What Just Happened in the Meta Trial Should Set Off Alarms Everywhere

It's a sign of an industry that knows it’s above the law and has been doing so with absolute arrogance — making billions every year — for 30 years...

On Monday, a New Mexico jury delivered what the coalition ParentsSOS called “a watershed moment,” finding that Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and Google (YouTube) knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what its executives knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

After a nearly seven-week trial, jurors agreed that Meta engaged in “unconscionable” trade practices that preyed on the vulnerabilities and inexperience of children. They found thousands of separate violations and applied the maximum $5,000 penalty per violation, arriving at a total of $375 million. Now the final penalty phase of the trial begins, which could cost Meta millions or even billions more.

You’d think a verdict like that would rattle the company. But, as NPR reported, Meta’s stock actually jumped 5 percent in after-hours trading following the verdict, indicating that shareholders were shrugging the whole thing off.

And why wouldn’t they? As long as Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act remains on the books, Meta and every other social media giant knows that $375 million is little more than a mere rounding error for a company currently valued at $1.5 trillion, and its billionaire owner. The verdict landed like a parking ticket on a Lamborghini with a “Screw You!” custom license plate.

That stock market shrug tells us everything we need to know about why these companies keep harming our children and promoting rightwing and Russian propaganda for profit. It’s not just that their executives might be uniquely evil people (although evidence about what they knew and when they knew it is genuinely damning), but the law has been written in a way that makes them pretty much untouchable. And they know it.

It all has to do with that notorious Section 230.

The Republican case against regulation of business has always boiled down to arguing that when people are harmed by a company’s behavior they can sue for big bucks. If a car company knowingly markets a defective car, they can be sued by people who sustained injury. If your hospital kills a family member because they didn’t sterilize things properly, they can be sued. If your local restaurant makes you violently ill from food poisoning, you can sue them.

But the morbidly rich CEOs who run the world’s biggest social media platforms occupy a unique space in American law: they can’t be sued, can’t be arrested, and can’t be held accountable for almost anything happening on their platforms, even if they knew all about it and failed or refused to stop it. Nor can their companies, or any of their employees or shareholders.

This is because of this bizarre provision — Section 230 — of the Telecommunications Act that Congress passed and President Clinton signed in 1996. It was supposed to help jump-start the internet, but what it really did was make Mark Zuckerberg into the richest millennial in America (he owns about 2 percent of all wealth held by American millennials) and since then has led to a nationwide mental health crisis and the election of Donald Trump twice.

The language of the law Clinton signed is explicit: while a newspaper, radio station, TV station — or even Substack writers like me and my colleagues — can be held responsible for what they/we publish and its consequences, Facebook can’t be. Section 230 says it clearly:

“[N]o 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.”

The issue is only mildly partisan; supporters of renewing Section 230 mostly seem to be those legislators who take money from social media giants. Those who don’t take the cash are genuinely concerned.

Consider the case of Chuck Grassley, the 91-year-old Trump-supporting Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and not exactly anyone’s idea of a radical reformer. He published a Q&A article on his official Senate website late last year calling out Section 230 by name and calling for its end, and then co-sponsored the bipartisan Sunset Section 230 Act to repeal it entirely. In his own words:

“The outdated law shields social media platforms and prevents parents and victims from seeking justice from online harm... Fast forward three decades, many of these entities are among the most powerful, profitable companies in the world; they use Section 230 to evade badly needed accountability. …

“Big Tech is profiting at the expense of the American people, especially young people. Section 230 allows online predators to sexually groom and extort kids. Predators create and distribute AI-generated deepfake pornography; drug traffickers sell fentanyl-laced pills to teenagers; impressionable adolescents experience harm to their mental health.”

But it gets worse: not only has Section 230 turned the web into a stalking ground for sexual predators; it’s also given Russian President Putin cheap and easy access to individual Americans, an access he’s been using for years to tear our country apart.

According to the Mueller Report and the FBI, Putin’s troll farms have been targeting Americans via social media for years: Mueller indicted 34 individuals and 3 Russian businesses for their work spreading lies and disinformation that succeeded in helping get Trump elected in 2016. White supremacist groups in America regularly get boosts from Putin’s troll farms, who have the power to make messages go viral.

But were the social media platforms that hosted those lies ever punished? Did they have to do anything to repair the damage Putin did to America via their companies?

Is there even a regulatory agency that has the ability to control them, the way the FCC can a radio or TV station, the NHTSA does car manufacturers, or the way the FDA oversees the pharmaceutical industry?

No on all counts. All because of Section 230.

And the social media companies know this: it’s intrinsic to their profit-making strategies, in fact.

An internal Facebook document leaked to the MIT Technology Review and written about by Karen Hao, found that around 15,000 different foreign-troll-farm-run Facebook pages/groups/sites reached 140 million Americans every month.

The foreign-run pages included the largest Christian American page on Facebook — 20 times larger than the next largest, reaching 75 million US users monthly. They included the largest African-American page on Facebook, three times larger than the next largest. The second-largest Native American page on Facebook. The fifth-largest women’s page on Facebook, reaching 60 million US users monthly.

When that report was written, of the top 20 “American Christian” sites on Facebook, 19 were Russian-troll-farm-run. Ten of the top 15 African American sites on Facebook, including the one that sits at #1, were similarly run by foreign, mostly Russian, troll farms.

Is it any wonder, given this, that evangelicals have bonded to Trump and the Black and Hispanic vote moved in his direction in the runup to the 2024 election?

The Facebook internal memo, written by former senior-level data analyst Jeff Allen, didn’t dive into possible political motivations, although the Mueller Report made clear that similar non-US activity on Facebook and other social media exploded prior to the 2016 election, reaching tens of millions of Americans and helping make Donald Trump president.

That America has allowed this situation to exist and fester for 30 years now is beyond bizarre.

Consider this thought experiment that hopefully makes the entire situation clear:

Friday night your neighbor puts a sign out in front of his house saying, “Big Party Tonight! No Rules! Everybody Welcome!”

By 2 a.m. the whole house has filled up with criminals doing their thing: some guy is selling child porn in the kitchen, a bedroom has turned into a shooting gallery filled with addicts, while a dealer in stolen guns has taken up residence in the living room. There’s a bloody knife fight going on in the backyard.

When the police show up they’ll not only bust the reprobates; they’ll also haul off your neighbor. After all, it was his home and he knew that criminal activity was going on inside it.

That’s not particularly controversial; it’s been an aspect of the law since at least 1275 with the introduction of the Castle Doctrine into British common law, and probably for millennia before.

You have control of your “castle,” but you also have responsibility for what happens in it.

The same is true of businesses. If the manager of your local Home Depot decided to open the large spaces inside the store to after-hours criminal activity, s/he would go to jail along with the criminals themselves.

But here’s where it gets weird. What if, instead of a physical location, the “home” or “party venue” or “business” is online and called Facebook or X or TikTok?

Back in 1996, a handful of geniuses in Congress thought, “Hey, let’s do away with the entire concept of the homeowner or business owner having responsibility for what happens in their place.”

Seriously. Selling drugs, trading in guns and ammunition, human trafficking, planning terrorist attacks. All good. No problem. You can bust the bad guys, but not Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Donald Trump, who own the “houses” of Facebook, X, and Truth Social.

No matter what happens on a social media platform, the owner — the person who opened the place to the world and put out a “Big Party” sign — bears no responsibility whatsoever for what goes on inside. None. Untouchable.

The police can bust the crooks, but they can’t arrest the guy who owns the online “castle” and literally makes billions from the criminal or anti-democracy activity that happens on it: no court has any authority to criminally try him, and he’ll never, ever see even one day inside a jail cell no matter what happened in his place.

Sounds crazy, right?

But, continuing that metaphor about your home or place of business being your castle, that’s pretty much exactly what Congress did with Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

It wasn’t always this way.

Back when the internet started, but before hypertext markup language (HTML) was invented, there were really only two big “castles” on the internet: CompuServe and AOL. My old friend and business partner Nigel Peacock and I ran forums on CompuServe starting around 1979, right up until 1996. As did our colleague Sue Nethercott, who helped out on other forums.

Nigel and I ran the IBM PC Forum, the Macintosh Forum, and about two dozen other “places” where people interested in ADHD, desktop publishing, UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, international trade, and a bunch of other topics were discussed.

CompuServe paid us well, because we had to make sure nothing criminal happened in any of the forums we ran.

We kept the online places open and safe. After all, it was CompuServe’s “castle” and they were paying us big bucks to make sure nothing illegal happened inside it.

Until 1996, that is, when they decided they didn’t any longer have to pay to keep the “home” safe and crime-free. Shortly after Section 230 went into law, CompuServe stopped paying us for the work we did and most of their moderators simply drifted away, some replaced by community-minded volunteers like those who today run “groups” on Facebook.

The impact of Section 230 is obvious today.

Facebook is now so powerful and its impact so far-flung that it literally helped cause a mass slaughter, a race-based genocide, in Myanmar/Burma.

Zuckerberg, our country’s richest millennial who owns 2 percent of all millennial wealth in America, had a secret dinner with Donald Trump, and held multiple meetings with rightwing politicians, reporters, op-ed writers, and influencers, according to Politico. I can find no record of him having similar private dinners with either Obama or Biden, nor with any groups of progressive journalists, writers, politicians, or influencers.

Numerous sources identify Facebook as one of the major hubs of organizing for rightwing events including January 6th, the rise of QAnon, and the contemporary militia and white supremacist Nazi movements.

The criminals can go to jail, but the billionaires who own the Internet “castles” where the transactions take place are almost entirely immune.

In 1997, in the case Zeran v. America Online, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Section 230 is written so tightly that even when an online service and its executives are knowingly allowing lawbreaking, they can’t be held criminally accountable.

And the harms keep piling up. Just this month, Tennessee teenagers filed suit against Elon Musk’s xAI company over AI-generated child sexual abuse material produced by its Grok chatbot. More than 40 state attorneys general have now filed lawsuits against Meta alone.

The New Mexico trial examined internal Meta documents showing the company knew that its algorithms were pushing harmful content to children but chose to jack up their profits and make Zuckerberg richer anyway. Whistleblower Arturo Béjar and others laid out in painstaking detail what executives knew and when they knew it.

And yet Meta’s stock went up on the day the jury announced its verdict. That tells you where Wall Street thinks this all ends up: with Section 230 still intact and the companies still untouchable.

Section 230 lives on. I wrote a book that covers it, The Hidden History of Big Brother: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy.

So did Josh Hawley, the Republican Senator from Missouri who hopes to be the next Trumpy president, and his book’s take is pretty much the same as mine: Section 230 is toxic, at the very least.

Fixing or simply voiding Section 230 is a place where internet-savvy liberals like Amy Klobuchar and far-right conservatives like Hawley and Graham can find considerable common ground.

The bipartisan Sunset Section 230 Act, introduced in December 2025 by Graham, Durbin, Grassley, Klobuchar, Hawley, and others, would repeal Section 230 immunity entirely, while giving companies a two-year runway to get their houses in order before victims would finally be allowed into court. Grassley put it plainly on his Senate website:

“The day is long overdue to open the courthouse doors for victims of online crimes and exploitation to seek justice and hold wrongdoers accountable.”

This is one of those genuinely rare moments when progressives and conservatives are saying the exact same thing, and it matters that Congress actually do something with it.

It won’t be super-easy and is going to require some serious discussion and debate about the limits of both surveillance and liability, as the Electronic Freedom Foundation points out about the newest attempt to “protect children” on the internet.

And the social media companies and their morbidly rich owners, raking in millions in profits every day, have so far stymied all efforts to do away with Section 230 or regulate their behavior by taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s legalization of political bribery: Silicon Valley is now one of the larger players in the lobbying and campaign contributions game.

Nonetheless, something must be done about these cyberspace “castles,” especially given the demonstrable harm Section 230 is allowing to happen to both our kids and our democracy.

Eliminating section 230 won’t be a magic panacea; some type of more comprehensive regulation of social media needs to replace it. Plus antitrust actions to break up Meta and Google. But it’s a damn good start.

If Zuckerberg and his peers have to start hiring people to do what Nigel and I did for CompuServe years ago, it may reduce their income from tens of billions to mere billions every year. But society will be the better for it, our political landscape will stabilize, and fewer children will die.

A jury in New Mexico just reminded us of what’s at stake. There were thousands of violations, but Meta’s stock went up anyway. That’s not a sign of a healthy industry operating inside reasonable legal limits. That’s a sign of an industry that knows it’s above the law and has been doing so with absolute arrogance — making billions every year — for 30 years.

It’s well past time to change that. Call your members of Congress at 202-224-3121, tell them you want them to cosponsor and vote for the Sunset Section 230 Act, and let them know that the next time a jury says a company preyed on innocent children, you want that company’s stock to go down, not up.

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide.