From Reclaim the Net
A Los Angeles jury has found Meta and YouTube negligent in the design of their platforms and awarded $3 million to a plaintiff identified as K.G.M., a young woman who testified that years of near-constant social media use contributed to depression, anxiety, and body dysmorphia. The jury assigned 70% of the responsibility to Meta and 30% to YouTube. Punitive damages came to another $6 million.
The verdict is being reported as a landmark for child safety. It also represents a significant legal mechanism for dismantling anonymous internet access, built in plain sight, with bipartisan enthusiasm and a CEO’s enthusiastic assistance.
K.G.M.’s attorneys built their claim not around what users posted, which Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act largely shields platforms from liability for, but around how the platforms were designed.
Infinite scroll, algorithmically amplified notifications, engagement loops engineered to maximize time on site. The argument treats social media architecture the way product liability law treats a car without brakes. A defective product that the public needs to be protected from.
If that framing survives appeal, the plaintiffs in over 1,600 similar cases waiting nationally will inherit a tested legal theory for bypassing Section 230 protections entirely. That is a structural change to internet liability law, driven by trial lawyers and a still-contested body of science on social media’s mental health effects.
The science is genuinely disputed. The word “addiction” is making substantial legal and rhetorical waves here. When social media gets classified as a drug, access to it becomes a regulatory and medical matter that the government needs to step in and fix. Who uses it, under what conditions, and who becomes verified are questions for authorities rather than individuals.
Regulating an addictive product and regulating speech should not be the same.
The surveillance infrastructure required to enforce either is identical: identity verification, access controls, and a system that follows users across every platform they use.
Which brings us to what Mark Zuckerberg said on the stand.
Zuckerberg spent more than five hours testifying in Los Angeles Superior Court, becoming visibly agitated under cross-examination.
Prosecutors presented internal emails, including a 2015 estimate that 4 million users under 13 were on Instagram, approximately 30% of all American children aged 10 to 12. An old email from former public policy head Nick Clegg was read into the record: “The fact that we say we don’t allow under-13s on our platform, yet have no way of enforcing it, is just indefensible.” Zuckerberg acknowledged the slow progress: “I always wish that we could have gotten there sooner.”
When pressed on age verification, he told jurors he did not understand why it was difficult. His proposed solution is a detail that deserves the most attention.
Multiple times, Zuckerberg argued that verification should happen not inside individual apps but at the operating system level, handled by Big Tech gatekeepers Apple and Google.
He told the jury that operating system providers “were better positioned to implement age verification tools, since they control the software that runs most smartphones.”
He elaborated: “Doing it at the level of the phone is just a lot cleaner than having every single app out there have to do this separately.” He added that it “would be pretty easy for them” to implement.
This is not a proposal to just verify the ages of Instagram users. It is a proposal to verify the identity of every smartphone user, for every app, at the OS layer.
It applies to every app installed on the device, every website accessed through the phone’s browser, and every message sent through any app on the phone.
Zuckerberg proposed this from the witness stand while simultaneously solving his own legal problem. If Apple and Google own age enforcement, platforms like Meta are no longer responsible for it.
The liability shifts to Cupertino and Mountain View. Two companies already under serious antitrust scrutiny for their control of app distribution would be handed new authority as identity gatekeepers for the internet.
The man under oath, under pressure, handed a high-profile public endorsement to a national digital ID layer baked into the two operating systems running the overwhelming majority of the world’s smartphones.
Legislators will use it. The infrastructure for this is already under construction. California’s SB 976 mandates age verification systems for social media platforms statewide, with implementation rules due by January 2027.
The Ninth Circuit has declined to rule on whether those requirements violate the First Amendment until those regulations are finalized.
Age verification for lawful online speech is advancing in California without a constitutional answer.
The Kids Online Safety Act, pending federally, would direct agencies to develop verification at the device or operating system level, precisely the framework Zuckerberg promoted from the stand.
New York’s SAFE For Kids Act permits facial analysis as an alternative to government ID submission, and biometric data collected to access a social media feed.
These laws require identity databases. Identity databases get breached. A Discord-related breach last year exposed approximately 70,000 government-issued IDs submitted through a third-party customer support system, with attackers claiming the number was higher. Every ID check creates a future breach waiting to happen.
Anonymous and pseudonymous speech online protects real people: whistleblowers, abuse survivors, political dissidents, people exploring medical questions or identities they are not ready to attach their legal names to, and journalists protecting sources.
Mandatory identity verification at the OS level ends all of that for everyone. The stated goal is to protect children from Instagram. The mechanism ends anonymous internet access for every adult who owns a phone.
Meanwhile, a separate New Mexico jury found Meta in violation of state consumer protection law this week, imposing a $375 million penalty after New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez built a case by posing as children on the platforms and documenting the sexual solicitations they received.
The jury determined Meta engaged in what it described as “unconscionable” trade practices and made false or misleading statements about child safety.
Meta said it “disagrees with the verdict and will appeal,” adding: “We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and are clear about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors or harmful content. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.”
The $375 million fine is a fraction of Meta’s $201 billion revenue in 2025.
The chain from these verdicts to surveillance architecture runs through a single word: “addiction.” Public health emergency follows from that classification. Emergency powers follow from the emergency. Age verification follows from emergency powers. OS-level ID checks follow from age verification. Each step is presented as protecting children. What gets built is a surveillance system for everyone unless we can get more people to wake up to it.
“When social media gets classified as a drug, access to it becomes a regulatory and medical matter that the government needs to step in and fix. Who uses it, under what conditions, and who becomes verified are questions for authorities rather than individuals.”
In other words outlawing ANY mood-altering substance is a slippery slope
What we’re witnessing now was set in motion a good century ago
Supermarkets are government proxies
As known by the fact that when a “pandemic” kicks you’re only allowed 1 bag of rolled oats and 1 bag of rice
But you can have as many chocolate bunnies + 2 litre bottles of coke as you like
Personally I wouldn’t be engaging with anything that has Zuckerberg’s smell on it but his fare can hardly be compared to a car without brakes.
Supermarkets are likewise geared toward pandering to addiction, why aren’t they being taken to task?
Oh that’s right, because they’re government proxies, as evidenced by the “shortages” and “rationing” re the covid fiasco
That 1st paragraph sure does my head in.
How about ordering a grocery store to pay an obese food addict $3 million
Trust a bunch of Californians who deliver something that’s every bit as warped
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We’ve reached the stage where tv is totally unwatchable, the bs now beyond beyond. If you turn volume down to zero a better understanding is had viewing lies presented. I haven’t bothered watching for a few decades, but elderly mum is addicted because of boredom in suburbia so occasionally I view a few snippets of the tell lies vision.
Predictably, net is going same way. All sinful filth is promoted to 5 year olds as sites critical of this perverted pedo shit show are swiped out deleted one by one.
No thanks to big brother that’s not human but AI robots made by aliens hellbent on taking all well on their way via genocide global.
The crazies that rule have totally lost the plot leading us to Armageddon, tragically loaded on all bases, thinking they’re David against Goliath’s mass of useless eaters. Threatening Samson’s fury with destruction as their pin up boy CCP builds back better. Pray for mercy and redemption in tribulation and get out of the 15 minute cities if you can.
As my post said, Nowhere Man, posts are being deleted by FB almost as they are written, meaning that the federal government, via its Future Fund investment in Facebook, is sanctioning this censorship of political speech and opinion.
If you don’t already know, that is a crime punishable by three years jail, under the prohibitions in the Crimes Act 1914, Section 28, and the identically-worded Criminal Code Act 1995, Section 83.4, which say that:
“Any person, by threat, violence or intimidation of any kind, interfering with the performance of any other person’s political rights and duties of anyone else, is guilty of an offence. Punishment is 3 years jail.
Got that, Folk? It sems that the blinkers are well and truly on, for a few commenters here!!!
Yeah, yeah, make the platforms liable, enforce self restriction and control our presence on the internet. There’s way too much information on the internet for the average Joe to figure out wot’s wot. Way too much information to find out how many ‘official’ stories are full of BS.
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Let’s all pretend our governments and our law enforcement institutions are fighting for us and protecting us from ourselves. But make the platforms take the responsibility and the flack for it.
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Everybody gets a DIGITAL ID and the platforms will limit access by themselves, to themselves and through theirdirectives. It’ll be an act of god, nobody will be to blame and our hidden path from freedom to authoritarianism can accelerate even faster!
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Just another brick in our Wall.
At some point all truthful information critical of ZOG and it’s propaganda on the internet will be removed by Ai.
Websites will just be inexplicable disappeared.
And there won’t be a damn thing anyone can do about it.
Who you going to complain to? Who’s gonna fix “the problem”? Who will even recognize or acknowledge it? How will they publish information about it?
Who’s even gonna know or care that those “fringe” websites have disappeared?
Haha…just about everyone I ask out in normies-ville USA has never even heard of “bitchute.com”.
The majority…whom the psychopaths rely on for obedience, like during the COVIDHOAX, won’t miss it, or care. They’d probably think the people talking about the disappearances as vitally important are raving paranoid lunatics.
“1984”.
What about justice against those responsible for genocide of innocent people who received biological weapon called covid jab. All of you freemason judges are worthy of Christ’s judgment .
“Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.” – Psalm 82:3
YouTube, Facebook and other social media take one for the #GloBaalist team by design to justify Biometrics/Digital ID.
The goyim will never free themselves from Jewish mind control: social media, cigarettes, porn, African-American music, gambling, television.
Will this be applicable to social media in Australia for I know of a site that is 3/4 full of those worthy of legal action when the whistle has been blown on medical malpractice that they made fun of .
Who gave the kid the syringe, anyone could supply them anything and they might put it in the syringe, but if they never got a syringe in the first place they wouldn’t inject anything. Ironically the government hands out syringes in Kings cross and places like that, but just to switch out of the metaphor, Kevin Rudd made sure all the schoolkids got a laptop with Gates’ software on it, this would be about 2008, I’m guessing they had infinite scrolling back then ?
The real problem kids have these days their community has been fractured beyond recognition, they are treated as if they were product.
There were a number of teen suicides at my old Geelong West technical school back in 2013 which caused an absolute uproar. One article in the local paper had a photo of a policeman who seemed on the verge of tearing up speaking about these events. There was no Julie Inman Grant cyber tsarina extolling the virtues of age verification or anything else in those days, though something of the sort was well required. When a friend from Spain came to visit for a few weeks, about seven years ago, we went to the local TAFE college teaching restaurant, where the trainee chefs who do their block release training get to dish up the fine fair in the restaurant, the Davidson. I commented to the restaurant supervisor that the young trainee waiter chap waiting on our table was very shy. The supe instantly made like texting on a phone, and said that these kids could not communicate properly, either in conversation or any other way than texting. Hmm? Talk about addiction, also compounded by the fact that these kids are not taught at school their times tables, so that they can do various calculations in their heads, and cannot read, write and spell properly, and you have a massive problem with these kids and their future prospects, both employment-wise, and as fully rounded people, which they may not eventuate to be./And in that era the elites-the (Bill) Gateses and so on-were said to disallow their children form going anywhere near a mobile phone or computer, largely because of the addictiveness of these devices. This attitude is quite plausible, because one of the fundamentals of we social human animals is the desire to communicate-and these kids do, although in a sub par way.
Facebook is guilty of far more, as they have a commercial relationship with our government’s Future Fund, which allegedly has some $250+ million invested in a Facebook that actively censors political posts, disallowing posts of links to sites like Natural News and other alternative sites, under their supposed “Community Standards” baloney. Their censorship has become rather extreme, as they seem to delete posts almost as soon as they are written, as has been my experience.
I m having a go at my local man Richard Marles already, over the fuel supply crisis, so another go might be this Facebook thing, which follows on, in a way, form this story I gave Cairns News some time back:
https://cairnsnews.org/2022/07/26/aussie-feds-have-secrecy-deal-with-cia-offshoot-fakebook/
There is a bit more to tell about this regarding a Marles’s staffer straight outlying to me about whether he was going to be in his office ne day I was writing an email to him. This staffer claimed she has no idea where he was going to be that day, but a couple of hors later I emerged from the Westfield opposite Richard’s office, to see a TV cameraman going into Richard’s office. When I went in to inquire about the member’s presence, the lass who told me on the phone she had no idea was the same one who told me: “Oh, he’s doing media today.” Soothe to say I asked her if she had lied to me off her own bat, or was she instructed to do so by her boss? The poor dear was caught out, badly, groaning when I told her I had spoken to her on the phone just a couple of hour before etc. She does not answer the phone there nay more, and probably isn’t employed in that office anymore either.
$6m would be pocket money to Motherfuckerberg.
Official Narratives, Censorship, “Dissenting on Covid”: Government Agencies Banned From Pressuring Big Tech to Censor Americans for Ten Years.
Global Research – 25 March 2026.
In a historic win for free speech, the U.S. Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have been legally restricted from pressuring social media companies to silence Americans for the next decade.
This comes from a formal Consent Decree in Missouri v. Biden, one of the most consequential First Amendment cases in modern history.
The agreement itself is striking. It acknowledges that, in recent years, federal officials “exerted substantial coercive pressure” on social media companies to suppress speech they did not approve of. This case began after physicians, journalists, and everyday Americans—especially those dissenting on COVID and elections—were systematically censored online. This was confirmed through discovery: a coordinated, government-backed effort to pressure Big Tech into silencing alternative viewpoints.
Now, under this decree, these entities are prohibited from threatening, coercing, or directing platforms like Facebook, X, YouTube, and others to remove or suppress lawful speech—including through algorithmic means. These restrictions will remain in place for 10 years.
Perhaps most important, the agreement explicitly states that labeling speech as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation” does not strip it of First Amendment protection.
This is one of the most significant blows yet to the censorship regime.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/breaking-win-government-agencies-banned-from-pressuring-big-tech-to-censor-americans-for-10-years/5919975
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