As a mother of two children who has often been on the losing side of family battles against screen time, I’ve been closely monitoring New Mexico’s landmark lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. State Attorney General Raúl Torrez took the company to task to protect children “from sexual abuse, online solicitation, and human trafficking.”

I was thrilled to learn that Torrez won penalties totaling nearly a billion dollars over the company’s inadequate warnings to parents about the harms of its product and the resulting impacts of constant social media consumption on children’s mental health.

The New Mexico lawsuit is “groundbreaking and also an affirmation of what many families have been experiencing and concerned about with Instagram for years,” said Haley Hinkle, policy counsel for Fairplay, a nonprofit working to protect children from marketing and predatory digital practices.

She explained that “the public nuisance claims are the first we’ve seen across the country where a state is saying, in general, ‘You have created a burden on families, on our resources, our education system, [and] our health system, in the way that you have treated children.’”

Digital screens are everywhere, and children’s brains are particularly vulnerable to the sophisticated algorithmic delivery of content on Instagram, Facebook, and other social media platforms.

Capitalist responses to children’s digital consumption place the onus of regulating exposure squarely on parents. In addition to navigating a world where sugary drinks and processed foods seduce young taste buds, gun violence lurks near and within schools, and fossil fuel companies jeopardize children’s future, social media addiction is yet another source of parental anxiety.

“What we hear many parents saying, including parents we advocate alongside who lost their children to social media harms, is that this really isn’t a fair fight,” said Hinkle.

Despite the US Surgeon General’s warnings about social media’s disturbing impacts on young people—from eating disorders to suicidal ideation—and federal regulations such as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA), social media companies like Meta have refused to place adequate guardrails to protect children.

“Meta and many other big tech platforms are designed to maximize engagement at all costs,” explained Hinkle. “What that really means is maximizing time and attention, how many clicks kids make on platforms, and how long they spend there. That’s really valuable to social media companies because they can show more ads the longer that a child or adult is on the platform.”

“The more a child does when they’re online, the more data they generate that allows them to be targeted to get more direct ads and targeted to spend more time,” said Hinkle. She called it a “vicious cycle that has been, in many ways, at odds with kids’ health and well-being.”

When public schools began rolling out laptops for classroom use in the early 2000s, I was horrified even as others were of the opinion that preparing children for the digital age was in everyone’s best interest. Today, schools across the country are admitting their overreliance on digital learning was a mistakeand are starting to reverse the misguided trend. For my children and others who spent their formative learning years staring at screens, this mea culpa comes too late.

On top of school screens, kids and parents have to contend with the tantalizing pull of social media feeds, just so Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his investors can extract greater profits from children’s constant online engagement.

The good news is that Zuckerberg and his ilk may soon face constraints on their near-limitless profit-making, thanks not only to New Mexico’s lawsuit but also to a new major federal lawsuit that just began. On August 18, 2026, California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey made opening arguments in a highly anticipated case against Meta. The attorneys general of the four states represent 29 states and are demanding a whopping $200 billion in penalties from the company over violations of various state and federal laws, including COPPA and several consumer protection laws. According to the New York Times, the $200 billion “would be just over 14 percent of the entire stock value of the company.”

California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill eloquently summarized Meta’s business model in her opening statement: “Hook the users. Hold them for as long as they can. Harvest their data. Hide the truth from the public when making public statements.”

This approach is similar to how Big Tobacco and Big Pharmaaddicted people to cigarettes and opioids, respectively. The good news is that the prospect of ending social media’s hold on our children via lawsuits is promising.

The trouble is that the technology underlying Instagram and Facebook’s sophisticated algorithms is generated by armies of programmers and moves faster than government regulators, members of Congress, or even Meta’s own investors understand. “What was difficult for so many years is that social media, [and] these platforms, [were] a black box,” saidHinkle.

Thanks to a former Facebook product manager, Frances Haugen, the public now knows how Meta spun elaborate webs to trap users, especially children. Haugen’s 2021 leak of internal Facebook documents was the basis of extensive reporting led by the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz in what’s now known as “The Facebook Files.”

“Frances’ decision to come forward, and other whistleblowers since then, has been fundamental to allowing everyone to come together and step up and demand more information,” said Hinkle. Haugen’s role will be memorialized in a new movie releasing in theaters this fall called The Social Reckoning. It is a companion film to writer Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed 2010 The Social Network, and could further shift public narratives against Zuckerberg and other tech billionaires.

Another Meta whistleblower, Arturo Béjar, who is the lead witness in the federal trial against his former employer, puts the blame squarely on Zuckerberg for the harm to children. Over and over, the Meta founder, who is worth nearly $200 billion personally, chose his company’s profits over children’s safety and well-being, according to Béjar.

Globally, Meta also faces other major lawsuits. In 2025, Australia enacted a complete ban on social media platformsfor people under 16 years, becoming the first nation in the world to do so. China, India, and other Asian nations, as well as Britain, France, and several European countries, are considering strong regulations and bans, and are launching lawsuits.

“There are limits to what these companies should be able to do, [such as] using advanced techniques to design the platforms that are… targeted at neuroscience and what makes our brains sort of light up, and what’s going to keep us all scrolling,” said Hinkle. “That’s really unfair when it comes to kids and teens, and what we have is really the state saying that enough is enough and you’ve gone too far.”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

avatar

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.