Abusive parents who damaged their children should not be getting rich from lawsuits scapegoating “social media”

The lawsuit blaming Meta and other platforms for “addicting children” has morally unraveled amid “victim” testimony exposing a nightmare of parental abuses.

If elder America harbored any normal caring about young people, we’d be turning away from the faddishness of “social media addiction” and toward assessing which appalling parental abuses being revealed on these lawsuits’ witness stands remain criminally prosecutable.

Plaintiffs’ leading 20-year-old “social media addiction” witness in the Meta trial proved so damaged by her mother’s and fathers’ long-term violent, emotional, and abandonment abuses that her testimony wound up presenting social media as something of a relief. In a grotesque irony, the young woman had used video composition skills she learned online to document her mother’s abuses.

In today’s upside-down era of wanton anti-youth cruelty, the press, politicians, and commentators are ignoring horrifying childhood abuses (relegated to lower-paragraph asides when mentioned at all) after hailing abusive parents as heroes defending their “precious children” by bravely standing up to Big Tech. If judges and juries buy this crap, we’ll see monster parents getting rich off their violence.

What does “social media addiction” even mean?

Selected internal memos reveal Big Tech officials boasting of uncanny power to hook users with seductive algorithms and indifference to potential harm. Their bragging is seized on by political panickers champing to reward abusive grownups and enhance the power of Big Tech in order punish all teens by banishment from social media. It’s the American way: punish the victim with the least power.

If the logic of “social media addiction” was applied to life’s habits, we’d be seeing thousands of lawsuits on behalf of masses of “victims” of all kinds of institutions.

Read books hours a day. Spend time and money on church. Talk on the phone every night. Jog miles. Meditate all morning.

You’re addicted! Feel aggrieved by your habits and want cash? Lawyer up. Research shows all these activities – reading, religion, telephone time, jogging, eating, meditating – can be harmful in the same mentally, physically, and socially damaging ways now blamed on social media.

What could be more socially isolating than reading, meditating, and running, nearly always done alone, often with a sensory-blocking Walkman? The landline telephone? Detached, disembodied, anonymous. A predator favorite (ever see “When a Stranger Calls”?). Religious obsession? Mass inflicted psychic damage. But to sue, you have to show deliberate violent victimization, not mere distress.

At various times, though, these activities were condemned as “addictions.” Today, they’re personal habits, maybe even bad habits – your own failing.

And we haven’t even gotten to television. Television ad allures and programs’ “cliff hanger” algorithms long have been designed to tease more viewing, often of violent, sexualized, consumerist content. Ralph Nader famously observed TV shows’ only purpose was to keep viewers glued to screens between commercials. But good luck suing TV programmers or sponsors for mental health damage.

No one can sue Ma Bell because they got drugs, an obscene call, or bullied or assaulted from a telephone conversation. Lonely bookworms would get nowhere blaming bookstores, libraries, and Random House. Eating compulsively? You could try blaming the barrage of snarf-more grease-sugar TV ads. Heart attack or divorce after running your 30^th mile this week? Try suing Runner’s World.

Social media addiction is a myth

“Addiction” is a gross mislabeling of habitual behavior, including harmful habits. Social media time is the same as any other activity (ask a recovering fundamentalist or overeater if the messages weren’t compelling). Slapping the term “addiction” on social media behavior is destructive because it sabotages the best (and puritans’ most hated) remedy to Americans’ habitual excesses: moderation.

Ironically, the average cutoff between healthy and unhealthy screen time for teenagers is 3 to 4 hours daily (individuals vary, but for most, more or fewer screen hours are superficially though not causally correlated with harms). That’s about the same daily hours considered unhealthy if spent on reading, jogging, meditating, praying, playing sports, and so on.

But if it’s new, it’s frightening to the aging brain. The popularizing of “social media addiction” helps demagogues aggrandize themselves hyping the latest moral panic, enables cynical lawsuit money-grubbing, and excuses culpability by rotten parents.

Teens – the “victims” – aren’t buying it

Even after years of daily bombardment by panicked declarations declaring that social media destroys teenagers’ mental health, brains, and humanity, majorities of teens continue to tell Pew Research in 2025 that social media:

· keeps them “more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives” (74%),

· gives them “a place to show their creative side” (63%),

· connects them to “people to support them through tough times” (52%), and

· makes them feel “more accepted” (52%).

· One-third use social media to get health information.

Only 14% feel social media is harmful to them personally, while 28% feel social media is beneficial and 58% feel it has no effect one way or the other.

That last statistic – 6 in 10 teens see social media as just a useful tool, neither good nor bad but what you choose to make of it – is exactly the calming, adaptive response that advances society to overcome primitive panics against anything new.

Confirming teens’ adaptive views of social media…

…Even relentless efforts by well-resourced law firms and attorneys general to dredge up teenage victims of social media abuses find vanishingly few documentable cases. Attorneys general suing Big Tech are reduced to citing teens shot by grownups who obtained bullets online. Private lawsuits can’t seem to produce victims who weren’t so grossly abused by parents that any social media damage seems trivial in comparison. Damage settlements won’t affect giant global media conglomerates backed by hundreds of billions of dollars.

I’d love to see Big Tech punished for perfidies and boastings, but that’s not happening. Just the opposite. Legislators loudly rail against media moguls while pushing the Kids Online Safety Act to lavishly reward Big Tech with more profits, censorship, and mass user surveillance powers, which will harm “precious children” more. Big Tech should be broken up into localized platforms and severely regulated to guarantee free speech, neutrality, and user privacy.

The “precious children”? They deserve full public and online media rights, not another round of panicked punishment from abusive, authoritarian, profiteering elders whose priorities have gone completely haywire.