For years, many parents have had the same uneasy feeling: Social media platforms do not just entertain our children, they seem to capture them. Now, the courts are beginning to say that concern may not be mere parental intuition.
Recently, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable in a case alleging their platforms were designed in ways that addicted a young user and contributed to serious harm. The jury awarded $6 million and assigned most of the responsibility to Meta. Around the same time, a New Mexico jury found that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and safety, and it awarded $375 million in penalties under state law. Meta has said it disagrees with the verdicts and plans to appeal. These cases are not the final word, but they are a significant cultural marker. They suggest that the public, and now some juries, are becoming less willing to treat harmful platform design as just the price of modern life.
This matters because it clarifies something parents have long sensed but often struggled to name. The problem is complex, and is not simply that children are weak-willed or that mothers and fathers are inattentive. Some technologies are intentionally built to hold attention, flatten stopping cues and keep users coming back. Testimony in the California case focused on features like infinite scroll and autoplay, tools that are easy to describe as convenient but hard to deny are engineered for prolonged engagement. When adults struggle to resist that pull, it should not surprise us that children do, too.
Still, we have to resist a different oversimplification too: blaming Big Tech for everything and parents for nothing. Families are not powerless. In fact, one of the oldest truths about family life is that children need limits before they understand why those limits matter. Love has always involved boundaries. Bedtimes, curfews, table manners, driver’s licenses, spending money, dating rules — none of these were invented because children enjoy restraint. They exist because maturity takes time, and parents are called to protect and shape what children cannot yet regulate on their own. Devices and social media belong in that same category.
The research supports a balanced response. The U.S. Surgeon General has warned that social media can pose a risk of harm to youth mental health and has called for action not only from companies and policymakers but from parents and guardians as well. The American Psychological Association has likewise urged adults to recognize that the effects of social media depend on the child, the content, the context and the amount of use.