in which lawyers argued that the companies knowingly created products designed to get users hooked, including children.
In addition to the millions they’ve spent on lobbying, the social media companies have built their entire legal defense strategy on a federal law called the Communications Decency Act of 1996, specifically Section 230, which protects them from liability for what users post. They’re just a public forum, they say. A gigantic, monopolistic, billion-dollar private corporate public square!?
Congress needs to step in, but how can we get the millions of dollars social media companies are spending on lobbying from jamming up the gears of our democracy?
Here’s what I would do:
Enforce anti-monopoly laws against the social media platforms that use their vast market share to gobble up competitors and degrade their users’ experience.
Impose meaningful privacy protections for users, so that social media companies can’t gobble up valuable data and use it to feed us endless streams of content designed to make us miserable and keep us scrolling.
Rewrite Section 230 so that social media companies can be held liable when algorithms spread misinformation and foment violence. If there is a cost for boosting blatant lies and misinformation, these companies will design their algorithms to prevent it from spreading.
These proposals have broad support among the American people. Parents and teachers are fed up and demanding action. But, politicians have become so dependent on these platforms and so addicted to the attention they get on them, that they have few incentives to rein them in.
We see it all the time. Lawmakers call people like Mark Zuckerberg into the hearing room, read them the riot act, and then post the clips online in the hopes they go viral. Wash, rinse, repeat.
There’s a better way. I am the only candidate for federal office in America not on social media. I know political consultants and D.C. insiders think I’m crazy, but I don’t care. I’m not putting a penny in the pockets of tech billionaires who want our kids addicted to screens and the rest of us doomscrolling ourselves into fascism. You can’t take their money, depend on their platforms, and then credibly claim to want to take away their power.
When I go to Congress, you will know exactly who sent me. When Zuckerberg, Musk, and whatever basket of right-wing billionaire Trump donors own TikTok come with their truckloads of lobbying money, I will tell them to keep walking. I’ll be there for us and the kids, the parents, and the teachers who are fed up and ready for change. By standing up to Zuckerberg and the social media billionaires, these ordinary people are showing us a better way. I plan to follow them.
