Parents Are Suing Social Media Companies for Harm to Kids | #childpredator | #kidsaftey | #childsaftey

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 pursuing a novel legal theory: that the platforms themselves were negligently designed, stuffed full of features and algorithms that addict and harm teenage users. Carl understood that, if the courts validated this theory, it would represent a chink in social media’s armour—a way to hold Big Tech accountable for its role in what happened to Harry. So he wrote back. He wanted in.

Matthew Bergman is an unlikely thorn in Big Tech’s side. A stern Seattle-bred lawyer, he spent thirty years representing plaintiffs harmed by exposure to asbestos. In 2021, he decided to try something new. He just wasn’t sure what.

That fall, a former Facebook product manager named Frances Haugen leaked thousands of internal documents to the Wall Street Journal, revealing that the company now known as Meta was aware that its platforms Facebook and Instagram were amplifying mental illness among underage users. In a study of teen users in the UK and the US, Meta’s own researchers had found that 40 percent of teen users who reported feeling unattractive said that that feeling began on Instagram, and a quarter who felt “not good enough” singled out the app as the source. One-third of teen girls reported that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. And among American teens with suicidal ideation, 6 percent traced their desire to kill themselves directly to their experiences on the app.

Testifying in the US Senate, Haugen claimed that Meta’s leadership knew how to make their platforms safer but had neglected to do so because it would have hurt their bottom line. “We are here today because of deliberate choices Facebook has made,” Haugen said. “Facebook became a trillion-dollar company by paying for its profits with our safety, including the safety of our children.”

Bergman started to see similarities between the asbestos cases he had been litigating and the social media cases. “You have a ubiquitous product that, at least initially, was seen as very beneficial,” he says. “You have a cause-and-effect relationship between a product and serious harm. You have a public health crisis. And you have unbelievable corporate misconduct.” He has since come to believe that social media firms are far more malicious, often saying they made the asbestos companies “look like choir boys.”

Unlike the asbestos industry, however, the social media giants enjoyed the seemingly inviolable protection of Section 230. Signed into law in 1996, when the US Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, Section 230 stipulated that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” That’s legalese for: online platforms aren’t generally legally liable for content posted by their users. Legal scholars have suggested that Canada is bound by similar laws thanks to the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement, which contains a 230-like provision called Article 19.1.

In the ’90s, American lawmakers argued that Section 230 would allow the nation’s nascent technology industry to grow without fear of being sued into oblivion over content posted to their blogs, forums, online bulletin boards, review sites, and early social media platforms. Accordingly, Section 230 is often called “the twenty-six words that created the internet.” It’s also been described as the twenty-six words that destroyed society, because it has allowed social media platforms to host hate speech, disinformation, deepfakes, and content that encourages self-harm with impunity. “In my more rhetorical moments,” says Bergman, “I call Section 230 a licence to kill.”

But he started noticing cracks. That May, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Section 230 did not protect Snap from a lawsuit launched by a group of Wisconsin parents whose children, three boys between the ages of seventeen and twenty, had fatally crashed their car into a tree at 181 kilometres per hour. Just before the collision, one of the young men had taken out his smartphone and uploaded a “snap” using the app’s speed filter, which overlaid the vehicle’s real-time speed over his post. In their suit, known as Lemmon v. Snap, the boys’ parents alleged that the filter incentivized users to drive at dangerous speeds, and that, in spite of accidents, online petitions, and at least one other lawsuit, Snap had not removed or restricted access to the feature. The case settled before the courts could determine whether Snap was in fact liable. But the fact that the case was allowed to go ahead was in itself a major development.

Bergman believed that Lemmon v. Snap exposed other elements of social media’s architecture to attack: lists of “people you may know” that connected children to drug dealers and sexual predators; features like infinite scroll, autoplay, and incessant notifications that seemed designed to keep kids onscreen as long as possible; personalized feeds that funnelled teens to content promoting self-harm and eating disorders. “The algorithms using artificial intelligence direct young people to ever more extreme, difficult, dangerous material,” says Bergman.

Bergman founded the Social Media Victims Law Center before the end of 2021. It didn’t take him long to find clients. He encountered hundreds of families across several countries with unsettlingly similar stories. Some had lost sons and daughters to TikTok’s “blackout challenge,” which encouraged users to record and upload footage of themselves self-asphyxiating. Others were mourning teens who’d died “subway surfing,” another viral trend, prompting young people to ride the top of moving trains. Bergman met with the mom and dad of an eighteen-year-old in Colorado who took her own life after TikTok exacerbated her mental health symptoms, showing her content that included a livestream of a suicide. He connected with the parents of an eleven-year-old girl who made multiple suicide attempts after being financially and sexually exploited by adult men she met through Discord and Roblox.

Bergman offered to represent these families on a contingency basis; they wouldn’t pay unless he won. Within four years, he and his team of eight attorneys had filed more than 1,500 lawsuits on behalf of more than 4,000 clients—including Carl Burke.

In October 2024, SMVLC sued the parent companies of Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, and Discord on behalf of Carl and several other parents, including the mother of Amanda Todd, a fifteen-year-old BC girl who took her own life in 2012 after being sextorted and severely cyberbullied. The suit, filed in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, seeks unspecified damages from the defendants.

“Harry had a loving and supportive family and was told repeatedly that everything would be okay,” the lawsuit asserted. But because of defects and dangers inherent to Instagram and Snapchat, the complaint continued, “there was nothing Harry could do but sit, wait, and suffer the unspeakable harms Meta and Snap subjected him to.”

Carl, too, had to sit and wait. It would be years before the lawsuit went anywhere. Before Harry’s case could be heard, the courts needed to answer a more foundational question. Would they believe Bergman’s argument—that social media’s design, not its content, was to blame? Or would the courts invoke Section 230 and throw out the complaints?

On January 27, 2026—one day after what would have been Harry Burke’s twentieth birthday—Bergman entered a courtroom in California for what would become a landmark trial. His client Kaley, or KGM, as she was identified in the pleadings, started watching YouTube at age six and joined Instagram when she was nine. She experienced anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and body dysmorphia. And though she suspected her social media use was only making her mental health worse, she felt unable to tear herself away from her phone. Kaley, who was twenty at the time, testified that she once spent sixteen hours on Instagram in a single day. “I wanted to be on it all the time,” she said. “If I wasn’t on it, I felt like I was going to miss out on something.”

Kaley’s trial lawyer, a litigator and Christian pastor named Mark Lanier, argued that Meta and Google had deliberately designed Instagram and YouTube to hook users like Kaley, that the companies knew their products could cause harm, and that they had failed to warn users of those harms. (TikTok and Snap were also named in KGM’s suit but settled before trial.) To make his case, Lanier produced a series of internal emails and documents, including one from inside YouTube that admitted its “goal is not viewership, it’s viewer addiction.” In another, a Meta employee wrote, “Oh my gosh yall IG is a drug,” to which a colleague replied, “We’re basically pushers.” Another staffer added that “targeting 11 year olds feels like tobacco companies a couple decades ago.”

When Lanier pressed Mark Zuckerberg to explain an email that said Meta wanted to increase the amount of time ten-year-olds spent on Instagram—despite the fact that Meta ostensibly prohibits anyone under thirteen from using its apps—the CEO said, “I don’t remember the context of this email.” Zuckerberg repeatedly denied that Instagram was addictive, claiming instead that “if something is valuable, people will use it more because it’s useful to them.”

The jury didn’t buy it. In late March, they found Meta and Google negligent and concluded that they had “acted with malice.” Meta and Google, both of which said they intended to appeal the verdict, were ordered to pay a total of $6 million (US) in compensatory and punitive damages. It was Meta’s second loss in as many days. Earlier that week, a separate jury in New Mexico found that the company misled users about the safety of its platforms, enabling the sexual exploitation of underage users. That jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million (US).

The decisions landed like an atom bomb—not because the penalties represented a serious threat to Meta, which has annual revenues of $200 billion (US), or to Google, which makes double that, but because they confirmed the product-design approach represented a viable route around Section 230. They set a precedent that left the social media giants vulnerable to thousands of other lawsuits like Carl Burke’s.

“This verdict carries implications far beyond this courtroom,” Bergman wrote in a statement after the KGM verdict. “Families pursuing justice in other jurisdictions can now point to this outcome as proof that these claims deserve to be heard and taken seriously.” And if each of those cases were to result in its own multi-million-dollar fine, Big Tech could soon face some very big bills. Perhaps then, Bergman says, social media companies could be compelled to make their platforms safer, if doing so meant the difference between survival and insolvency.

There are now thousands of plaintiffs seeking billions of dollars in damages from some of the world’s largest technology companies. In California alone, there are more than 3,000 social media suits. Attorneys general in forty-one American states have filed cases, as have around 1,200 school districts across the US. The Vancouver-based firm CFM Lawyers is pursuing a class action against Meta. The families of the Tumbler Ridge shooting victims are suing OpenAI over its failure to alert authorities about the shooter’s violence-laden exchanges with ChatGPT. OpenAI is facing an additional suit from the mother of a Montreal woman who was allegedly encouraged by ChatGPT to kill herself.

“Basically, the dam has burst,” says Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, where he co-directs the Datta Center for High Tech Law. If Meta and Google lose their appeals and the product-design theory is further validated, he argues, these lawsuits could represent an existential threat to social media. “The amount of damages we’re discussing could be more than these services have,” he says, “which is shocking, because they’re among the most wealthy companies that have ever existed in human history.” Goldman predicts options for the social media giants include reaching some sort of global settlement—or shutting down. In the latter scenario, he says, “the plaintiffs’ lawyers will be like the locusts that destroy the crops and leave nothing for anyone else.”

A cynic might accuse all these attorneys of ambulance chasing, racing to amass clients so they can win a windfall for themselves. Bergman claims to have a more altruistic motive: to save kids’ lives. “If I never hear another story, never have to talk to another parent, I’ll feel I’ve done something meaningful,” he told me. Nonetheless, he is actively recruiting additional plaintiffs. “If your child was harmed by social media or AI,” SMVLC’s website notes, “you can fight back!”

Some critics hold a dim view of the plaintiffs launching these suits. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, for one, described the tsunami of complaints as a shakedown, writing, “Unemployed? Depressed? Spend your Friday nights scrolling? You could make big money by holding billionaires responsible for your problems.”

But Duncan Embury, a lawyer representing fourteen Ontario school boards in their quest to win billions in damages from the social media giants, contends these suits serve a higher purpose: to rein in Big Tech where governments have failed to.

Like Bergman, Embury took a roundabout path to social media litigation. As a partner at the Toronto-based personal injury firm Neinstein, he specialized in medical malpractice cases. But in 2020, he had no choice but to turn his attention to the dark side of social media. “Part of my motivation was very personal,” he says. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, his daughter Lauren was stuck at home, spending up to fourteen hours a day on her smartphone. Isolated from her friends, she gravitated toward videos discussing mental health.

“I’d be watching a video of someone skydiving, and it would be all fun,” Lauren told me. “And then I’d like one video of someone who was talking about how depressed they were, and then all of a sudden, it was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m depressed too. Everyone’s depressed.’” Soon, her TikTok feed was dominated by content promoting self-harm and suicide. About a year into the pandemic, Lauren’s mental health deteriorated to the point that she needed to be hospitalized.

By 2024, Lauren had recovered and largely gone off social media. Embury, suddenly hyper-aware of social media’s potential harms, was heartened to learn the Liberals, under then prime minister Justin Trudeau, had introduced Bill C-63, otherwise known as the Online Harms Act. The bill would have imposed upon social media companies a duty to, among other things, shield kids from harmful content, enable new privacy and security features for minors, and take down child sex abuse materials and other types of explicit content within twenty-four hours of being posted. But critics worried parts of the bill would endanger free speech online; Margaret Atwood called it “Orwellian.” To postpone the debate, the Liberals split the bill in two, prioritizing the child-protection measures over the more controversial hate-speech provisions. But when Trudeau prorogued Parliament in 2025, C-63 died on the floor.

This past June, under Mark Carney, the Liberals vowed to take another crack at it, announcing the Safe Social Media Act. If enacted, the bill would resurrect pieces of the Online Harms Act, including requirements to remove harmful content, such as that which advocates self-harm and child sexual abuse material. The bill would also impose new rules, like labelling AI-generated content and mitigating harmful interactions with chatbots. Most notably, it would prevent children under age sixteen from using social media, unless those services demonstrated that they’d put in place certain safeguards to protect children. A new Digital Safety Commission would handle enforcement, including issuing fines of up to $20 million against social media companies that run afoul of the rules.

But to become law, the Safe Social Media Act will need to survive parliamentary scrutiny and debate. And to have its desired effect, it will need to be effectively implemented and enforced, which would be a tall order. In Australia, the first country to age-gate social media use, roughly 70 percent of Australians under sixteen have found ways to stay active on social media due to spotty implementation of age verification and the ability to fool AI systems. And platforms are pushing back, one clearly suggesting young users manually update their age in advance of age-verification measures, and others suing the Australian government to try to have the ban overturned.

For the time being, Canada lacks a comprehensive online safety law for children. So does the US. In late June, the US House of Representatives passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, a bipartisan package of online safety measures meant as a replacement to the Kids Online Safety Act that was stuck in limbo since it was introduced in 2022. The KIDSA is expected to face challenges in the Senate. “This is an industry, and the only one I can think of, where there really are no guardrails and no regulation that governs them in terms of how they do business,” says Embury.

Although critics have claimed that the lawsuits against social media companies are a way for parents to offload blame onto tech billionaires, or for avaricious attorneys to siphon funds from Silicon Valley, Embury views things differently. “What we’re seeing is the use of the litigation system, both in Canada and the US, as a means to fill a very important social gap to regulate these companies,” he says.

Pundits have dubbed this social media’s “Big Tobacco moment,” referring to the way the US’s largest cigarette manufacturers were caught lying to the public about the harms they knew smoking caused. Just as social media firms used Section 230 to evade liability, tobacco companies successfully fended off lawsuits for decades by claiming that their customers bore personal responsibility for the consequences of their decision to smoke. But as the revelations mounted, laying bare exactly what cigarette makers knew and when they knew it, the lawsuits multiplied. In 1998, facing a wave of them, the American tobacco industry negotiated a master settlement agreement: they would pay an estimated $206 billion (US) and accept certain terms—including restrictions on their ability to advertise cigarettes—in exchange for immunity from future litigation from the states covered in the agreement. In 2025, Canadian cigarette companies negotiated a similar $32.5 billion settlement.

If their appeals fail, the social media giants may opt to negotiate their own master settlements. They could conceivably agree to pay some gargantuan sum to make all of the outstanding lawsuits go away, agreeing to a slate of restrictions and design changes—like implementing enhanced security settings and disabling algorithmic recommendations for kids—as a means of securing legislative protection from future lawsuits. And that, finally, could bring about the kinds of changes that Carl Burke and thousands of other parents have been fighting for.

But if Big Tech truly follows in Big Tobacco’s footsteps, the industry will never stop targeting kids. Despite all the rules and restrictions placed upon them, tobacco companies still court minors, attempting to turn them into customers for life—not with cigarettes, necessarily, but with candy-flavoured vapes and influencer-endorsed nicotine pouches. It’s not hard to imagine social media firms picking up the same playbook, wooing future generations with AI companions and virtual-reality games and online casinos and all sorts of digital services that haven’t been invented yet. “We have no illusions that these companies are going to go silently into the wind,” Bergman told CTV News after the KGM verdict. “This is the first battle in a very long war.”

I last spoke to Carl Burke in April, a few days after the three-year anniversary of his son’s death. He was finding his days were getting harder, not easier. “I guess I was being strong for everyone else,” he said. “And now I’m kind of coming down.” It had been a tearful winter. He’d been having nightmares about finding Harry’s body. “I still look out the window and wonder when he’s coming home.”

It’s too soon to know what will come of Harry’s case. It could be settled out of court—or go to trial and potentially be grouped with other sextortion cases and heard in the next year or two. If Carl wins, he expects Meta and Snap to appeal the decision, further drawing things out. In the meantime, he plans to continue doing what he’s always done: telling Harry’s story, badgering MPs, waiting for a moment in court that could change everything. At Souris Regional School, the basketball team still shows up to every game in dress shirts and ties, the way Harry taught them to.