They Didn't Look at It. Now a Jury Made Them.
Yesterday, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for misleading users about child safety...
Emma Parfitt
They Didn't Look at It. Now a Jury Made Them.
Yesterday, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for misleading users about child safety on its platforms.
It is the first jury verdict of its kind against Meta. Prosecutors compared it to Big Tobacco. The Attorney General called it historic.
I called it inevitable.
Not because Meta is uniquely evil. But because the industry has been making the same choice for twenty years.
Not the choice to harm children. The choice not to look.
Child Safeguarding Is Too Big
There is a phenomenon I have observed throughout my decade in frontline child protection, and again in every conversation I have had with digital platforms since founding Libran Global Safeguarding.
Child safeguarding feels, to many organisations, like the sun.
Too vast. Too complex. Too uncomfortable. If you look directly at it, really look at it, you have to confront the full scale of what is happening. The volume of harm. The systemic failures. The gap between what the policy says and what the architecture actually delivers.
So organisations don’t look directly at it.
They look adjacent to it. They invest in moderation teams. They publish transparency reports. They hire Heads of Child Safety and give them insufficient resources and structural authority. They build policies that describe a world of safeguarding that their actual systems cannot deliver.
And then, when the evidence of harm becomes undeniable, they say they had no idea.
Meta’s own internal documents told a different story. Their employees knew. Their researchers quantified it. Their executives were warned.
They chose not to look anyway.
The Big Tobacco Moment
The comparison to Big Tobacco is not hyperbole. It is structurally accurate.
Big Tobacco knew cigarettes caused cancer. They funded research designed to obscure that knowledge. They marketed products to young people while publicly denying the harm. They prioritised shareholders over the children whose lungs they were destroying.

Emma Parfitt
Founder & Principal Consultant
Over a decade in social work and child protection. Founder of the Front Door Theory framework. Working with organisations to build safeguarding architecture that holds under pressure.
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