The Senate odd couple demanding Congress act on kids’ online safety
By Michael Jones
For years, parents and child safety advocates have faced a legal landscape in which lawsuits against tech companies rarely make it past the starting line, largely because federal law treats platforms as hosts of user content rather than as products responsible for how that content is delivered.
But that dynamic is starting to shift.
Recent courtroom setbacks for Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—including a major jury verdict in New Mexico and ongoing litigation in California—have injected new urgency into a long-stalled fight on Capitol Hill.
Standing alongside Democratic Attorney General Raúl Torrez of New Mexico and child safety advocates, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) argued last week that Congress should seize the moment to advance bipartisan legislation aimed at holding tech companies accountable. They pointed to proposals such as the Sunset Section 230 Act with Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the STOP CSAM Act and the Kids Online Safety Act.
Durbin, the number two Democrat in the Senate and top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, cast the current moment as part of a familiar arc, comparing today’s tech giants to Big Tobacco: companies that recognized the addictive pull of their products, sought to capture users early and leaned on their political muscle to stall reforms—until the legal and political pressure became too great to ignore.
“These back-to-back decisions in New Mexico and California show that big tech will ultimately face the same fate as Big Tobacco,” he said.
Hawley, who also serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, argued that the debate amounts to a binary choice for lawmakers: siding with powerful tech companies or protecting children and constitutional principles.
“The United States Congress is here to represent, ‘We the People,’” he told me. “So I would just say to my colleagues: Are you here to represent the people? Are you here to represent the corporations? It’s time that we stood up for the people.”
A New Mexico jury hit Meta with a $375 million judgment last month after finding it violated state consumer protection law by misleading users about safety and enabling child sexual exploitation.
The state argued that Meta knew its platforms exposed minors to predators and harmful content. The case’s evidence included undercover stings showing how easily adults could target accounts posing as children. And the jury agreed that Meta deceptively marketed its platforms as safe for kids and failed to enforce protections.
The judgment is widely seen as a potential turning point—the first time a jury has held Meta liable for harms tied to its platform design and safety claims, rather than just user content. Supporters of the outcome say it creates a roadmap for future cases,using consumer fraud and product design theories to sidestep Section 230, which has provided near-absolute immunity to social media platforms by shielding them from liability for third-party user content.
Plaintiffs in the ongoing California case argue that Meta—and, in some claims, Google and YouTube—designed platforms to be addictive for teens with methods that drove compulsive use and psychological harm. Jurors have been weighing whether those design choices—algorithms, engagement loops and recommendation systems—create liability. In other words, it challenges tech companies’ longstanding claim that their platforms are neutral intermediaries.
Durbin and Hawley say the bills they’re lobbying for would move the fight from the courtroom to Congress by setting national standards for how tech companies operate.
The Sunset Section 230 Act would strip platforms of the liability shield that has long protected them, opening the door for victims to sue. The STOP CSAM Act would give survivors of child sexual exploitation clearer legal pathways to hold companies accountable. And the Kids Online Safety Act would require platforms to build safer products for minors from the start, with stronger default protections, limits on addictive features and increased parental controls. Advocates argue that instead of relying on piecemeal court rulings like those in New Mexico and California, Congress should define the boundaries of responsibility up front.
Torrez told me that even if Congress fails to muster the collective will to act, it should at least weaken or eliminate Section 230 to make it easier for states to hold companies accountable.
“We will do it right,” Torrez said. “It’s the fact that the courthouse door has been barred, that people who have been harmed are not allowed their day in court, that states that have realized this impact are denied an opportunity.”
I was most struck by how united Durbin and Hawley, otherwise strange bedfellows, are for this cause. The former is an old-school, relatively mainstream liberal grandfather who’s retiring at the end of the year. The latter is a right-wing populist conservative who has young kids and is on the front lines of the anti-abortion movement.
Hawley acknowledged the unlikely alignment with Durbin, saying parents from Missouri to Illinois are united in frustration with tech companies that profit from their children’s attention while deflecting responsibility onto families.
“These companies design the platforms to get around parental controls, to stymie parents, to divide children from their parents. That’s the goal,” Hawley told me. “We have got to put a stop to that and put power back in the hands of parents.”
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
