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Parents Are Suing Social Media Companies for Harm to Kids. Will It Work?

Meta, Google, and Snap are facing accusations that addictive platforms are causing serious, even fatal, damage

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2026 / JUSTICE

Parents Are Suing Social Media Companies for Harm to Kids. Will It Work?

Meta, Google, and Snap are facing accusations that addictive platforms are causing serious, even fatal, damage

ART BY JUSTIN POULSEN

Published 6:30, AUGUST 19, 2026

Everyone at Souris Regional School knew Harry Burke. He was a popular grade eleven student, six feet tall and striking, with bright-blue eyes and a mischievous smile. His teachers enjoyed debating him—he was always up on the latest political news—and his coaches appreciated the attitude he brought to the basketball court: he convinced his teammates to arrive to games like NBA stars, decked out in dress shirts and ties.

Off the hardwood, Harry sometimes wore another uniform. He’d joined the Cadets at thirteen, enlisted in the Reserves three years later, and, once a year, donned his military fatigues to tour from class to class and speak about the discipline, camaraderie, and courage that the armed forces had instilled in him. He had planned, after graduating from high school, to leave his hometown of Bay Fortune, a quiet community on the eastern end of Prince Edward Island, to attend the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. “He was a patriot,” his father, Carl Burke, told me. “He said to mom and I, ‘I want to change Canada. I want to make it better.’”

Harry spent the weekend of April 22, 2023, the same way he spent most weekends: doing drills and basic training on the opposite end of PEI. On Sunday evening, having completed his penultimate stint of boot camp, he did the familiar two-hour drive home. By the time he stumbled in the front door, it was late, and his parents—Carl and his wife, Barbie Lavers, both nurses—noticed he was tired. So they allowed him to take Monday off from school to rest and catch up on homework.

That day, Carl stayed home with Harry, chatting as they did chores. The two were tight. They regularly rode around the Island together on their Harley-Davidsons. Between them, few topics of conversation were off limits. So it wasn’t unusual when, after lunch, Harry held his phone up and showed his dad a picture of a girl from Nova Scotia he’d started messaging on Instagram earlier that day. “That’s a long piece to go for a girlfriend,” Carl joked.

Carl gave the girl little more thought until, around 9 p.m., Harry walked into his bedroom looking flustered. “Dad,” he said. “I screwed up.” He explained that the girl had sent him nude photos and asked him to do the same, and that he’d sent some via Snapchat. And then the awful truth had come out: the girl he had been talking to wasn’t a girl at all but a scammer who was threatening to send screenshots to everyone Harry knew—his classmates, his basketball team, his commanding officer—unless he sent money. “Come on, Dad,” Harry pleaded. “You have to help me out.”

Carl quickly convened a family meeting around the kitchen island. He and Barbie were cranky—they’d always told Harry and his younger sister, Ella, not to share explicit photos online. But, more than that, they were concerned. They told Harry they loved him and that everything would be okay. They decided against paying the blackmailer, convinced they would just ask for more. Instead, the Burkes agreed they’d call a local RCMP officer they knew first thing in the morning. Harry seemed satisfied with that plan. But as the family was about to turn in, Barbie’s phone buzzed. The scammer had found her in Harry’s Instagram followers and sent her a message, vowing to ruin her son’s life. “That really hit Harry,” Carl told me. “Because he figured, at that point, everything that he had worked hard for was done, and that he would never become what he wanted to be.”

The next morning, when Carl walked into Harry’s room to wake him up, the bed had not been slept in. “My heart just started pounding,” Carl says. He ran through the house looking for him until he opened the door to the garage. Harry was face down on the floor. He’d shot himself.

The following minutes, hours, and days were a maelstrom of tears and sirens, phone calls to bewildered relatives, and visits from heavy-hearted friends. Through his grief, Carl arranged a military funeral for Harry. But once that day came and went, he felt utterly lost. “You don’t know what to do,” Carl says. “You don’t know what to say.” He kept replaying that Monday in his mind, wondering whether Harry would still be alive if he’d made him go to school, had he been less grumpy at the kitchen island, had he paid the money the scammer demanded.

A year after Harry’s death, someone from the youth justice system called Carl, wanting permission to share his family’s story, including with RCMP officers who specialized in online scams. Carl wanted to tell the story and so began speaking in schools and within the youth justice system himself. He and Barbie later visited offices of MPs, urging them to combat the rise of sextortion. Harry was, in many ways, the archetypal victim: a teen boy, targeted on Instagram, then persuaded to send pictures over Snapchat. A seventeen-year-old Manitoban named Daniel Lints had taken his own life under similar circumstances, as had William Doiron, a sixteen-year-old in New Brunswick, and Carson Cleland, a twelve-year-old in British Columbia.

These deaths were not anomalies but symptoms of what the RCMP has declared a public safety crisis. In 2024, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection received an average of six reports of sextortion every day. But the nature of the crime—online, anonymous, encrypted—makes it difficult to prosecute. In 78 percent of cases, Canadian law enforcement either fails to identify an accused or can’t collect enough evidence to lay or recommend charges. The RCMP managed to trace Harry’s assailant to Nigeria, a global locus of cybercrime. “But with the sheer number of people who are doing this,” says Carl, “to narrow it down to one house in one neighbourhood in one town, it’s almost impossible.”

Whoever it was, Carl did not consider them solely responsible for his son’s death. He also blamed Instagram, which provided the culprit with direct access to Harry and hundreds of his contacts, and Snapchat, with its false promise of “disappearing” photos. Both social networks had allowed a criminal to create fake accounts and interact directly with a minor. As Carl saw it, these platforms had put his son in danger. While speaking with a lawyer about Harry’s death, Carl asked about the possibility of launching a lawsuit against Meta and Snap, the parent companies of Instagram and Snapchat. The answer he got back: “It can’t be done.”

For years, social media firms were virtually untouchable in the courts. They enjoyed broad immunity from litigation thanks to a controversial piece of US law known as Section 230, which stipulates that social platforms, as hosts of third-party content, are in most cases not liable for that content.

But in 2024, Carl received a note from the Social Media Victims Law Center, a firm, established in 2021 in Seattle, that represented thousands of families like the Burkes—families who had lost children to sextortion, fatal TikTok challenges, and fentanyl-laced drugs sold over Snapchat. SMVLC’s founder, an attorney named Matthew Bergman, and his team were mounting an all-out offensive against social media, not by attacking Section 230 but by sidestepping it. Instead of focusing on content, they were........

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