Below is an op-ed by Fairplay Executive Director Josh Golin that was published Feb. 18, 2026, in National Review:
It was the world’s worst-kept secret. Over many years, a powerful businessman was responsible for hurting more children than we’ll probably ever know. Not only was there no accountability, but his fellow elites even fawned over him. He met with presidents and was lauded for his philanthropy. And after his predatory behavior was exposed, it led to a lot of performative outrage but no real justice for those who had been harmed.
I’m talking, of course, about Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO who is scheduled to testify today in a landmark trial of social media companies for addicting children to their platforms.
The scale of the harm inflicted by Zuckerberg’s Instagram is staggering. When Meta surveyed young teen users about their experiences during the previous seven days, nearly one in four reported receiving unwanted sexual advances, and one in five suffered cyberbullying. Extrapolated to Meta’s 270 million teen users, that means every week, tens of millions of young people experience these serious harms.
The company understood these harms well when it made increasing teen users and engagement its number-one goal in 2024, but it decided to prioritize profit over safety. Zuckerberg personally vetoed a ban on plastic-surgery filters on Instagram, despite pleas from outside experts and his own employees that these filters cause harm to the mental health of teens.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who is trying a separate case against the company, has called Meta the “largest marketplace for predators and pedophiles globally.” Evidence in that trial includes an email from a child safety professional claiming that 500,000 minors per day received targeted sexual messages from adults on Facebook and Instagram. In 2023, a Wall Street Journal investigation found that Instagram allowed users to search for terms linked to child sexual abuse material. These queries were met with a warning (“These results may contain images of child sexual abuse”), but users were given the option to “see results anyway.”
When Zuckerberg takes the stand in Los Angeles today, I suspect we’ll see many more explosive revelations. But I’m less interested in what Zuckerberg will say than what will happen as a result of his testimony.
As with this century’s most notorious child predator, Zuckerberg must have friends in high places. It’s been more than four years since whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked documents that showed Instagram made body-image issues worse for one in three girls. More than two years have passed since former Meta security chief Arturo Béjar said Zuckerberg never responded to his email about “a critical gap in how we as a company approach harm.” It’s also been two years since Zuckerberg was forced to apologize to families whose children died as a result of social media harms. In that time, Congress has passed exactly zero laws to protect kids online. In fact, the last time they passed such a bill was in 1998 — before social media and smartphones even existed.
They came close in 2024. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) overwhelmingly passed the Senate, but in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson never brought it to a vote. The Speaker promised online safety would be a top priority in the new Congress, but 14 months in, the gold-standard Senate version of KOSA — which has a whopping 76 sponsors — hasn’t even been introduced in the House. Instead, the House has introduced its own version of the bill that guts key provisions and, in a massive giveaway to Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs, prevents states from enforcing or enacting their own laws to protect kids online.
But perhaps things will finally change after today. As divided as our society is, we should still be able to agree that billionaires should not be harming children for profit and that elites should not protect those doing the harm. Survey after survey shows that huge majorities of parents want Congress to protect children online. And KOSA is the only thoroughly vetted bill with broad bipartisan support that would help prevent the wide array of dangerous situations that young people face online.
KOSA has the support of parents whose children have died because of social media. Over the past few years, these parents (many of them members of ParentsSOS, which is supported by my organization, Fairplay) have gone to Washington again and again to describe how their children died by suicide after cyberbullying, sextortion, or being force-fed pro-suicide content; were poisoned by drugs laced with fentanyl after being connected to dealers on social media; or suffered accidental deaths when attempting algorithmically-promoted viral challenges. We should listen to these courageous survivors.
So while all eyes are on Zuckerberg testifying today, I’ll be looking to Capitol Hill to find out: Will Congress stand with survivors and families and finally pass KOSA, or continue to protect the Zuckerberg class by doing nothing?
Josh Golin is the executive director of Fairplay, an organization dedicated to protecting kids from the exploitative practices of Big Tech.