Parents like me are cheering these Facebook verdicts. But it’s not all good news

March 30, 2026 — 12:55pm

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I am alarmed by the negative influence of smartphones and social media on children. All of us should be. I am also worried that, in our zeal to protect children from those negative influences, we will undermine free speech. And that’s where things get tricky.

Last week, juries in two different American states delivered multimillion-dollar verdicts against Big Tech. A New Mexico jury handed down a $US375 million verdict in a case brought by the state’s attorney general against Meta for enabling child sexual exploitation. The next day, a California jury awarded a young woman a combined $US6 million in damages from Meta and YouTube for the allegedly addictive and mentally distressing properties of social media apps, including algorithmic curation and so-called infinite scroll, where the app continually provides you with new content as you scroll down the page.

I know that it’s easy to celebrate those verdicts. I’m a parent of three who’s seen what happens when a teenager becomes a “screenager” and buries his or her head in a smartphone, minute by minute, hour after hour. Looking around my community, I’ve seen the disconnection from the real world and the vulnerability to conspiracy theories and absurdly radical social and political movements.

I’m also a concerned citizen who read Jonathan Haidt’s transformative book, The Anxious Generation, and watched with alarm as sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — the concerns of previous generations of parents — have been replaced by the unholy trinity of anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation.

And I’m an angry consumer who has seen internal documents that show that Big Tech, for all of its high-minded rhetoric about making the world a better place and doing no evil, can be just as greedy and grasping as countless other companies in countless other industries.

So, yes, it is a matter of urgent national necessity that we start to pull all of our heads — not just our kids’ — away from our phones and reengage in the real world, with our neighbours and our communities. We should think creatively about policies and habits that can wean people away from their phones. But not at the expense of our right to free speech.

A social media site isn’t a bottle of alcohol or a cigarette. It’s not delivering a drug. It’s delivering speech. Sometimes that speech is silly and harmless. Sometimes it........

© The Sydney Morning Herald