On August 12, a federal court in Oakland, California, began selecting a jury for a case that could reshape the boundaries of responsibility for social media. The states of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey accuse Meta of deliberately designing Facebook and Instagram to keep minors using the products continuously, and of making misleading claims about their safety; 29 states also accuse Meta of collecting and using data from children under 13 without parental consent. Opening statements are expected to begin on August 18, and the trial may last six to eight weeks.
The states are asking for more than compensation. They also want the court to order Meta to impose age limits, eliminate infinite scroll, and change several product mechanisms. Meta denies wrongdoing, stressing that the company has long worked with parents, experts, and law enforcement, and has already introduced protective features such as teen accounts, contact and content restrictions, and time limits set by parents.
This is not the first time social media has gone to court over teenagers. In 2023, a coalition of state attorneys general already filed suit against Meta; this March, a New Mexico jury found that Meta had made misleading claims about platform safety and imposed a civil fine of 375 million dollars. On August 6, a court in that state further found that Meta’s platforms had substantially contributed to a public nuisance in the area of youth mental health, ordered it to pay another 567 million dollars, and required it, over the next five years, to implement measures such as restrictions on minors’ use, controls on notifications, and preventing inappropriate contact between adults and children. Meta says it will appeal.
The most important change in this round of litigation is that what the court is examining is no longer only what content appeared on the platform, but also the form in which the platform presented that content: whether infinite scroll, autoplay, nighttime notifications, public likes, and personalized recommendations constitute harm mechanisms designed by the company itself.
From the perspective of media ecology, Suixuan’s Hu Yilin believes this turn is indeed more to the point than simply holding a particular post responsible. “The medium is the message” means that the way information is arranged, split up, and constantly refreshed may shape human perception and life more profoundly than what any single piece of content says.
But he immediately drew a line: “The freedom to criticize and the bias of governance are not the same thing.”
Media criticism cannot automatically become administrative power
Hu Yilin is by no means defending the product form of social media. In his view, short-video platforms’ slicing up of attention, and the erosion of sustained reading ability caused by endless information streams, are fully worthy of severe criticism from philosophers, educators, and cultural critics. Indeed, compared with Meta, Douyin-style short-video media may be a more典型 expression of this problem.
However, proving that a certain media form deserves criticism, and proving that the government has the right to redesign that media for everyone, are two completely different tasks.
The left can criticize the right, serious readers can criticize the penny press, print advocates can criticize television, and teachers can criticize students for excessively scrolling short videos. The reason modern civilization permits these debates is not that society has already found the one correct media life, but that different values can compete in the public sphere.
If the government, merely because a certain cultural criticism sounds reasonable, turns it into a nationwide product rule, then what the critic obtains is no longer just a right to speak, but the power to force others to live according to their own value judgments.
Protecting children is first and foremost a parental responsibility
In recent years, countries have often used “protecting adolescents” as a reason to set minimum ages, identity verification, usage limits, and algorithmic restrictions for social media. Hu Yilin concedes that this goal itself is certainly legitimate; his question is that children’s media life originally falls mainly within the scope of family educational responsibility.
Parents can decide whether their child watches television, whether they have a mobile phone, how long they practice piano each day, and whether they can use social media, and they should also bear responsibility for those decisions. So long as it has not developed into serious abuse or neglect of guardianship, educational ideas in general should not be uniformly decided by the government.
In his view, playing the piano, scrolling Facebook, playing soccer, or reading novels can all make children intensely engaged. Parents may think the first is worth encouraging and the latter should be restricted, or they may judge differently. The state cannot, on the basis of some currently fashionable hierarchy of educational values, declare that one kind of obsession is inherently noble and another inherently harmful.
Nor is the analogy between the internet and alcohol or tobacco fully valid. When children buy alcohol or cigarettes at a convenience store, they are usually leaving a space where parents can maintain continuous control; the clerk has already seen the buyer in person, and a rough age check does not additionally create a vast digital identity system. By contrast, the entry points through which children encounter social media are mainly the computer at home, the tablet, and the phone provided by parents—devices that are already controllable by their owners and guardians.
Hu Yilin therefore believes that “at an entry point that can clearly be controlled by parents, adding an extra age-verification gate to replace parental control is neither necessary nor just.” Age verification would not only transfer parents’ educational authority to platforms and the government; it would also force adult users to submit ID documents, facial images, or other data in order to continually prove that they are not children.
Every new medium has at one time been described as poison for children
In media history, concern over children becoming addicted to new technologies is nothing new.
Plato, speaking through Socrates, criticized writing for damaging memory; after the rise of the mass newspaper, elites criticized readers for abandoning serious knowledge and becoming addicted to crime, celebrities, and urban curiosities; radio, film, and television were then denounced for driving children away from nature, sport, reading, and family communication. Neil Postman’s critique of television’s logic of entertainment still has explanatory force today.
These criticisms are not necessarily wrong. Writing did indeed change memory, television did indeed change attention, and social media is indeed changing the relationship between people and information, friends, and self-image.
But the cultural consequences of technology are complex. Writing weakened certain oral memory abilities, yet it established civilization’s external memory system; newspapers spread gossip, but they also formed modern public opinion; television made people passively entertained, but it also created new forms of news, education, and art.
Older media found it difficult to authenticate every reader, and even if the government wanted to lock up books, newspapers, and television programs, it would have been hard to build a comprehensive gatekeeping system. By the internet era, technology seemingly made it possible at last to require everyone to prove identity, age, and usage eligibility, and political power thus more easily developed a governing impulse.
Hu Yilin worries that the long-term civilizational cost of this governance may be more serious than a child spending a bit more time scrolling social media. Systems of identity verification, behavior tracking, and product control established again and again in the name of child protection will not naturally remain confined to children.
“Exploiting weakness” is not enough to constitute illegality
The plaintiffs describe infinite scroll, notifications, and recommendation systems as designs that exploit adolescents’ psychological weaknesses. Hu Yilin believes that, by itself, “exploiting weakness” cannot establish a clear legal boundary.
Technology itself arises from human imperfection. Because people are unwilling to walk, they create vehicles; because memory is limited, they invent writing; because they wish to save physical effort, they make machines. Commerce likewise constantly responds to human vanity, laziness, anxiety, and the pursuit of convenience.
News exploits people’s fear of missing important information; mall promotions use “last day” to trigger the fear of missing out; cosmetics ads exploit appearance anxiety, health supplements exploit health anxiety, and trendy products exploit the desire to display status.
Hu Yilin put it bluntly: “If ‘exploiting weakness’ is wrong, then the reckoning should have started in the age of advertising, not only now when people suddenly remember it in the Meta case.”
This does not mean that all commercial methods are legitimate. A company may persuade consumers, but it may not forge consumers’ consent; it may make the exit button insufficiently conspicuous, but it may not secretly turn notifications back on after the user has clearly disabled them; it may promote its services, but it may not induce consumers, through false data, ambiguous terms, or deliberately shrunken fonts, to make commitments they do not understand.
The boundary should not be “whether the product is attractive enough,” but whether the company has deceived, coerced, or hollowed out the choice the user has already expressed.
“Half-truths” can also constitute fraud
Hu Yilin does not oppose holding Meta responsible for false advertising, but he insists on first clarifying exactly what the company said, what it knew, and how it presented the relevant information.
He uses food advertising as an analogy: a product labeled “0 sucrose” may in fact contain large amounts of corn syrup. Strictly speaking, this is not necessarily completely false, yet it may lead ordinary consumers to form an overall impression that it is “healthier.” If a company knows that this impression does not match the actual nutritional risk, and still uses technically correct statements to promote the product, that may constitute misleading conduct.
“‘Half-truths’ do in fact have the potential to constitute fraud.” He believes a company has no obligation to proactively disclose all internal research, but once it chooses to release safety reports, emphasize specific indicators, or make factual assurances, it cannot use partial truths to create an overall false impression.
This is also why cases of this sort require neutral jurors to take part in the judgment. Deception is sometimes not something that can be determined in isolation from a single sentence; one has to look at the full context, how ordinary consumers would understand it, and whether the company intentionally used a certain wording to steer that understanding.
That said, Hu Yilin still remains reserved about some of the accusations Meta faces. If the company merely says it is “committed to” building a safe, inclusive, and supportive community, and introduces what tools it has already provided, that is more like a declaration of values and direction of effort than an absolute guarantee of real-world outcomes.
A community is not made up entirely by the platform. Meta provides the space for activity, the tools for communication, the basic rules, and the management mechanisms, while the specific participants must also take responsibility for how they speak, how they use the tools, and how they manage their time. One cannot simply attribute every instance of bullying, anxiety, or overuse in a community to the platform’s failure to keep its promises.
Companies are not required to disseminate every scientific conclusion
Hu Yilin also opposes turning Meta into the designated publishing house for youth media studies.
That a company discovers certain users developing bodily anxiety, changes in memory, or negative social comparison does not automatically mean that these outcomes admit only one value-laden interpretation. Writing impairs certain memory capacities, but that does not entail that writing is harmful; social media causes some children to reduce offline activity, but that alone cannot prove that its overall effects are necessarily negative.
Meta does not monopolize research. Universities, media outlets, public-interest organizations, and the government can all study the consequences of social media, and parents themselves are often users of the platform and can form their own direct experience. So long as Meta does not suppress third-party research, falsify data, or publicly claim conclusions directly contrary to known facts, it has no duty to attach a full literature review to every user’s registration page.
No cartoon on television first airs an academic review saying “long-term television viewing may affect children’s health,” and Facebook likewise need not shoulder the entire society’s responsibility for scientific communication every time someone logs in.
Parental controls should be supplied by the market, not uniformly designed by the government
Whether Meta should provide more effective parental-control tools is another question.
Hu Yilin believes that platforms can provide them, and will indeed have a commercial incentive to do so in response to parental demand, but the government should not force every platform to have a particular button, use a particular default setting, or adopt a particular time limit.
Parental controls do not have to be implemented only by Meta. Mobile operating systems can set app time limits, third-party software can manage children’s devices, and other social platforms can make more robust family controls a competitive advantage. If parents value this function, they will be more willing to buy the corresponding phones, apps, or services.
If Meta uses its dominant position to prevent operating systems or third-party tools from functioning, the government can deal with that under antitrust, property-rights, and interoperability principles. A company may refrain from manufacturing a button itself, but it should not be allowed, by virtue of platform power, to tear out the buttons others provide.
Hu Yilin is more inclined to have specific victims bring lawsuits and then have them adjudicated under general law, rather than preemptively drafting a new regime, in the name of child safety, that deeply manages every platform interface. If the problem concerns monopoly, then deal with it as monopoly; if it concerns contractual fraud, then deal with it through contract law and consumer protection; there is no need to repackage every issue as some special right of social-media governance.
When children use things uncontrollably, the first issue is a concrete guardianship problem
Excessive use of social media may indeed coexist with family neglect.
If a child eats several kilograms of sugar every day and suffers long-term harm to health, the parents may have failed in their guardianship responsibilities; even milk, which is usually regarded as healthy, would cause harm if a child drank eight liters a day. Soccer, piano, and reading are not harmful in themselves, but if a child repeatedly skips class, loses sleep, or is physically injured because of them, then the parents likewise must intervene.
Therefore, if a parent knowingly allows a child to spend every night doomscrolling on their phone while the child’s health and school performance obviously deteriorate, and yet persistently refuses to take action, that may constitute serious neglect of guardianship. The state’s intervention in a specific case does not mean the state has the right to uniformly prescribe how many hours a day every family may scroll.
The former is about dealing with a specific guardian who has failed to fulfill their responsibility; the latter presupposes in advance that all parents lack the ability to decide their children’s media lives.
Compensation for fraud and management of products must be strictly distinguished
The New Mexico court simultaneously ordered Meta to pay a huge sum and change several product functions; the plaintiffs in the current federal case in Oakland also hope the court will eliminate infinite scroll, set age limits, and reshape the recommendation system.
Hu Yilin agrees that these two kinds of relief should be kept separate.
If Meta made false factual statements, illegally collected children’s data, forged consent, or if its specific conduct caused demonstrable harm to identifiable individuals, the court can order compensation and can also order the corresponding unlawful conduct to stop.
But if the court goes further and for the long term stipulates how the platform should arrange information, how long users may use it each day, or what values the algorithm must optimize, then it is no longer merely correcting a single tort; it is becoming a continuing product committee.
A judge can determine whether a company has deceived people, but may not be more qualified than parents, users, engineers, cultural critics, and market competitors to decide what kind of media environment the next generation of human beings should live in.
Let different freedoms compete with one another
Hu Yilin’s position is not that society should stop criticizing Meta. On the contrary, the more important media forms are, the more seriously the public should discuss how infinite scroll, short video, algorithmic recommendation, and instant notifications change culture.
Critics can write articles, run schools, invest in serious publications, develop new platforms, launch parental-control products, and also refuse to use Meta. The platform, for its part, can defend its own design, while users and parents choose among different options.
Matters of the market should be left to the market, including the free market of speech. For example, if I think cheap newspapers and television are harming the culture of serious reading, then I can awaken public awareness by freely publishing critical speech; I can insist on writing or invest in serious publications; I can join the television industry to produce better programs; I can enter the education industry to transmit the ideal of serious reading to the public; and so on. But the government should not be allowed to tilt the scales. The free spirit of modern civilization has never referred solely to “freedom of content.” Market freedom, freedom of innovation, freedom of design, freedom of criticism, and so on—these freedoms compete and check one another; that is the normal course of civilization’s evolution. There can never be a state that satisfies everyone. New ideas, new technologies, new fashions—all of them are always controversial. The government should safeguard the public’s right to choose and right to refuse, rather than choosing on the public’s behalf.
What the Meta lawsuit ultimately requires the court to judge are the concrete pieces of evidence: whether the company deceived consumers, whether it illegally collected children’s data, whether certain design features had sufficiently clear causal force in the harm. The current case has not yet reached a final judgment, so one cannot treat the plaintiffs’ claims as facts in advance, nor can one declare that a company bears no responsibility merely because one opposes governmental paternalism.
But the institutional boundary opened up by this lawsuit is far more important than the victory or defeat of Meta alone.
Media-environment studies tell us that platform forms shape people; liberalism reminds us that being able to see the shaping does not mean the government should take over the shaping. A civilized society can sharply criticize its own media and still require public power to remain restrained: to protect people from deception, monopoly, and fabricated consent, rather than deciding for all parents, children, and users what the correct way to live is.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply