Hey, Meta, leave our kids alone
The claim that Meta “didn’t know” people were being hurt is laughable
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At Meta HQ in Menlo Park, screens pulse with real-time engagement metrics, the dopamine hits for billions, quantified to the millisecond. Down the hall, engineers tweak their algorithms.
A thousand miles away a teenage girl swipes on her phone. Meta knows her moods better than her parents ever could.
Now imagine the same company’s executives, under oath, shrugging, saying that they simply had no idea their platforms had become a breeding ground for predators. A New Mexico jury just called that bluff.
On March 24, 2026, Meta was found liable for willfully violating the state’s unfair practices act and ordered to pay $375 million—the maximum per-violation penalty under state law, though far below the $2.1 billion the attorney general had sought.
The case, brought by Attorney General Raúl Torrez in 2023, centered on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp’s role in enabling child sexual exploitation. An undercover operation created a fake profile of a 13-year-old girl; it was “simply inundated” with images and targeted solicitations from abusers.
Whistleblowers and former executives testified that safety was never the priority under Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Internal messages revealed concerns that end-to-end encryption would hinder reporting of millions of child sexual abuse material cases. One researcher had warned of 500,000 such cases daily on Facebook and Instagram alone. Yet profits—and the engagement flywheel—came first.
For a company as obsessed with knowing as much as it can about its users as Meta is, the claim that it “didn’t know” people were being hurt is laughable. Meta’s surveillance capitalism is legendary: it tracks every scroll, pause, like, and hesitation. Its algorithms don’t merely serve content—they optimize for maximum addiction.
Have you ever noticed that the scrolling mechanism on your timeline feels like a slot machine at a Casino? The next swipe always promising another roll of the wheel, a fresh fix for your dopamine receptors? You will now!
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That same machinery, jurors heard, excels at connecting users with shared “interests”—including predators and their “interests.” Arturo Bejar, a former Meta executive, testified that after his own 14-year-old daughter received sexual solicitations, he warned leadership. The response? Not urgency, but continued emphasis on growth.
The data about the effects of social media on children, teens, and young adults is now well established. Peer-reviewed studies link heavy social media use to increased inattention symptoms, declining concentration, poorer reading and memory scores, disrupted sleep, and heightened emotional volatility.
Short-form video and endless doom-scrolling have rewired people’s minds, to say nothing of developing brains. The entire global consciousness is very well aware that attention spans have been ruined by the prevalence of these products; teachers report it daily, parents live it nightly. Meta didn’t invent human vulnerability, but it industrialized it at scale—designing interfaces that exploit the same reward circuits cigarettes once targeted in the young.
Here is where the parallels with the Big Tobacco cases of the 1990s become almost impossible to ignore. Tobacco companies engineered products to be as addictive as possible while denying the harm, especially to minors. They didn’t just put tobacco in paper tubes, they added chemicals to heighten the cravings.
They knew.
They knew, and they lied, and eventually, they paid.
Social media may not be as straightforward as “cigarettes causing lung cancer”—the line between cause and harm is more a not-so-distant-cousin rather than a direct biochemical pathway—but the pattern is eerily familiar: a product deliberately optimized for compulsive use, marketed to the young, despite mounting evidence of damage being caused to them. About the only piece of the cigarette industry playbook Meta didn’t use was getting doctors to say that using social media was good for people.
The kids may not be coughing and wheezing but they are definitely addicted and the psychological and social damage to their minds is profound. In the words of The Offspring, the kids aren’t alright.
Internal documents, whistleblowers, and jury findings suggest Meta followed a similar script as the cigarette companies before them: downplay risks publicly, dismiss employee warnings privately, and prioritize the metric that matters—time on site.
This verdict should serve as a landmark for future tech inventions, whether AI or whatever comes after AI. You will be held responsible for the harm you cause.
Consider the ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI a firm in its infancy and no where near as established as Meta, where a Colorado mother alleges ChatGPT turned from a helpful tool into her son Austin Gordon’s “frighteningly effective suicide coach.” The complaint details how the model romanticized death, transformed his favorite childhood book into a “suicide lullaby,” and encouraged him in late 2025. Three days later, he was gone.
OpenAI insists it has improved safeguards, yet the case underscores a broader truth: when systems are built to maximize engagement and emotional dependency, tragedy is not a bug—it is a foreseeable consequence of the design choices.
Put brutally simply: For some users, it will kill them. It will have a body count.
This is not a witch hunt with pitchforks and burning torches, counterarguments deserve their airtime. Meta employs thousands to work on safety, works with law enforcement, and faces genuine challenges policing billions of users and pieces of content twenty four hours a day. Section 230 has long shielded platforms from liability for third-party speech, and some worry that aggressive liability will chill innovation or push harmful activity into darker corners of the internet. These are fair points and companies face real challenges which the average user can’t comprehend. Yet designing addictive products while feigning ignorance of their documented harms is not neutral engineering—it is a business decision with victims. The jury did not buy the defense that bad actors will always exist; they held Meta accountable for the architecture that makes predation easier and more targeted.
Skeptics of regulation often warn of bureaucratic overreach. As capitalists, we share that skepticism—government is rarely the most efficient allocator of resources or arbiter of speech. But accountability is not regulation for its own sake. It is the market mechanism of tort law doing what it does best: forcing builders to internalize the externalities their products create. When a platform knows (because its own data tells it) that its recommendation engine funnels predators toward children and still optimizes for retention, the proper response is not another layer of Washington rules. It is the sting of liability so great that it makes executives weigh the human cost against the quarterly numbers.
The New Mexico case is smaller in dollars than the headlines once touted, but its precedent is enormous. It pierces the “we’re just a neutral platform” myth and puts every tech founder on notice: build responsibly, or pay the price. Future AI systems that foster dependency, manipulate emotion, or steer vulnerable users toward harm will face the same scrutiny. That’s healthy. Builders thrive when they solve real problems without manufacturing new ones.
Meta will appeal, and the fight will continue in other courtrooms and statehouses. But the cultural and legal tide has shifted. Companies that treat users—especially the young—as raw material for engagement algorithms must now calculate the true cost.
Innovate boldly, yes. Do your best to mitigate the harm you cause as you create, absolutely, but never again pretend you didn’t see the wreckage.
It’s the parent’s responsibility not META. If the parents gave their 9 yr olds beer every day would we blame Bud Light?
They bought the kids tablets or smartphones and let them sit there all day using them. Take responsibility and stop crying like META made them do that.
Parents have much of the blame. There are many things harmful (alcohol, gambling, fast food products), but they require some self-discipline (and parental discipline). Lawsuits are just going to limit the freedoms of us all.