# Larry Magid: Make social media safer without losing its benefits > Source: > Published: 2026-08-20 15:00:27+00:00 **Getting your** [Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...As you may have heard, Meta is on trial in an Oakland courtroom, accused of knowingly designing its social media products to be addictive and contributing to what the plaintiffs call a national youth mental health crisis. California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are bringing this first trial, part of a bipartisan coalition of 29 states that sued Meta over alleged harms to children. The states claim that Meta’s infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, likes and recommendation systems are designed to keep young people engaged, similar to the way ingredients in tobacco can hook smokers. They say Meta knew about potential harms while telling the public and Congress that its products were safe. They also allege that Meta collected personal information from children under 13 without the required parental consent, in violation of the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. The case is being heard by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers and an eight-person advisory jury. Because the jury is advisory, Rogers will ultimately decide whether Meta is legally liable and, if so, what remedies to impose. The states have indicated they could seek about $200 billion in financial penalties, but more consequentially, they want Meta to change the way Facebook and Instagram work for young people, including removing or restricting features such as infinite scroll, autoplay and likes. They are also seeking deletion of personal data allegedly collected from children under 13 without parental consent. Meta denies the allegations, saying it did not design its products to addict young people and has taken significant steps to make its services safer for teens. Before I go on, a disclosure and a bit of a confession. In 2005, shortly after I co-founded ConnectSafely, I visited Facebook’s small office on University Avenue in Palo Alto to meet with Chris Kelly, the company’s general counsel and chief privacy officer. At the time, ConnectSafely’s only funder was MySpace, but Kelly agreed to provide funding for our nascent internet-safety nonprofit. We’ve worked with Facebook, now Meta, ever since, with safety advice and resources for parents and teens. I serve on Meta’s Safety Advisory Council and Youth Advisory Council, as well as a safety advisory group for Meta Reality Labs, which develops products including virtual reality headsets and smart glasses. Meta does not currently make financial contributions to ConnectSafely, but it does compensate the nonprofit for participation on advisory councils and content creation. And here’s the confession. Although I’ve always been aware of social media’s potential risks, until a couple of years ago, I believed that, for most users, the benefits outweighed the harms. That view was partly based on research showing that most young people described their own experiences as positive or neutral. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that 32% of teens said social media had a mostly positive effect on them personally and 59% said it had neither a positive nor negative effect, compared with 9% who said mostly negative. I thought about LGBTQ+ youth, especially those in rural or less accepting communities, who could find support online that might not be available where they lived, though they can also experience high rates of online bullying and abuse. I pointed to teens advocating for causes, connecting with classmates and people who shared their interests, and getting help with schoolwork. A 2018 Pew survey found that 81% of teens said social media made them feel more connected to what was going on in their friends’ lives. Although online exploitation was and remains a serious concern, research has long shown that most child sexual abuse is committed by someone the child knows rather than a stranger, although social media can facilitate sexual exploitation and abuse. Taken together, the data reinforced my belief that, for most young people, the benefits of being connected outweighed the risks. Also, as someone who works closely with Meta’s trust and safety staff, I can say there are people in the company who genuinely work hard to make its products as safe as possible. But they don’t necessarily make the final decisions, and their advice doesn’t always result in safer outcomes. None of this meant the risks weren’t real, and concern is growing. A 2025 Pew study found that 48% of teens said social media had a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32% in 2022. We are also seeing other serious risks, including sextortion and online scams affecting children and adults. I used to argue that these services were more like chocolate than cigarettes. Most people can consume a moderate amount of chocolate with little or no harm, while some consume too much and others need to avoid it for medical reasons. I saw excessive social media use as a genuine risk for some people, but not evidence that the product itself was inherently harmful to most youth. This analogy worked when I started using it, but social media has changed. There are now significant differences between chocolate and social media. Chocolate may have seductive ingredients like fat and sugar, but the chocolate bar doesn’t change its recipe based on who is eating it. There is no algorithm watching what you eat, learning what you crave and continually adjusting what it puts in front of you to encourage you to consume more. Social media platforms can do exactly that, using what they know about our interests and behavior to personalize what we see and keep us engaged. While I still wouldn’t equate social media with cigarettes, some features have qualities associated with behavioral addiction. Algorithms feed us content selected in part to keep us engaged, infinite scrolling makes it easy to consume one post after another and likes can reinforce our tendency to post things we think will make us more popular with our peers. And whether it’s youth or adults, recommendation systems that amplify incendiary content can contribute to divisiveness and expose people to increasingly extreme material. I’m not in the courtroom or following every piece of evidence presented, so I’m in no position to say what the jury should advise or how the judge should rule. But I hope this case, along with other social media cases, encourages companies and regulators to preserve social media’s many benefits while greatly mitigating its risks. No technology or human endeavor is completely risk-free. We didn’t stop driving because cars can be dangerous. We made them safer through seat belts, airbags, car seats, better engineering, traffic laws and other safeguards. Likewise, through consumer protection laws, sensible regulation, safer design and responsible corporate behavior, we can greatly reduce the risks of social media without giving up its benefits. *Larry Magid is a tech journalist and internet safety activist. Contact him at larry@larrymagid.com.*