The Protectors v. the Predators: The Case Against Meta
In our Left & the Law segment on KBOO Community Radio on June 8th, 2026, attorney Mike Snedeker and I take up two recent civil suits against Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) and discuss the legal strategies that won over juries in these cases centered on the harmful effects of these social media platforms, and particularly their harmful effects on youth.
Prosecution and defense arguments in jury trials in California and in New Mexico centered on interpretations of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act enacted by Congress in 1996.
Often called the law that created the 21st century internet, Section 230 protects servers and users from liability for objectionable content. The law also provides legal protection for content moderation, including content deemed “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.”
Until these recent cases, Meta has been able to enlist Section 230 to shield the company from governmental regulation and liability. In our Left & the Law review of these recent lawsuits, we look at some of the measures that critics are calling for in protecting youth from the harmful effects of online apps and how young people themselves are pushing back on corporate control of social media.
As we prepare for our radio segments, Mike and I often take up the personal and professional associations that come to mind with the cases under discussion. On the professional side, we met decades ago through our shared research and writing on child protection agencies and their role in the “Satanic ritual abuse” scare of the 1990s. On the personal side, we both grew up in white middle-class families during the repressive post-war era. This was a time of televised congressional hearings with the mandate of protecting a decisively conservative vision of morality against the rebellious currents of that era.
My Story: When Bambi Was Too Dangerous to Watch
In the fundamentalist Christian home of my youth, movies were strictly forbidden. As a grade schooler, I suffered many humiliations over this policy. When the mom at a friend’s birthday party hauled everyone in her station wagon to a local theater to watch Bambi, I had to go home.
It was the 1950s and the McCarthy hearings were targeting the film industry in Hollywood for communist sympathies and for subversion of public morality. Walt Disney was himself a stalwart supporter of McCarthyism. In 1947 he went before HUAC to name leaders of the Screen Cartoonists Guild, claiming that they were labor agitators and members of or influenced by the Communist Party.
But my mother was not seduced by Disney’s distancing his studios from the problems of Hollywood. The sanitized (and very white) allure of Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Bambi failed to satisfy the strict scrutiny of my mother’s personal censorship codes. When I appealed for mercy, she would inevitably instruct me in the slippery slope argument: “Today it’s Bambi; tomorrow it’s Lolita” (that was not her exact reference but something to that effect). Her backup argument—one that actually stayed with me in thinking critically about films—was that “these films have a lot of hidden messages. They are not just entertainment.” We never talked about what those messages were.
The Hays Code that governed censorship in the film industry during the post-war era also failed to convince her. Once again, she insisted that there was a lot more going on in films that went under the radar of the Code and its list of prohibited images and words. And decades of psychoanalytic and feminist film analysis would support her in that general critical stance.
Mike’s Story: When Comic Books Became a National Scandal
Mike, on the other hand, had more freedom from watchful parents. He could walk to the local movie house on Saturday to watch a double-feature. The stacks of comic books under his bed did not arouse parental suspicion. Mike was a big fan of the Little Lulu comics which feature a spunky, stubborn girl (Lulu) and her friend Tubby, a boy she spars with, and her best friend Annie. The Lulu series had a distinctively proto-feminist message: girls are as smart and clever as boys and need to band together to fight for their rights. (Lulu and her friends confront the “Clubhouse boys” who try to enforce their “no girls allowed” rules.)
The EC comics seemed to Mike to be part of the landscape but they were the Horror Corner. He was jarred when he saw the comic book part of his life spill over into the daily newspapers that his father religiously read. It took a minute for him to realize that actual grown-ups were saying that reading a comic book would somehow shape your future behavior. That realization was perhaps the first time he felt that grownups, some of them anyway, were caught up in some kind of national hysteria.
The Comics Code Authority, created by the Comics Magazine Association of America in 1954, was a response to moral panic over the burgeoning popularity of comics, particularly crime and horror comics, and modeled after the Hays Code in Hollywood. Some of this anxiety was fueled by the bestselling book, Seduction of the Innocent published in the same year. Authored by German American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, the book targets crime comics as a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. The book asserts that “if one were to set out to show children how to steal, rob, lie, cheat, assault and break into houses, no better method could be devised” than letting them read comic books. As supporting evidence, Wertham argues that 95% of children placed in reform school for delinquent behavior read comics. Based on the popular influence of his book, Wertham was invited to testify in 1954 before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. Like other figures in 1950s inquisitions, the psychiatrist’s scrutiny of comics also fixated on anxiety over homosexual seductions of youth. The Batman and Robin comics in particulars, he warned, expressed “a wish-dream of two homosexuals living together.”
The Cases Against Meta: Moral Panic?
Just as there were in Mike and my youth, there are currents of moral panic in contemporary discourse over youth mentally destroyed through their use of social media. The history of campaigns to protect youth from corruptive influences should give us pause. Unlike movies and comic books, however, Meta represents a qualitatively and quantitatively different threat. These platforms intrude on personal life in very intimate ways. At the same time, young people find creative ways of ways using these tools. In our Left & the Law segment on the cases against Meta, we look at forms of resistance among youth to social media in their lives.
Discussion of the monstrous side of Meta often overlooks how these companies are products of capitalism and particularly the lightly regulated reign of industries so central to the dominant American story of progress. Not unlike the film industry and the companies publishing comic books in earlier eras, the profit motive drives this generation’s social media companies as well. As a college drop-out in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and his former roommates/co-developers pitched Facebook as a place for “building community and connection.” In 2012, Zuckerberg enlisted mobile phone companies in the global South with the noble aim of bringing internet access to hundreds of millions of underserved people. He is now one of the richest people in the world and, like other capitalists, measures growth in how much value (profit) can be extracted from the human labor behind his products.
In the case of social media platforms, users themselves are the living base of this system of extraction. The longer users stay on a platform, the more revenue in advertising. Indeed, Meta and Google control over half of the world’s digital advertising market and over 40% of the entire global advertising market.
A former liberal supporting LGBT rights, immigrant rights, and the Black Lives Matter Movement, Zuckerberg proclaimed himself in 2025 an avid Trump supporter. In January 2025, he proclaimed (with no apparent shame) that “We now have a U.S. administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning and that will defend our values and interests abroad.” Much like other Silicon Valley tech liberals, Zuckerberg has turned hard right in embracing the Trump regime. He aggressively opposes EU regulations of his social media companies, stating “we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies.”
Part of the story of Meta that unfolds in recent lawsuits centers on the federal government’s role in the commercialization of the internet at the turn of the 21st century. A 2025 Stanford Law article asserts that “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is the most important law in the history of the internet. It is also one of the most flawed.” Representatives Christopher Cox (R-CA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced the provision in 1995 as the “Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act” which was folded into the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Their goal was to protect nascent internet startups from lawsuits and regulation.
In our Left & the Law segment on June 8th, Mike and I take up the stories and strategies behind the recent jury trials in California and New Mexico. And we look at how lawsuits signify a shift in public views on social media and how they affect regulatory initiatives. We close the segment with some of the initiatives of young people as they struggle with intense ambivalence over the place of social media in their lives.
Watch the Introduction:
Join us on the Old Mole Variety Hour on KBOO Community Radio and listen to the whole 25-minute segment on Monday!
