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From writer Luc Rinaldi:
I first spoke with Carl Burke in January, a few months after I became a father. We were, in a macabre way, mirror versions of one another. I’d just had a son, and Carl had just lost one. His boy, Harry, had taken his own life after being sextorted over Instagram and Snapchat.
I’d reached out to Carl because he belongs to a growing demographic: parents who have lost children to social media. He’d recently connected with the Social Media Victims Law Center, a new firm that represents dads whose daughters have died doing viral TikTok challenges and moms whose sons have overdosed on fentanyl-laced drugs they bought on Snapchat. The centre is advancing a novel legal argument, alleging that these children died not because of the content hosted on social media, for which platforms are generally not liable, but because the platforms themselves were negligently designed. This struck me as a clever way to target the most harmful features of online social networks, which have so far escaped any serious regulation.
Part of my interest in this story was personal. Though my son is still in diapers, I worry about the world he’s inheriting, one where the average teen spends several hours a day on social media. These lawsuits may not change that, but they could be part of the solution. It’s just one of the things Carl has done to make online spaces safer for future generations, so that families like mine don’t have to endure the heartbreak that his did.
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