As Meta seeks new legal protections and Congress weighs the Kids Online Safety Act, families are confronting a hard question about where responsibility should fall when a child is harmed in a digital space built and run by someone else.
For most parents, a child’s safety online is a daily, hands-on concern. It looks like a password set here, a screen-time limit there, a conversation about who a teenager is messaging. A legislative fight now unfolding in Washington has little to do with any of that, and yet it could shape the question parents care about most: when a child is harmed in a digital space that a company designed, operates and profits from, who is responsible?
That question moved from the courtroom to Capitol Hill in June. According to Reuters, Meta Platforms has lobbied Congress for legal language that would shield online companies from certain lawsuits brought under state law over harms to people under 18. Reuters reported that the proposed language, which its journalists reviewed, would make online companies immune from many state-law claims tied to the safety or privacy of minors, and that it appeared alongside text designed to override state online-safety laws. Reuters also reported that Meta offered the language in exchange for dropping its opposition to a major federal child-safety bill.
Meta has framed the proposal as an effort to create a single national standard rather than a shield from accountability. A Meta spokesperson, Stephanie Otway, told Reuters the provision “does not extinguish existing lawsuits, nor does it represent blanket immunity,” and said it would place youth-safety rules under federal law instead of a patchwork of state lawsuits and statutes. Critics read it very differently. According to Reuters, a lawyer for the American Association for Justice, a trade group representing trial attorneys, argued that the language would effectively bar parents and school districts from holding social media and artificial-intelligence companies accountable for harm to children. A spokesperson for Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., one of the bill’s sponsors, told Reuters that lawmakers had not seen the specific provision and would not consider it.
A wave of lawsuits behind the lobbying
The lobbying did not happen in a vacuum. Meta, Google’s YouTube and other platforms face thousands of lawsuits from families, school districts, state attorneys general and Native American tribes, all alleging that social media products contributed to compulsive use, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, sleep loss and exposure to exploitation. Most of these cases are consolidated in a federal proceeding in California known as a multidistrict litigation, which court trackers placed at more than 2,600 cases as of June 2026.
It is worth keeping the legal posture clear, because it is easy to blur. These are allegations that the companies dispute, not established findings. The platforms argue that their products offer real benefits, that parents control children’s device access, and that federal law and the First Amendment protect many of their design choices.
Even so, the litigation has begun to produce concrete results. In March 2026, according to NPR and other outlets, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google liable in the first trial of its kind and ordered them to pay a combined $6 million to a young woman who said she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a minor. Both companies said they would challenge the verdict and appeal. Weeks later, according to Kentucky station WKYT and Bloomberg, four companies (Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube) agreed to pay a reported $27 million to settle a Kentucky school district’s case before it became the first federal trial of its kind. The settlements carried no admission of liability. Outcomes like these help explain why any change to the legal rules now carries such high stakes for every party involved.
What the evidence shows, and what it does not
Underneath the legal maneuvering sits a body of evidence that parents have reason to weigh carefully. The U.S. Surgeon General reported in a 2023 advisory that up to 95% of teens ages 13 to 17 use a social media platform, and that more than a third say they use it “almost constantly.” That same advisory concluded there is not yet enough evidence to call social media sufficiently safe for children and adolescents, while also noting that it can offer benefits such as connection, creativity and community for some young people. The picture, in other words, is genuinely mixed, and that is part of what makes it so hard for families to navigate.
Meta has drawn particular scrutiny since 2021, when The Wall Street Journal reported on internal company research as part of its “Facebook Files” series. The Journal reported that Facebook’s own researchers had found Instagram made body-image issues worse for a meaningful share of teenage girls, including findings summarized in internal company slides. Meta disputed how the reporting characterized that research, and Mark Zuckerberg publicly described the findings as inconclusive, noting that many teens also reported positive experiences. For a family trying to make sense of the debate, the careful reading is this: the evidence does not show that every child is harmed, but it does indicate that some children may be, and that platforms have held detailed information about those risks for years.
Why parents cannot fix this alone
Many of the lawsuits focus less on what other users post and more on how the products themselves are built: recommendation algorithms, infinite scroll, push notifications, appearance-altering filters and default privacy settings that can influence how long a child stays online and what they encounter there. That focus matters for families because it marks the outer limit of what parents can do on their own. A parent can set a time limit but cannot inspect an algorithm. A teacher can warn a class about online comparison but cannot change how a feed is ranked. A child can delete an app and still face group chats, viral trends and social pressure that follow them off the screen.
The bill at the center of the current fight is the Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA. According to Reuters, it is sponsored by Blackburn and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and would require platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent specific harms to minors, including compulsive use, and to exercise care around features such as infinite scroll, notifications and beauty filters. Supporters say it would also require greater transparency and independent audits. The bill carries a long history. Reuters reported that the Senate passed an earlier version by a vote of 91-3 in 2024 before it stalled in the House, and that it was reintroduced in 2026 with backing from both party leaders in the Senate.
KOSA also has critics well beyond the industry. Civil-liberties groups and some lawmakers have warned that broad online-safety mandates could lead platforms to over-remove lawful content or could cause unintended harm to vulnerable young people, including LGBTQ youth who rely on online communities for support. That tension is real, and it is a large reason the debate resists simple answers. Parents tend to want safer platforms, and they also want laws that protect children without cutting off useful information or weakening a family’s ability to seek a remedy.
Why This Matters for Families
Stripped of the legislative detail, the issue comes down to where the burden of safety sits. Today, much of it falls on parents, who often learn about a risk only after a child has already encountered it. The companies that design these products hold something parents do not: detailed data about how children behave on their platforms, and direct control over the features that shape that behavior.
If Congress sets new rules, the practical question for families is whether those rules will push platforms to design for children’s well-being from the start, or simply standardize what already exists. A second question is whether families, schools and states keep the ability to go to court when serious harm occurs, or lose it. For a household, that is not an abstraction. It is the difference between having a path to accountability and not having one.
What Happens Next
The road ahead runs on two tracks, one legislative and one legal, and neither is settled.
On the legislative side, KOSA is now tangled in negotiations that, according to Reuters, would package child-safety measures with a separate provision to preempt some state laws on artificial intelligence. Several outcomes are possible. Lawmakers could pass KOSA without Meta’s immunity language, which the bill’s sponsors have publicly rejected. They could pass a narrower version, fold it into a larger AI package, or fail to reach agreement before other priorities take over. Any version that preempts state law would raise its own question for parents. A national standard could mean more consistency from state to state, but depending on its exact wording, it could also limit the state laws and lawsuits that some families have relied on.
On the legal side, the cases continue regardless of what Congress does, unless a new law changes the rules in the middle of the fight. The California verdict is being appealed. The Kentucky settlement removed one closely watched test case from the calendar. Additional test cases, including claims brought by state attorneys general, are expected to reach trial later in 2026. Courts are still working through threshold questions, including how much protection federal law and the First Amendment give to platform design choices, as opposed to the content that users themselves post. Each ruling and settlement sends a signal about the value and viability of the thousands of cases still pending. Broad federal immunity, if enacted, could cut across all of it. Without it, the courts will keep setting the terms case by case.
For families raising children in the age of AI and social media, the takeaway is not that any single company is the villain, nor that parents have somehow failed. It is that responsibility for a child’s safety online is currently shared unevenly, and that the rules governing that balance are being written right now, in courtrooms and committee rooms most parents will never see. The decisions made there will help determine whether safety depends mainly on a parent finding the right setting buried inside an app, or on the people who build these products being required to consider children from the beginning. Either way, the most useful thing a parent can do is stay informed enough to ask the question that started all of this, and to expect a real answer: when a child is harmed online, who is accountable?
Sources and Further Reading
- Reuters, “Exclusive: Meta lobbies Congress for protection from child-harm lawsuits,” reporting by Jody Godoy, June 18, 2026.
- U.S. Surgeon General, “Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023.
- The Wall Street Journal, “The Facebook Files” series, including “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls,” September 2021.
- NPR, coverage of the jury verdict in K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms and YouTube, March 25, 2026.
- WKYT (Lexington, Ky.) and Bloomberg News, coverage of the Breathitt County, Ky., school district settlement, June 2026.
- Court records, In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction / Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 3047, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Editor’s note: This story was reviewed before publication. Legal proceedings and federal legislation discussed in this article remain active and may change.
Managing children’s screen time is one of the most important responsibilities of parents. Excessive screen time can negatively affect children’s mental health, physical well-being, educational development, and social interactions. Setting healthy limits helps ensure their overall growth and well-being.
I suggest internet parental control system.
Thank you for sharing this important point. I agree that parental control systems can be useful, especially for setting healthy limits and keeping children safer online. They work best when combined with communication, trust, and clear family rules.