Social media trials are the flashing marquee warning of adults’ alarming hostility toward young people. Authoritarians and Big Tech are the winners.
An attorney general pursues money and limelight instead of prosecuting real child predators. A jury awards an abusive mother millions. The motive: punishing youths.
As a former journalist covering police and courts, member and president of a state child abuse prevention board, and long-time worker with youth and reporter of child abuse cases, I have never been as discouraged as I am now. The outcomes of civil trials accusing Meta of “addicting children” to social media are appalling.
Let me lead off with a stark reality teens face, shown in large-scale, comprehensive surveys by the Centers for Disease Control, the USA’s leading health agency: 84% of teenagers who report being cyberbullied and bullied at school ALSO report being violently and emotionally abused by parents and grownups in their homes – and teens are abused by household grownups four times more than by peers.
Teenagers are not wantonly bullying each other in some frighteningly unheard-of social-media world, as grownups yearn to believe. Rather, a small fraction of teens bullied by grownups at home are both victims and perpetrators of bullying online and at school. That political, professional, and media leaders refuse to face this elemental fact demonstrates today’s crisis of adulthood severely victimizing young people.
Generation Z understands that offline and online worlds are intimately integrated because that’s the reality they grew up with. Powerful older interests indulge moral panics against teens and social media as an excuse not to face the harsh deterioration of adulthood afflicting young people.
There were no good actors in the Meta “social media addiction” trials. All players prioritized contempt and repression toward young people that yielded the atrocious outcomes.
New Mexico’s appalling “punish kids, not predators” trial
In my worst cynicism, I never expected a state attorney general would post fake child accounts with pornography-adjacent pictures of real children, collect information on hundreds of predators and traffickers… and instead of pursuing prosecution of criminals victimizing children, would file a grandstanding civil suit to grab some bucks from media giants… and then be celebrated for his derelictions.
Just one example of the horrific tactics the New Mexico Department of Justice’s 225-page filing against media giant Meta admitted:
In September 2023, State investigators developed a Facebook profile for Rosalind Cereceres, a 40-year old fictional “bad mother” to a 13 year-old chat persona, Issa Bee. Cereceres lives in Albuquerque and is described as a Colombian immigrant from Medellin, who primarily speaks Spanish and Portuguese. Based on experience with the symbols, language and earmarks of potential human trafficking, the profile incorporated signals that Cereceres was interested in trafficking her daughter… Within three days of establishing the profile, and without any efforts to promote the account, Cereceres’ account reached its maximum limit of 5,000 Facebook friends and over 3,000 followers. As shown below, the pictures Cereceres posted of her daughter showed her to be visibly under-age and Cereceres referred to her by her age. Commenters on Cereceres’ account responded with inappropriate expressions of love or interest in the girl.
This was just one of the fake profiles the attorney general’s office publicly posted on social media, accompanied by often-salacious pictures of real children (handy for pedophiles’ unmaskings and photo searches) that – surprise! – drew “numerous” responses (“inundated” was his public term) from wannabe predators.
Shockingly, New Mexico’s chief law enforcement officer evidenced no effort at identifying or referring to proper jurisdictions for prosecution even the most identifiable potential predators – not even ones locatable in New Mexico.
Instead, the attorney general filed a splashy civil suit from which his office pocketed $375 million amid loud boastings of “protecting children” – with every “predator” his fake profiles lured left free to maraud.
New Mexico bravely punishing Big Tech? Not even a scratch. Meta, the world’s 10th largest corporation capitalized at $1.3 trillion, doesn’t care about piddling-millions payouts, easily reducible on appeal.
The real losers are young people, who suffer the trifecta of potential banishment by the millions from social media sites they need, zero added protection from “traffickers” and “predators,” and further identity exploitation by Big Tech using “age verification” schemes.
Plausibly, Meta and YouTube, based on their own damning internal memos and uncompelling testimony of Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerburg, violated New Mexico’s consumer protection laws by falsely representing their platforms’ safety.
So, why didn’t the attorney general pursue a far more potent criminal complaint? Three cynical reasons: criminal guilt is harder to prove than civil liability; there’s no money in criminal proceedings; and tacit law-enforcement/gentlemen’s understandings exempt wealthy execs from jail. Just siphon harmless loot from shareholders’ built-in cost-of-doing-business slush.
If New Mexico cared about young people, the legislature would investigate the attorney general’s child-endangering fakery, confiscate the $375 million award, and distribute it to the state’s many young human victims of real abuse, neglect, and disadvantage.
The Los Angeles “social media addiction” trial: rewarding abuse
Having worked with real abused children and teens, I cannot in my lowest moods fathom a juror, politician, or reporter who could hear victim “Kayley’s” testimony detailing her mother’s years of inflicting brutal abuses that led to her years of mental anguish and sister’s suicide… and then award her violent, money-grubbing mother $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages as if she were the victim.
True, a civil trial jury technically is limited to apportioning liability between named defendants, media giants Meta and YouTube in this case. Media moguls deserve punishment in criminal and legislated form that would really hurt them through congressionally mandated breakup, anti-trust prosecution, user privacy rights, and censorship bans – not sniveling civil trials brought by dubious interests.
If ever a jury had the chance to stand up for abused children like “Kayley” against their multiple abusers, the Los Angeles Superior Court jury was it. A thundering no-verdict and juror tirades to the press lambasting exploitative Meta, YouTube, abusive parents, and greedy civil-suit lawyers as unholy exploiters of children would have sent a truly youth-affirming message to the world.
The Los Angeles jury blew it. They greased the already-slick slope for thousands’ more abusive parents and their predatory lawyers to line up for big money awards for destroying kids’ lives. They speeded Big Tech’s political assault raging globally to implement “age verification” schemes falsely hyped to “protect children” that vastly expand online corporate giants’ and authoritarian governments’ harvesting of user data, censorship of information they don’t like, and crushing of smaller competitors.
Equally devastating, these civil suits’ outcomes severely punish young people by further fueling the torch-wielding global mob’s political crusade to wreck Generation Z’s inconvenient online activism on corporate/government-threatening issues like climate change, Gaza, civil justice, war, rising fascism, and social tolerance.
If Los Angeles cared about young people, its county attorney would be investigating criminal charges against “Kayley’s” mother and father, and lawmakers would be banning abusive parents from collecting civil judgments and abolishing statutes of limitations for prosecuting abuses by plaintiffs revealed in civil trials.
These trials’ anti-youth outcomes reveal how “protecting children!” is a subterfuge for reducing children and youth to willfully endangered commodities in order to serve adults’ self-exonerations and wealthy interests’ financial and political largesse. More on this alarming trend soon.
Thank you Mike for your powerful illuminating piece. Here in Australia where all MSM were cheerleaders for our Governments social media ban for teenagers under 16, we didnot hear anything about the perspective on the LA trial of META & You Tube that you have given your readers. Our teenagers here have been abandoned by both our govt and media here. Their voice, their agency , autonomy, their rights etc The whole social media ban built on Haidt propaganda . Our govt rejected pre ban submission from 140 youth mental health experts opposing the ban. Now of course they are bragging " Victory. We told you so," after LA jury decision. It's so demoralising. I write as a retired social worker having worked in criminal justice , Child protection, disability, aged care, research, here & in London UK. Trying to get the media here to understand the benefits of social media and the implications for empowerment of teenagers is impossible as they have so much invested in vilifying social media. My X feed over past 18 months filled with all the evidence based YMH & social media studies from UK & USA . e need your voice & expertise Mike, Thank you.
One of the problems in the present, is that young people are letting moves like this happen, because they won’t criticize their parents. If you compare parent blaming now as to decades ago like the 1970s and 1980s, this isn’t really happening these days. This makes me fear that today’s kids are being programmed to be household dictators of the future, to their yet to be born kids, and this will eventually lead to regression in kid parent relationships and communication between them. For myself, I have personal experience of parents being low communication, household dictators, yet being overprotective in the real world which Haidt likes to say, so things aren’t as simple as Haidt seems to think. Like, I get it, I really do. Today’s young people aren’t happy and social media is partly responsible. As Haidt and his allies like to say, the youth need greater separation and independence from their parents. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. No matter what, neglectful parentings is harmful. By urging parents to be more ‘demanding’ as Jonathan T. Rothwell suggests, while simultaneously excusing neglect, an entirely new set of problems are bound to happen. I do agree with Haidt in that social media is largely detrimental to children, but what I don’t agree with him and his allies, is the seemingly overlooking of the potential negative repercussions for removing this, as well as almost totally excusing harmful parent behavior.