I would love to think that Mark Zuckerberg saw the light. Meta, Zuckerberg’s massive tech company that owns Facebook and Instagram, agreed to a $17 billion settlement with 47 state attorneys general who had sued the company for deliberately addicting children to its products. In addition to the financial penalties, Meta agreed to implement features that would support youth mental health, such as a default daily time limit of two hours, alongside nighttime blocking features, for users under 18. These protections would end after five years. If industry peers TikTok and YouTube adopt identical measures, the protections would extend to 10 years.
Even Meta seems to realize that the settlement does not fully address the problem. A Meta official told reporters, “I think legislation would have been the best answer to this issue. It would be better to have this done by a legislature, which can immediately bind all of our competitors to the same rules.” The official added that “we didn’t get there this Congress” with the Kids Online Safety Act but that “this deal is designed to lead us to basically the same place.”
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As a parent who lost a child to a social media harm and has been advocating basic safety reforms for years, I have watched Meta lobby against common-sense legislation such as the KOSA. If it weren’t for Meta and Zuckerberg, we would already have the legislation and industry standards they say they now support. The KOSA has always enjoyed broad, bipartisan support in Congress. But after the KOSA passed the Senate 91-3 in 2024, Zuckerberg and his colleagues helped kill the bill in the House. Their moves to crush it have continued this Congress. In just the second quarter of 2026, Meta spent nearly $6 million on federal lobbying — an average of approximately $66,000 per day.
The KOSA would create the industry standards that Meta now says we need. More importantly, it would create a duty of care for online platforms to ensure that the design of their products does not cause social media addiction or other serious and fatal harms to minors.
Contrary to the Meta official’s assertion, Congress is very much still in session this year, and there is still time to pass the KOSA, which has passed through the House this year and just advanced out of the Senate Commerce Committee in July.
Recently, the organization I helped found to advocate online safety, ParentsSOS, sent a letter to Zuckerberg inviting him to join us in our fight to pass the KOSA.
If Meta isn’t being totally hypocritical, the path forward is clear. Zuckerberg should stop lobbying against the KOSA, publicly pledge his support for the legislation, and share his support with President Donald Trump and leaders in Congress. That would make a huge difference in creating long-lasting, industry-wide standards to protect all children on all platforms.
For seven years, I have been mourning the loss of my 15-year-old son, Mason, who died after attempting a dangerous viral challenge that the YouTube algorithm fed him unsolicited. Parents often hear that it’s their responsibility to protect their children online. And I believed that. I was the engaged parent who did everything the experts advised. I turned on every safety feature on Mason’s devices. I used watchdog apps. I delayed and limited social media. I had the hard conversations.
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And the harmful content that killed my son still found its way into his life.
Parents can’t do this alone. Even the most attentive parents cannot fight these companies and their algorithms. We agree with the Meta official: Legislation is the best way to help parents protect their children. It’s time for Zuckerberg to join our cause and get the KOSA passed this year.
Joann Bogard is a founding member of ParentsSOS.
