Suing Social Media Won’t Protect Our Kids (C1)

A New Mexico jury has found Meta liable to the tune of $375 million for harming children’s mental health, violating state consumer protection law, and enabling child sexual exploitation on its platforms. As jurors in Los Angeles continue deliberating in a separate bellwether case that could shape thousands of similar addiction lawsuits nationwide, the verdicts are being celebrated as a landmark reckoning in the long effort to hold Big Tech accountable for the youth mental health crisis it helped create.

And yet, these lawsuits will not protect our children from the harms of social media.

The desire to sue social media giants is understandable; the anger at them is justified. Internal Meta documents described Instagram as “a drug.” A 2019 internal study compared its reward mechanism to a slot machine. The company knew millions of children under 13 were using Instagram despite a nominal policy prohibiting them from doing so, and it chose growth over enforcement. New Mexico’s undercover investigators created accounts posing as children and documented how quickly predators found them. The harm is real, the evidence is damning, and juries are beginning to speak. Even so, courts will not bring structural relief that will protect our children.

Consider what is actually happening in the courts right now. New Mexico pursued Meta under consumer protection law, arguing the company made false and misleading statements about platform safety while hiding what it knew about child exploitation and mental health harm. In Los Angeles,

a jury is still deliberating a product liability theory, that Meta and YouTube’s platforms are defective products, akin to a manufacturer sued over a dangerous feature in a car. A second phase of the New Mexico case, coming in May, will test yet another theory: public nuisance . No single doctrine cleanly fits the problem, so plaintiffs’ attorneys are trying all of them at once.

This doctrinal scramble is not a sign of the legal strength of the cases against them; it’s a confession that no existing body of law was designed for this problem. Consumer protection doctrine targets deception, not platform architecture. Product liability requires a defective physical object, not a service. Public nuisance is a blunt instrument built for factories and polluters. Each theory captures something real about what Meta has done to children. None of them, even if they survive appeal, compels the structural changes that would actually protect children.

A damages award against Meta does not redesign the algorithm that exposes children to harmful content. It does not eliminate the engagement loops that keep them glued to their phones. It does not create any coherent legal standard governing how social media companies may or may not build their products. What these verdicts do is generate headlines, enrich plaintiff attorneys, and leave the underlying problems entirely intact.

Some will argue that sustained litigation pressure will eventually force the industry to change, similar to how Big Tobacco was brought to heel when it agreed to a settlement that produced structural change in the industry, but it took about forty years of sustained litigation to get to that point. Courts move slowly, making them a particularly ill-suited venue for regulating an industry built on a ‘’move fast and break things’’ mantra.

None of this means the problem isn’t real or that regulation isn’t warranted. The case for restricting minors’ access to social media is a reasonable one. The mechanism for doing so just needs to actually work.

The tools to address this problem already exist. Congress has simply declined to use them. For example, device-level age verification, a mandate requiring smartphone manufacturers to build age-verification architecture into their devices using already-existing secure enclave technology, would do what this verdict claims to want. It would prevent underage users from accessing platforms they are too young to use, universally and without the patchwork failures of platform-specific mandates. It would place the obligation where it logically belongs, on the manufacturers of the devices through which all digital content is accessed. And it would do so without requiring users to hand their identification documents to a parade of individual websites.

Meta will appeal every verdict against it. Each case will grind through the courts for years, ending either in settlement or a win for the social media giant. Meanwhile, millions of children will still have unrestricted access to platforms that cause them harm and are designed to addict them.

Numerous other countries have either already banned social media for children under 16 or are in the process of doing so. Well over a dozen American states have passed their own restrictions. The appetite for protecting children is clearly there. What is missing is the federal action and technological mandate that could actually deliver it. Courts cannot give us that, only Congress can.

Nicholas Creel is an associate professor of business law at Georgia College & State University. The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.