Now well into 2025, Meta is still making questionable news waves.
Revelations about CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s willingness to censor content to win favor with the Chinese government – and an enormous market there – come mere months after a series of stark and alarming policy changes at his company. In January he announced that fact-checking on Meta’s social media apps is out. So too is content moderation. And rather than removingchild predators from its online platforms, just one month later Zuckerberg announced an educational curriculum for kids to deal with child online exploitation. Yes, as unbelievable as it sounds, he’s actually asking children to keep Meta’s platforms safe rather than doing it himself. It’s a cynical ploy to stave off federal legislation that would truly protect children.
My son Mason was only 15 when he died of accidental asphyxiation in May 2019 after participating in the viral social media “Blackout Challenge.” Mason was a typical teenager, surrounded by great friends, and deeply loved in his community. I mourn him every minute of every hour of every day.
These dangerous trends, along with many other kinds of unsafe content, are fed to children unsolicited and repeatedly until they become normalized. Social media platforms need to be regulated if children are allowed to have access to them. Yet it’s that precise regulation that Meta and other social media companies are pushing so hard to avoid.
The changes at Meta came only one year after Zuckerberg was grilled by Senators in a hearing on the safety of social media for children. I was one of the many grieving parents who attended that hearing where he was forced to face the parents – myself included – and apologize to us.
Yet, it’s now clear, Zuckerberg’s apology was all smoke and mirrors.
Over the last year, I spent countless hours fighting to make social media safer for other children and advocating for the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) – a bill that would have required social media platforms to finally implement common-sense safeguards to protect children from severe online harms like dangerous trending challenges, cyberbullying, eating disorders, sexual exploitation, substance abuse and more. Meanwhile, what has Zuckerberg done? He’s gone from apology to outright apathy and children across this country – their mental health, their well-being, and their very lives – are going to pay a bitter price as a result.
By removing fact-checking and other content moderation tools and safeguards from its social media platforms, harmful material – ranging from self-harm content to hate speech – can now circulate freely, exacerbating risks to young users. This leaves parents the burden of reporting it, knowing Meta rarely acts on their concerns. But as I alleged in my nation-wide class action lawsuit filed with other victims of social media, social media companies’ reporting mechanisms are less than 5 percent accurate. KOSA, on the other hand, would have provided the necessary tools to protect kids online, including effective reporting mechanisms and a “duty of care” in the design of social media platforms.
Zuckerberg himself acknowledged this latest change in fact-checking will lead to more harmful content proliferating online, further proving that he has no intention of protecting children. And in the months following Zuckerberg’s hollow words to us parents, Meta spent $24.4 million on lobbying against bills including KOSA – a 27 percent increase from the year prior. Furthermore, Big Tech companies, as a whole (Meta, ByteDance, Snap, and others), spent an astonishing $61.5 million.
Critics – like some of those Big Tech companies and others – claimed KOSA would lead to censorship of free speech and of conservative voices in particular. Yet KOSA does nothing of the sort. It doesn’t even regulate content. Instead, it requires that social media platforms change the designs and algorithms of their products that purposefully target children, sending them toxic, addictive content promoting harms like eating disorders and suicide they never asked for in the first place, and rendering them vulnerable to drug dealers and predators.
Our local leaders in Indiana get it. They have listened to our stories and understand the risks kids face online today. Last year, Mason’s Internet Safety Education Bill was passed into law providing schools with curriculums to provide internet safety education. The Indiana Senate also introduced a bill last month that aims to mandate verifiable parental consent for minors under 16 to create social media accounts. These protocols will enhance online safety for minors and allow parents oversight of the platforms their children are accessing.The former Surgeon General gets it too. So do a diverse group of bipartisan KOSA supporters in Congress, including leading liberals and conservatives alike, and even those closest to the new administration like Donald Trump, Jr.
The U.S. House of Representatives had a remarkable opportunity last year to make KOSA law after its historic passing in the Senate. It would have been the first reform of social media in more than 25 years. By failing to do so, House leadership effectively endorsed Big Tech’s impunity to continue prioritizing their profits and paychecks over children’s lives. They have failed our children miserably, that is for certain.
Yet this new session of Congress provides a fresh chance for lawmakers to stand together for children’s safety by passing KOSA without delay. Because we know Big Tech won’t protect children themselves – quite the opposite, as Zuckerberg has shown. Such legislative action is no different than the product safety laws our government has already imposed on car manufacturers, food producers, clothing and toy companies and more.
Sadly, our group of survivor parents lost the last round in our David vs. Goliath fight against Big Tech to get KOSA passed. But we’re not done. We will not stop pushing for laws that keep children safe because no other family should ever suffer the loss of a child to something so easily preventable. If our elected leaders empathize with grieving parents, like me, about the risk social media poses to every single child in this nation – especially after Meta’s highly criticized decision to abandon proactive content moderation – they will act. My only hope is that Zuckerberg’s dishonesty and hypocrisy will be the push they need to finally do something to protect children online.
If you want to make a difference, contact your federal legislators and ask them to protect our children online by passing federal legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act in 2025.
Joann Bogard resides in Evansville and is an advocate for social media reform. She is a member of ParentsSOS and the 2025 Recipient of the Sammy Berman Chapman Award given by the Organization for Social Media Safety.
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