Meta social media trial awards severely abusive parent millions of dollars in a devastating loss for America’s young people

Two just-decided lawsuits assembled a trifecta of youth-punishing lawyers, child-abusing parents, and perfidious media giants, so, yes, bad actors won.

“Was Your Child or Teenager Harmed Due to Social Media?” announces one big law firm’s pitch. “YOU may be entitled to money!”

After this week’s “social media addiction” suits wrapped up, Big Law’s pitches should add: “Violent, abusive parents are especially set up to WIN millions of dollars blaming severe troubles you caused your child on Big Tech!”

Meta was ordered by a New Mexico state court on Monday to pay $375 million in civil fees to the state for violating consumer protection laws by misleading the public over the safety of its platform for children. The “victim”? A fake “child” made up by the state.

Then, on Wednesday, Meta and YouTube were ordered in Los Angeles Superior Court to pay $3 million in compensatory and $3 million in punitive damages to a 20-year-old victim and her violently abusive mother.

These awards barely punish the $200-billion annual revenue giant, which will appeal. No one should sympathize with Meta, whose internal memos boasting of corporate exploitation (example: an unnamed employee jocularly admitted the platform’s user protections lay “somewhere between zero and negligible… child safety is an explicit non-goal”) enabled lawyers and juries to jump on an emotional blame-media bandwagon in order to evade truly damaging threats to children and youth.

The unrepresented losers as usual were America’s young people, who face both severely punishing mass banishments from vital social media platforms they need and an incentive for grownups to cash in on criminal violence and abuses against them.

The unreal nature of the two Meta cases

In neither civil case was the issue provable damage – a crucial point when considering the ignored question of real children’s and teens’ real-world safety, discussed below.

The New Mexico prosecutors didn’t even try to show damage to real children. Instead of calling human victims to testify, New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez created “a fake social media profile of a 13-year-old girl that he previously told CNBC ‘was simply inundated with images and targeted solicitations’ from child abusers.”

Fumed Torrez: “By their own reckoning, nearly 100,000 children a day receive sexually explicit material or are targeted for sexual harassment” among the tens of millions of under-18 Instagram and Facebook users spending several hours a day on social media. “That’s unacceptable.”

Assuming many millions of children are suffering some kind of sexual and/or predatory contacts on social media sites at a rate of 100,000 a day, even a small state like New Mexico should have been able to choose among thousands of real child victims (most now adults) to testify to real-life predations and their damage.

Yet, not only did the attorney general not call any real victims to testify, he didn’t even produce a body count of teens provably abducted, raped, injured, abused, killed, or even mildly troubled from Meta platforms.

Rather, he speculated that if the fake child account he created was being “inundated with images and targeted solicitations,” then vast numbers of real-life children must be getting damaged. One fake child case statistically multiplied by thousands of speculatively damaged New Mexico children every year yielded the $375 million award enriching the attorney general’s office.

Using fake children seems the ticket

New Mexico won 60 times more damages than the Los Angeles plaintiffs, who unwisely opened the door to exposing the parental and family abuses Centers for Disease Control analyses associate with two-thirds to 90% of teens’ poor mental health, drug abuse, and suicidal thinking (social media use: just about none).

In the Los Angeles trial, attorneys suing Meta and other platforms chose 20-year-old “Kaley” as their ideal “victim” to prove “social media addiction” damage, the best case they could find. (A dozen families claiming their children were harmed by social media attended the trial, but strangely, none were called to testify.)

“Kayley’s” testimony revealed years of violent, emotional, and abandonment abuses by her mother and father that led to her severe mental health issues long before she ever used social media. In fact, none of the plaintiff’s counselors and experts testified that social media caused the victim’s problems. Plaintiff attorneys even admitted in closing that only a “small bit” of the victim’s troubles related to social media.

So, why the damage awards?

Rather than showing real damage to real youths, prosecutors’ and plaintiff attorneys in both cases lambasted platform “design flaws related to apps like Instagram and YouTube instead of specific content” (emphasis mine). That is, the platforms’ design allowed “children” to access “adult content” and third parties to contact children.

Whether real damage ensued has been the ignored question. Even well-resourced attorneys general and Big Law firm plaintiffs have been unable find provable child or teen victims of social media beyond a handful of speculative cases.

Contrast the fake-child, speculative-harm Meta cases with the tens of thousands of real, named human victims suffering real damages caused by major institutions.

New Mexico’s Catholic churches were sued by 400 human – not speculative, not made-up – victims who came forward to charge real child sexual abuses by at least 105 priests in the Santa Fe Archdiocese alone.

The Archdiocese has filed for bankruptcy after paying $121.5 million in damages to victims so far, and lawsuits against churches for victimizing children ages 3 to 15 are spreading across the New Mexico-El Paso region. Victims accuse the Archdiocese of shielding dozens more abusive priests, a level of child-victimization the Meta social media trial didn’t begin to venture.

The Los Angeles Archdiocese has paid $1.5 billion to 1,350 named abuse victims of at least 300 named abusive priests – so far.

In California, nearly 10,000 children and teens were victims of substantiated violent, sexual, and/or psychological abuses (half by multiple maltreatments) by grownups in their homes in 2024, including 144 killed. In New Mexico, over 2,500 (two-thirds by multiple maltreatments), including 14 killed. That’s where children’ and youths’ mental health problems really stem from, teens tell major CDC surveys and analysis by our leading health agency confirms.

This isn’t about child safety

Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc. are virtual entities. They exist solely on screens. They are controlled by users’ easily-reached keyboard tabs allowing site switching, deletion, block user, report user, and turn the whole screen off.

That is why there are so few real child and teenage victims of social media. In the 17 states whose attorneys general have filed suit against social media, their well-lawyered offices with broad access to violence against children cases could cite only a half-dozen even speculative victims.

While the vast majority of teens have proven adept at protecting themselves from online predators, the few victims who civil suit plaintiffs cite turn out to be victims of severe parental, family, and institutional violence and abuses. For example, 16% of teens tell the 2023 CDC youth risk survey they have been cyberbullied, and of these, 84% have also been victimized by parents’ and household adults violent and emotional abuses that afflict four times more teens.

That none of the big players on any side deploring “social media addiction” show any inclination to challenge the institutional forces that really harm children and teens proves volumes. Legislatures at the very least should abolish statutes of limitations in order to allow criminal prosecution of parents/grownups for abuses revealed in civil trials and bar them from profiting from damaging their children.

The New Mexico and Los Angeles juries, narrowly tasked to apportion damage only to the badly-behaved plaintiffs being sued, still did a grave disservice to young people and social responsibility. They rewarded parental atrocities, lawyer greed, and official subterfuge. They damaged the real-life safety of real children and teens.

Meta, Google, and Big Tech are already parlaying civil and legislative cases to push their power campaigns to grab even more private information on users (especially children) through “age verification” identity measures, censor user political content they don’t like, and eliminate smaller competitors through “kids online safety” legislation.

Bad actors from all sides united to exploit young people, and bad actors are winning.