The verdicts are in: Big Tech is hurting kids, and Congress must protect them.

Last month, a jury in California gave me something I have been fighting for since May 1, 2019, when I lost my son Mason at age 15: It gave me a small sense of justice in the fight to hold Big Tech accountable for the online harms it caused my son and many other young people.

A jury found Meta and Google were responsible for the harms their products caused a young girl and awarded her $6 million. Only the day before, a jury in New Mexico also found Meta liable for violating state consumer protection laws because it misled users about the safety of its platforms, particularly by allowing sexual predators to find children there. That court ordered the company to pay $375 million.

Finally, these companies are being held liable for their crimes, for the damage they cause our children.

My beloved Mason didn’t just suffer from these social media harms — he died from them. Mason accidentally asphyxiated after participating in the viral social media “Blackout Challenge” — a trend in which kids are urged to choke themselves to the point of passing out to get a laugh. But for Mason, a typical teenager, surrounded by great friends, and deeply loved in his community, the outcome was tragic. His death shattered my heart. I will never fully recover. 

I live with the unbearable grief of losing a child because of the dangers social media platforms pose to our children — and of which Big Tech has long been aware. The companies have simply refused to do anything about the problem, lest they dampen their billion-dollar bottom line. 

The fight for justice for Mason and many other families is far from over. On the heels of these historic verdicts, we must continue this fight. Lawmakers must act to build on the momentum from the overdue verdicts from the social media trials by passing the Kids Online Safety Act as soon as possible. 

This bill is the most comprehensive, thoroughly vetted online child safety bill ever created. It would be the first legislation in more than a quarter century to require social media platforms to implement common sense protections to shield children from the risks present with every scroll.

Critically, it takes a “safety-by-design” approach that requires platforms to change their algorithms, which currently push content to kids that holds the attention of their developing brains, no matter how dangerous it is. The Kids Online Safety Act includes a “duty of care” that requires platforms to mitigate a distinct list of serious harms to which children are especially vulnerable on social media platforms, such as sexual exploitation, cyberbullying, depression, self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, illegal substance abuse and more. 

The Kids Online Safety Act has strong bipartisan support, having passed the Senate in 2024 by a vote of 91 to 3. It has been reintroduced this Congress by Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and has 76 Senate cosponsors. The Senate’s version of the bill would create a strong duty of care, as previously mentioned, and stop platforms from pretending they don’t know when a user is a minor.

The recent trials made clear that we need Congress to pass the Senate version — the stronger version.

Kids will typically be exposed to harmful content online, even if parents don’t hand them personal devices. We all — educators, lawmakers, platforms and parents — have a responsibility to protect children online. But even the most diligent parents are struggling, because they lack the tools necessary to protect them. The Kids Online Safety Act would require the platforms to put some of those basic features in place — for example, by turning off autoscroll for young users by default, turning on robust safety features and requiring the platforms to design algorithms with child safety in mind.

If this bill becomes law, social media platforms will have to turn on the strongest privacy settings for minors by default, create effective reporting mechanisms (currently non-existent) to manage abuses when they do occur, and perform regular audits to show they are complying. Children have been literally trapped in digital spaces and their parents unable to help them, as they have no tools to fight back against social media’s corrosive algorithms. 

The many social media lawsuits — and also the settlements that TikTok and Snap entered rather than take their chances with a jury — underscore what we grieving parents know too well. But in addition to legal rulings, we must codify in law basic safety requirements for children on social media. The ongoing evolution of the online universe — now, for example, with growing dangers from AI chatbots — underscores our need for the Kids Online Safety Act’s comprehensive protections.

Our peers on these juries have seen past the lies and smokescreens of things like “teen accounts.” They have seen how Meta, Google and other companies prioritize money over children’s well-being. The question is, will our lawmakers actually now be bold enough to put kids first, for a change, over Big Tech’s lobbying dollars? The choice is that stark and that simple. 

Joann Bogard, mother of Mason Bogard, forever 15, is a founding member of ParentsSOS and an advocate for strong social media reform. 

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