Hooking children isn’t free speech. Meta is running a casino in your child’s pocket

Opening statements began this week in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California, and the accusation on the table is blunt. A lawyer for four state attorneys general told the judge Meta’s business model comes down to four words: hook, hold, harvest, hide. I’ve raised three boys through the smartphone era, and I’ve spent years coaching high school athletes. I didn’t need a courtroom to tell me something was wrong. I’ve watched it happen on the practice field.I’m a First Amendment guy. I believe in the marketplace of ideas, and I’m allergic to anyone who wants to regulate speech because it hurts their feelings. But there’s a difference between protecting speech and protecting a business model built to exploit a brain that hasn’t finished forming. A 14-year-old’s prefrontal cortex isn’t done wiring the circuits that handle impulse control and risk assessment. Feed those brains an algorithm engineered to maximize time on screen, and you’re not exercising free expression. You’re running a casino with a child’s allowance.I see the damage up close every season. Attention spans that once carried children through a full practice now fragment several times in a single practice. I’ve coached enough teenagers to know the difference between a child who’s tired and a child who’s twitchy for a screen. That twitch is new, and it tracks the rise of the apps now on trial. California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are the first four of 29 states that sued Meta in 2023. They’re seeking damages that could theoretically reach $1.4 trillion, along with court-ordered changes to how Facebook and Instagram operate for minors. They also allege Meta violated the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by scooping up data from minors under 13 without parental consent. Meta denies all of it and points to “Teen Accounts,” parental controls, and age-detection tools as proof that it takes the problem seriously.New Mexico already ran this case to a verdict: a jury found 75,000 violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act and hit Meta with a $375 million penalty. A judge then ordered another $567 million into an abatement fund, bringing the total to $942 million. The remedy list reads like a parent’s wish list: a 90-hour monthly cap on Facebook and Instagram use for minors, no push notifications during school hours or overnight, likes hidden by default unless a parent opts in, and a ban on sexualized chatbot interactions with children. None of that stops a teenager from posting an opinion. It stops the platform from engineering compulsion.I get the counterargument. Parents, not judges, raise their own children, and plenty of good conservatives are rightly nervous about government further in the living room. I share that instinct. But the “just parent harder” line assumes a level of surveillance that doesn’t exist in the real world. I can set screen time limits at dinner. I cannot follow my sons, or my athletes, into every notification and every autoplay video, deciding what shows up next at 11 at night. A platform engineered around infinite scroll doesn’t wait for permission.OPINION: META JUST PROVED SAMMY’S LAW COULD HAVE SAVED MY SONThis isn’t a call for Washington to run Silicon Valley. It’s a call for the same principle we already apply to cigarettes, alcohol, and gambling: you can sell an adult on plenty of things, but you don’t get to design the product specifically to hook a child. Age verification that actually works, notification limits during school hours, and default settings that protect rather than exploit young users aren’t radical. They’re common sense dressed up in engineering language.The Oakland trial will run for weeks, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself may end up on the stand. Whatever the outcome, the lesson for parents and coaches shouldn’t wait for a verdict. Know what’s on the phone in your child’s pocket. Push for the guardrails New Mexico already ordered. And hold every platform, not just Meta, to the same standard we’d demand from any adult who spent this much energy studying how to keep a child hooked. That’s not a partisan position. It’s a parental one.Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.