A series of trials in the United States involving social media giant Meta could cost the tech behemoth over $1 trillion in fines and reshape social media. The efforts are a reminder that our collective capacity to regulate harms can be slow, lumbering, and imperfect, but occasionally successful. Sometimes nature heals itself. We should celebrate that.

Perhaps the most important trial — and test — will be an action launched by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, which began last week. The states, which are seeking $200 billion in damages, argue that Meta and its platforms are addictive, targeted at children, and in violation of privacy and consumer protection laws. Meta, of course, maintains its innocence.

The claim of innocence is rich, and implausible. Last spring, Meta and Google were found liable for causing harm in a personal injury trial in California. That judgment included millions in damages against the companies. In another recent judgment in New Mexico, the judge labeled Meta a “public nuisance” while ordering fines just under a billion dollars and extensive reform measures aimed at curbing child exploitation on platforms.

These judgments against the company aren’t likely to be the last court cases Meta — or other social media companies — lose. The trajectory of action on social media reform is trending against the behemoths in the United States and around the world. There’s a precedent for the change.

Big Social Is the New Big Tobacco

The federal trial is one among the thousands of cases against Meta and other social media giants, with a common comparative frame appearing time and time again: Big Tobacco. The idea that social media companies are harmful, know it, and not only ignore the dangerous effects of their products but go out of their way to hook consumers, including minors, on them offers a neat parallel with the tobacco industry.

For decades, tobacco companies knew they were harming, even killing, people. They nonetheless lied and insisted they were innocent. Court judgments against them over the years hobbled tobacco makers. Though the fight continues against the industry, which has leveraged its capital and political influence to defend itself, it is a proof-of-concept case that even massive industry players can be held accountable if we’re willing to fight and demand our political and judicial leaders follow suit.

The harms at issue in these cases are neither frivolous nor abstract. By now, the psychological injury these platforms inflict on growing minds are well known: anxiety, depression, compromised focus, and an increased tendency toward self-harm, all encouraged by an architecture designed to be as addictive as possible. But the fight behind these trials is about more than addressing these harms. It is a fight to preserve childhood as a period of maturation and development rather than surrender it to algorithms designed to monetize attention. Breaking free of them can help provide room for children to “touch grass” — to spend time outside, take risks, experience boredom, play with flesh and blood friends.

Social media companies are worth trillions, with Meta alone valued at approximately $1.4 trillion. That’s a lot of money, a lot of power, and a lot of influence. But Silicon Valley’s colonization of children’s minds — and our lifeworld more generally — is not inevitable, nor is the ubiquity of their technologies an eternal barrier to a different world. A barrier? Yes. An insurmountable one? Not necessarily.

Maybe it’s inaccurate to say that nature sometimes heals itself, though. The backlash against social media platforms, and their framing as addictive and predatory, is driven by activists taking part in social movements, individuals using the legal system for its intended purpose, and politicians who haven’t been captured by Big Tech who have the courage to demand justice and to enforce the law. Left to their own devices, tech giants would capture every last second of our daily attention spans, drawing us down their rabbit holes of endless doomscrolling or envy-scrolling, stopping on the occasional advertisement to complete the unholy trinity.

Scrolling Through Social Media’s Moral Void

The suite of technologies that destroy mental health and political institutions in equal measure — and for the same reason, profit — is engineered and operated by companies that are neutral on the substance of content as such. They’ll call it free speech or consumer rights, but the concern of companies who long only to capture and keep your attention are interested only in the emotional valence of content: whether the stuff you’re seeing and/or hearing draws you in by provoking a response, whatever it might be. In short, the companies are psychopaths. That’s who we’re dealing with.

Targeting minors is a strategy to get users when they’re young, locking them into an ecosystem that will grow along with them over the miserable years to come. It’s evil, irresponsible, and antisocial in the proper sense of the word. Younger people addicted to social media become older people addicted to social media, just like past generations of teen smokers who took up the habit tended to stick with it for the length of their statistically shorter-than-average lives. You might expect that harming or even killing your consumers makes for a bad business model, but addictive substances and technologies at scale share a capacity to compensate for any losses through consistency and volume. There’s always another person to hook. We keep making them, and the companies keep capturing them.

Individual actions and social movements, necessary and useful as they are, can only do so much to combat the dynamic. Court cases, penalties, and state regulation are essential to controlling company behavior as well as product design and implementation. Society has a right and a duty to defend itself through collective action and the institutions of state, and that right extends to setting limits and expectations for corporations, especially those with an outsize influence on our lives and politics.

We can’t predict what will come of cases brought against Meta and other social media companies, though we can be sure these companies take every measure they can to resist judgment, reform, and taking responsibility for the effects of their products. We can, however, recognize that the current trajectory points toward reform and taking back control of our attention spans — and, in turn, our own health and the health of the body politic. We can build upon these efforts and the victories they’re already yielding to fight harder. There is reason to think we might win. That calls for optimism, even joy, because we’re making good progress on an important matter — and we’re doing it together, socially.

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