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Parents are desperate for help to protect their children from harmful social media platforms following two bombshell court rulings last week that fined the tech giant Meta with penalties in the millions.
“Ninety-five percent of our kids are using these products that we know are harmful,” Julie Frumin, a 43-year-old mother of two from Westlake Village, north of Los Angeles, fumed to The Post. “We need help. Help us!”
But others finally see more than a glimmer of hope in the wake of the cases.
Deb Schmill, founding member of ParentsSOS, helped craft legislation for phone-free schools in Massachusetts. Her daughter, Rebecca (Becca) Mann Schmill, was 18 when she died of fentanyl poisoning from drugs she purchased through a social media platform.
Schmill told The Post that the court victories are a “watershed moment,” proclaiming that they “are a major first step toward ending one of the most shameful public health failures in modern American history.”
On Tuesday, a jury in New Mexico ruled that Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, prioritized profits over safety, misled users, and failed to protect children from sexual predators. The jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties to 37,500 users, the maximum penalty allowed in the state.
The tech company denies any wrongdoing and plans to appeal the verdict.
The next day, a jury in Los Angeles sided with a 20-year-old woman, known only by her first name Kaley, who had accused Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube of making her addicted to their apps through features like scrolling and autoplay. Meta is now liable for $4.2 million in damages, and Google for $1.8 million.
Both Meta and YouTube insist that their platforms are safe for kids — but tech companies are facing more lawsuits all over the country.
When Frumin, a licensed marriage and family therapist, heard the verdicts, she shed tears of joy.
“It’s long overdue, this moment of accountability,” she said. Her children, a 9-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son, are not allowed to have phones or use social media. “But honestly, I’ve had this unfair advantage.”
As a therapist for more than two decades, she has witnessed how platforms affect teenagers’ attention spans, “their self-esteem, their feelings about their bodies,” and how they cause conflicts within their families.
One Manhattan mother — a nurse with three daughters, aged 3, 6, and 10 — cited the “ridiculous” number of parents “who don’t understand screens are dangerous, and so is social media.” The mom, who works the night shift at an assisted living facility, told The Post that she hoped the court decision would raise awareness in the “uphill battle” for parents — and also push lawmakers to pass legislation.
“Hopefully, they will raise the legal age kids can have social media so it’s not considered the norm to have it and kids aren’t pushing back,” she told The Post. “When all the friends have it, it makes it a lot harder for the parents to forbid it.”
Not that some parents haven’t made strident efforts to mitigate the potential harms on their children.
Veronica Feliciano, a 43-year-old waitress and mother of two from the Bronx, told The Post she had not even heard about the court cases, but favors parents drawing a distinctive line.
“I think phones should be illegal for kids until they’re 18. If you try to take away the phone from a teen, they act crazy,” said Feliciano, who has a 14-year-old girl and a toddler son. “They wanna run away, and they wanna call the cops on you.
“My son is 2, he only gets the iPad two hours on the weekend, and it has to be controlled. Because we don’t want screen addiction,” she continued. “But 10 years ago, when my daughter was his age, I didn’t know what we know today.”
Feliciano herself understands the danger all too well, telling The Post that a friend of her daughter once started spreading hurtful lies about her family online.
“Sometimes social media causes real-life problems,” Feliciano said about the incident. “I feel like there has to be some kind of law.”
However, a Manhattan father of three teenagers, two sons and a daughter, suggested that restricting kids from using social media would socially isolate them.
“They only communicate with each other on Snapchat for texting and Instagram and TikTok for sharing videos and pics of themselves and commenting,” the dad, who requested anonymity, told The Post.
To him, the court victories are “meaningless” — the genie, he said, is out of the bottle.
Furmin, who is a member of Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA), sees a lot of parents who struggle, “trying to carry the weight of all of this, and oftentimes parents throw their hands up.” They tell their teen child to get off the phone, but the kid is so addicted, they refuse — and that can cause “nightmares of family conflicts” that Frumin blames on the tech companies.
“It has been proven in a court of law. We saw the internal documents. These companies design these products for maximum engagement,” Frumin vented. “They did not care about our kids’ safety or well-being. And so now we have harmful products that these kids are using.”
Other parents complained to Frumin that they constantly take their kids to as many activities as possible just to keep them off their screens — but she said all precautions go out the window when the kids head off to classrooms.
“A lot of these parents are trying really hard … And then they send their kid to school, and they’re sitting on a Chromebook all day, and they’re looking at different apps, and they can get past all these internet filters too,” Frumin said. “We’ve got to shift the way we do things, but we need help as parents. We need legislation.
“This burden should not be on us alone. It’s too heavy of a lift,” an exasperated Frumin said.
That burden has weighed heavily on ParentsSOS site leader Schmill, whose daughter Becca had been self-medicating with deadly fentanyl to cope with the trauma of having been raped by a boy she met on a social media party chat when she was 15.
The rape was followed by cyberbullying, as detailed on ParentsSOS, where dozens of other parents have shared their heartbreaking stories of losing a child to social media-related incidents.
The devastated mother told The Post in an email that she hoped Congress would now push for “a strong version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) that mirrors the Senate bill that passed that chamber with a historic 91–3 vote last session.”
Of course, parents themselves, too, “are addicted” to tech, admitted Lissette Rosario, a reading comprehension professional from the Bronx, telling The Post, “We are used to being forced to use technology as a way of life.”
But as adults, they have an advantage over children, whose brains are not fully developed yet and are more susceptible to lasting cognitive damage than adults.
“Kids need to be protected,” Rosario said. “But it takes a whole village to protect a child, parents, teachers, Meta, the public, everyone has to be aware, and everyone has to do their part.”
