See You in Court

Summary

Podcast Summary: Left To Their Own Devices – "See You in Court"

Host: Ava Smithing, Toronto Star
Release Date: October 31, 2025
Theme:
This gripping episode delves into the legal frontlines of the digital age, chronicling the efforts to hold Big Tech accountable for enabling harm to children and adolescents. Through Ava Smithing’s personal lens and in-depth interviews with three prominent lawyers—Raul Torres, Duncan Embury, and Laura Marquez Garrett—the episode explores the groundbreaking lawsuits and strategies employed to challenge the unchecked power of Meta, Snap, TikTok, and others. It’s a raw, unflinching survival story about the fight for safety and justice in 21st-century childhood.

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Episode Overview

• Main Theme:
  The episode investigates how attorneys and survivors are turning to lawsuits as a means to force accountability on social media giants for harm to children—including sexual exploitation, addiction, mental health crises, and educational disruption. Through extensive investigative reporting and court action, change is being demanded in the absence of legislative regulation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Dark Shift of Childhood Online (00:01–04:20)

• Raul Torres’s Background:
  Veteran prosecutor describes his early work on violent crime and child abuse cases—“the really hard cases, the ones most people don’t even want to think about.”

  “Those are things that stay with you.” – Raul Torres (01:14)

• Transformation with Social Media:
  The darkest corners hosting abuse became mainstream—social media connects predators to victims more easily than ever.

  “That darkest corner of the Internet has now been pushed to the most accessible social media applications...” – Raul Torres (01:49)

2. Taking On Big Tech in Court (04:20–14:44)

• Litigation as Accountability:
  With governments failing to regulate, lawyers like Torres aggressively pursue lawsuits against Meta and Snap.
  • Meta Lawsuit Tactics:
    Undercover decoy accounts, like “Issa B”, demonstrate how quickly children are targeted on Facebook—flooded with explicit messages, harassed, and further exploited by algorithms.

    “76% of teenage girls have received unsolicited dick pics.” – Ava Smithing (06:48)
    “Meta had a sense of what was happening to Issa, but rather than try to protect her, they used that information to advertise to her.” – Ava Smithing (08:10)

  • Allegation Severity:
    Lawsuit claims Meta platforms are “a breeding ground for predators,” with investigators finding child sexual abuse material (CSAM) promoted by Instagram algorithms.

    “Instagram was helping pedophiles find it, by promoting graphic hashtags...” – Duncan Embury (10:45) “What the hell were you thinking?” – Senator Ted Cruz to Mark Zuckerberg, referencing Instagram’s handling of CSAM (11:12)

  • Corporate Priorities:
    Meta, instead of fixing products, spends billions fighting lawsuits and lobbying.

    “Their values are situational. Their ethics are situational. It’s their bottom line that matters the most.” – Raul Torres (12:56)

3. School Systems Under Siege (14:17–24:15)

• Duncan Embury’s Perspective:
  Former medical malpractice litigator now represents Ontario school boards suing Meta, TikTok, and Snap for havoc wrought on education.
  • Personal Impact:
    Sharing how his own daughter struggled with addiction and attempted suicide linked to TikTok.

    “When it wasn’t available to her, that was the result. I’m happy to say I’m one of the lucky ones. Not every parent, not every student gets that second chance.” – Duncan Embury (15:36)

  • Educational Harm:
    Lawsuit alleges platforms damage mental health, attention spans, and ability to learn, straining teachers and IT staff.

    “As soon as a student looks at their phone, they’re gone.” – Duncan Embury (18:07)

    • Systemic Costs:
      Schools demand $8 billion in damages for the cumulative burden.
  • Legal Argument:
    Asserting social platforms have a novel legal “duty of care” to students—an evolving interpretation to match the digital era.

    “We have to allow our law to evolve with that in order to protect our citizenry.” – Duncan Embury (20:45)

    • Evidence of Knowing Harm:
      Discovery from U.S. cases reveals internal studies showing habit-forming design within 35 minutes of use.

      “To my knowledge, there’s no other product that can develop habit forming tendency in 35 minutes.” – Duncan Embury (22:26)

4. Survivor Lawsuits & Patterns of Harm (24:57–34:56)

• Laura Marquez Garrett’s Fight:
  Once a premier corporate lawyer, now representing victims directly—including young women, families of children lost to suicide or drugs, and parents battling AI chatbot harms.
  • Personal Realizations:
    On discovering Silicon Valley designers won’t let their own kids use their products:

    “Every alarm bell went off...they know they’re hurting kids.” – Laura Marquez Garrett (25:40)

    • Addiction at Home:
      Describes her own 4-year-old’s tantrums when breaking YouTube Kids’ habit.

      “This child was not my child. And I realized in that moment, like I addicted my four year old child.” – Laura Marquez Garrett (26:16)

  • Emerging Data & Patterns:
    Across thousands of clients, a pattern emerges: social media disproportionately exposes teens (but not adults) to explicit solicitation, fostering addiction, secrecy, anxiety, and depression.

    “It’s pimping out our kids, basically.” – Laura Marquez Garrett (29:13)

    • Addiction and Isolation:
      Social media undermines household rules, causes sleep deprivation, and seeds a cycle of guilt and mental health decline.

      “They start to hate themselves because they are addicts.” – Laura Marquez Garrett (30:03) “Me absolutely being conscious of the fact that Instagram was ripping me apart and being so annoyed with that consciousness that I would even scratch it out.” – Ava Smithing (31:40)

  • Expanding Lawsuits:
    SVLC sues for harms ranging from compulsive use and self-harm content to fentanyl bought via Snapchat, and suicide encouraged by AI bots.

    “Family members of 60 people who died from fentanyl overdoses across the country are now suing the social media app Snapchat.” – Laura Marquez Garrett (32:21)

  • Legal Strategies:
    Rather than focus on Section 230 protections, Laura alleges product defect, likening the case to lawsuits against tobacco and asbestos.

    “These are deliberate design decisions...causing harm.” – Laura Marquez Garrett (33:44)

    • Why Litigation Matters:

      “The reason that companies don’t kill people, the reason companies fix things, it’s so they don’t get sued.” – Laura Marquez Garrett (34:40)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “[Meta] is the most dangerous.” – Raul Torres (05:17)
• “It is killing kids...If all we get is money judgments and they keep killing kids, we’ve lost. So when someone asks, what are the odds that you win? …I’ll die trying.” – Laura Marquez Garrett (04:20)
• “This isn’t third party speech...It’s like tobacco. It’s like asbestos. These are deliberate design decisions.” – Laura Marquez Garrett (33:44)
• “If we can establish that you knowingly targeted students during the time they were in school...that’s why there’s a duty.” – Duncan Embury (21:36)
• “They don’t get to stand outside a kid’s house and tell him he should go kill himself...So why do these companies get to do it?” – Laura Marquez Garrett (32:45)
• “What’s at stake to some extent is our public education system...It is the fundamental tenet of a just democratic society.” – Duncan Embury (24:15)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction/Content Warning: 00:01–00:16
• Raul Torres’s Journey & Early Cases: 00:16–02:51
• Lawsuit Against Meta – Evidence Tactics: 05:17–08:42
• Meta’s Algorithms & Harm: 08:42–11:06
• Internal Tech Company Resistance: 11:45–13:54
• School Board Lawsuit – Mental Health & Learning Impact: 14:17–19:29
• Legal Duty of Care Argument: 20:45–21:54
• Discovery & Internal Documents: 22:26–23:40
• Duncan Embury – Stakes for Public Education: 24:15
• Laura Marquez Garrett – Personal Motivations & Lawsuits: 25:07–34:08
• Garrett’s Novel Legal Strategies: 33:27–33:44
• Concluding Reflections: 34:56–35:22

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Tone & Takeaways

• Tone: Intense, urgent, and deeply personal. The episode is rich with survivor testimony, legal drama, and investigative grit, all delivered in straightforward, sometimes haunting language.
• Takeaway:
  Lawsuits have become the main avenue for pushing social platforms to take responsibility for the safety of young users. Survivors and their advocates are learning the tactics of large-scale litigation to fight the immense resources of Big Tech. As legislative fixes remain stalled, the courtroom becomes the battleground to demand safety, honesty, and change for a generation left to their own devices.

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(Note: Ads, intros, and credits have been omitted. This summary captures all primary content discussed in the episode for listeners seeking a thorough understanding of its key arguments, facts, and advocacy.)

Transcript

[Ava Smithing]

Just a heads up before we start. This episode contains references to child sexual abuse and suicide. Please take care while listening. I promise the next episode is less depressing.

[Raul Torres]

I think it actually starts with my own sort of personal journey as an attorney. I got my start as a frontline violent crime prosecutor and somebody who did child abuse cases.

[Ava Smithing]

Raul Torres has been a prosecutor in New Mexico for almost 20 years.

[Raul Torres]

You know, the kind of brutality, the kind of exploitation, the sorts of things that we are asked to look at are so extreme and so extraordinary that like, you know, frankly, most people don't want to think about it and they don't want to talk about it.

[Ava Smithing]

Early in his career, Torres earned a reputation for being someone who could handle the really hard cases, the ones that most people don't even want to think about.

[Raul Torres]

I ended up volunteering to do a lot of safe house disclosures where I would go and I would listen to kids make disclosures about physical abuse, sexual abuse, things of that kind, which often

[Ava Smithing]

meant he'd end up investigating child sex crimes.

[Raul Torres]

I remember going to the safe house and hearing other little ones, you know, 4 and 5 and 6, and they don't have all the vocabulary and they don't have all the words. And a forensic examiner is talking to this child about, you know, show me on the stall, what happened to you? And when you are in those rooms and in those spaces, those are, those are things that stay with you.

[Ava Smithing]

This was almost two decades ago, years before social media took off. But when it did, it transformed Torres job.

[Raul Torres]

When I started that work, you really had to be in a place on the Internet where you were going into the darkest corners of websites and peer to peer sharing networks where, you know, it was still a little bit difficult to find. Part of the reason that I have gravitated towards this work is, is that darkest corner of the Internet has now been pushed to the most accessible social media applications for people who are interested in the sexual exploitation of children. It's those same tools, the algorithms that connect and link people together, are actually linking together and making this kind of material more accessible to the kinds of people that I have been fighting and looking for and prosecuting my entire career.

[Ava Smithing]

In 2022, Raul Torres ran for New Mexico's Attorney General and won.

[Raul Torres]

I tried in my early career to take individual defendants out of the community.

[Ava Smithing]

And since assuming office, he's taken aim at some of the most powerful companies in the world.

[Raul Torres]

And now I'm in a place where I look at social media companies not just for the positive things that they contribute to society. But I recognize them as places where a great deal of harm can be done. It's hurting people, right? It's enabling monsters to victimize people. And that has to stop, right? There has to be accountability in that.

[Ava Smithing]

In the absence of meaningful regulation, Raul Torres has taken it upon himself to hold Big Tech accountable. In the last two years, he's sued both Meta and Snapchat. And he's not the only one. Thousands of young people are now turning to the justice system as an avenue for accountability. Because while some countries have started to address the harms of social media through policy, that hasn't happened in either Canada or the us.

[Raul Torres]

Congress is not doing their job. They are just not doing their job.

[Ava Smithing]

And in that vacuum, lawyers all over the continent are taking matters into their own hands. Lawyers who believe that maybe, just maybe, the way to hold these companies accountable is to sue the crap out of them.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

It's in their own damn documents. They are killing kids. And I don't care if it's one kid or 10 million kids, it is killing kids. Look, if all we get is money judgments and they keep killing kids, we've lost. So when someone asks, what are the odds that you win, It's I don't know, but I'll die trying.

[Ava Smithing]

I'm Ava Smithing from Paradigms and the Toronto Star. This is left to their own devices. Episode 7 See you in court. Almost immediately after being sworn in as New Mexico's 32nd Attorney General, Raul Torres set his sights on the big social media companies.

[Raul Torres]

We started with Meta because we do believe that Meta is the most dangerous.

[Ava Smithing]

But before Torres and his team could file their lawsuit against Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, they needed evidence.

[Raul Torres]

Some of the things that we do in terms of our investigative techniques are very similar to the types of things that we have done in criminal cases that I was involved in in the past. Setting up decoy accounts using undercover agents, things of that nature. Those are things that you don't typically see in this space.

[Ava Smithing]

Torres and his team set up a handful of fake profiles where investigators pretended to be young girls. One of these accounts was for a fictitious 13 year old named Issa B. The idea was to make a profile that would look and feel like the kind of profile an actual 13 year old would have. So Issa lied about her age and said she was 15, something a lot of kids do. But her posts made it clear she was still a child. My last baby tooth fell out. We've had an actor read some of them. I'm thinking of Moving to Iowa, since you don't need any teeth to say Iowa. The first real day of seventh grade was surprisingly good. Other than my mom making me take this first day at school pic. After those initial posts, Issa's Facebook feed filled up with content from other young teenagers, suggesting that Meta's algorithm did recognize her actual age. But Torres says that Meta used this information primarily to serve her friend requests, content, and advertisements. Almost immediately after setting up her account, Issa's Facebook messages were flooded with pictures and videos of men exposing themselves. I know this might sound crazy, but that doesn't really surprise me. It's happened to me. And if you have a daughter, I bet there's a good chance it's happened to her, too. According to a study in an academic journal called sex roles, 76% of teenage girls have received unsolicited dick pics. And an internal meta investigation in 2021 found that up to 100,000 children are sexually harassed on their platforms every single day.

[Raul Torres]

It's enabling the worst of the worst to find the most vulnerable people and harm them.

[Ava Smithing]

Issa reported the accounts that were harassing her, but they remained active. And that was just the tip of this disturbing iceberg. Issa also made posts suggesting that she had been trafficked by a family member. According to Torres lawsuit, Meta never alerted the authorities, but they did start showing Issa ads for law firms who represent victims of human trafficking. Again, this suggests that Meta had a sense of what was happening to Issa, but rather than try to protect her, they used that information to advertise to her. Okay, take a deep breath with me now, because it gets even worse. Despite being a 13 year old, the vast majority of people friending Issa on Facebook were adult men, many of whom propositioned her. But rather than flagging or banning those accounts, Meta suggested to Issa that she might want to set up a professional account, which would allow her to monetize her popularity among these predators.

[Raul Torres]

I wish we were in a place where I could call on executives and say, hey, this is what is happening because of the decisions that you have made and your company has made. And would you feel comfortable if this happened to your child or a person that you loved? And the answer, of course, would be no.

[Ava Smithing]

For Torres, this is unconscionable.

[Raul Torres]

And then my next question would be, well, if you won't tolerate that for someone in your own family, why will you tolerate it for someone else?

[Ava Smithing]

If a judge rules in favor of New Mexico, Mata could be on the hook for a substantial financial penalty. But For Torres, the real win would be change.

[Raul Torres]

A lot of times there's a payment and things like that to whoever's brought the lawsuit. I'm not interested in that. I want them to change the way they do business.

[Ava Smithing]

The lawsuit against Meta, which was launched in 2023, is more than 200 pages long. I won't get into all of it here because it would take hours and it would be unbearably depressing. But it can be summed up with one sentence in the suit's second paragraph. Facebook and Instagram have become, quote, a breeding ground for predators. Investigators also found a mountain of child sexual abuse material or See Sam on Meta's platforms. According to the suit, investigators easily discovered accounts selling See Sam just by searching for them. One screenshot from the lawsuit shows an account openly advertising small girls, small boys, 3 to 12 years old. Allow me to put this into context. On pornhub, a website hosting millions of free porn videos, investigators found 646 results that depicted or promoted little girls being sexually assaulted. On Instagram, they found nearly 20,000.

[Duncan Embury]

In other words, this material wasn't just living on the dark corners of Instagram. Instagram was helping pedophiles find it by promoting graphic hashtags, including hashtag head and preteen sex, to potential buyers.

[Ava Smithing]

In a U.S. senate hearing last year, Senator Ted Cruz grilled Mark Zuckerberg about this.

[Duncan Embury]

Instagram also displayed the following warning screen to individuals who were searching for child abuse material. These results may contain images of child sexual abuse. And then you gave users two choices, get resources or see results anyway, Mr. Zuckerberg, what the hell were you thinking?

[Ava Smithing]

When we asked Meta about this, they declined to provide a comment on the record. But Raul Torres has heard their arguments before.

[Raul Torres]

You know, I don't really react to canned responses to PR firms that they pay money to and that they use to sort of gaslight policymakers. It's. I'm not interested in that. I don't doubt that they're spending money on it. I would question, frankly how much they put into content moderation. I would want to know how much of that work gets outsourced. I would ask them why they continue to resist basic things like age verification. Seems to me it's simple enough for a company of Meta's size and scope and resources to implement age verification. But I guess what I'd like to say is not interested in words. I'm interested in action. There's any number of things that they could do to make this a safer place and a safer experience for Everybody.

[Ava Smithing]

For Torres, the fact that companies like Meta have chosen to spend billions of dollars on legal fees rather than redesign their products is proof that they're prioritizing profit over people.

[Raul Torres]

Take the money you're paying for your lobbyists, take the money you're paying for the lawyers and the fight, and put all of that money into building a safer product. But again, like, that's just not the way it works in America. Because there is always, and I'm not naive, there's always somebody behind sitting over their shoulder with an MBA saying, well, this is the probability that they win. And so it's worth it, right? It's financially worth it for us to run the gauntlet. But here's the thing. That's not a moral process. It's not an ethical process. It's a financial process. When they start touting the values that they're trying to uphold, it's laughable. It's not real. Their values are situational. Their ethics are situational. It's their bottom line that matters the most. And so we have to change the calculation for how they think about their bottom line.

[Ava Smithing]

A few months after Torres filed his suit, Mehta filed a motion to have it dismissed in the summer of 2024. A judge denied that motion and allowed the lawsuit to proceed. The case is still before.

[Duncan Embury]

So there's more and more studies coming out literally every day. And we now know 95% of all students are on social media. And in fact, a significant proportion of them report usage of over five hours a day on these social media platforms.

[Ava Smithing]

Duncan Embry is a veteran litigator who spent the better part of his career doing medical malpractice work.

[Duncan Embury]

So holding doctors to account where an error has occurred and it's led to harm.

[Ava Smithing]

A lot of those cases involved pediatric neuroscience, a field that in recent years has focused more and more on the impacts of social media.

[Duncan Embury]

We were very interested in that issue, and I guess essentially the same time our schools, certainly in Toronto, started to really see this issue more and more, and it was becoming a more significant problem for them.

[Ava Smithing]

Daily we met up with Duncan in his office in downtown Toronto. It feels like we're on the set of suits or something. We're sitting at a massive boardroom table that looks like it could seat at least 30 lawyers. Duncan has been worried about social media for a while now, partly because he was seeing concerning trends in the research and partly because he was seeing it in his own home.

[Duncan Embury]

I have one daughter who was on it and continues to be on it almost constantly in A problematic way. My other daughter attempted suicide at the age of 15. And I'm not gonna suggest or say that it was directly and solely the responsibility of social media products that that occurred, but it had to do with her coping mechanisms and need for the habit forming use that she'd made of TikTok. And when it wasn't available to her, that was the result. I'm happy to say I'm one of the lucky ones. She's one of the lucky ones. Not every parent, not every student gets that second chance.

[Ava Smithing]

So. Well, before he developed a professional interest in social media, Duncan was seeing the effect it was having on his own kids. But it was really only when he started talking to students and teachers that things began to click into place.

[Duncan Embury]

One of my daughters told me in her grade 11 class, the required reading for English, the teacher was reading it to the class. It's not that the students don't know how to read, of course. It's that because of the attention economy that has been promulgated by these social media platforms, they don't have the attention span to complete and comprehend the novel that they're being asked to read. And I think our educators are seeing on the ground, you know, what the effect on both on their students mental health, but on their attention spans and on their ability to be educated. And they're realizing the enormity of the problem and the need for steps to be taken.

[Ava Smithing]

Duncan and his team are now taking those Steps. They're suing TikTok, Snapchat and Meta on behalf of 23 different school boards in Ontario.

[Duncan Embury]

They were the ones who had really targeted students time at school. In terms of their underlying revenue model,

[Ava Smithing]

the lawsuit is pretty sweeping. They allege that these platforms are hurting kids mental health and leaving them vulnerable to predators. Things we've already spent a lot of time talking about on this show. But they're making another allegation that's unique to school boards. These platforms are wreaking havoc on the education system.

[Duncan Embury]

One of the things we hear consistently from educators is a fear, a fear that the students they are educating, they don't believe will graduate. And that's because of this attention deficit. And you know, some of the latest studies, the last one I read, students attention is now diverted every five minutes by social media. And one of the things they uniformly say is as soon as a student looks at their phone, they're gone.

[Ava Smithing]

In an attempt to do something about this, the government of Ontario banned phones from Ontario classrooms in 2024. But the policy gives teachers a fair amount of discretion in deciding how they want to implement that ban. And in practice, this has meant that there are still a lot of kids on their devices in class. But Duncan says even if a ban was totally effective, it's still not enough.

[Duncan Embury]

If we can get phones out of schools, that is a good thing. For sure, it's a good thing, and I applaud the government for taking that step. But it's not going to necessarily help with a student who's up till 4:30 in the morning in an endless scroll on TikTok, who's coming to school at 8:30 with, you know, four hours sleep and no attention span.

[Ava Smithing]

The school boards involved in Duncan's lawsuit are alleging that these three companies, Meta, TikTok and Snap, have placed a huge strain on the education system, a strain that they say entitles them to $8 billion in damages.

[Duncan Embury]

So we look at all aspects of the education system, right? Trying to educate a class of 20 to 30 students where some of them are either disruptive or not engaged because of these issues. It's the IT services at the school constantly on vigil to try try and protect the safety of their students. When we talk to principals dealing with whatever cyberbullying issue arose over the weekend, that's their first order of business on Monday. So from additional teachers, changes necessary to the curriculum it supports, and mental health supports in the school system, when we put all those together, all those are in the nature of $8 billion.

[Ava Smithing]

In order for the school boards to win their suit, they'll need to prove that these three social media companies have what's called a duty of care to students in Ontario. That won't be easy.

[Duncan Embury]

I'd be the first to say it's not a duty that's been recognized in this country before. This will be a novel argument really, essentially on the basis that we have to look at our law as evolving with modernization, right? We now live in a digital world where these companies now have a global reach. And when they make a decision or design a product, they can change the attitudes or response of billions of users at the snap of a finger. And so we have to allow our law to evolve with that in order to protect our citizenry.

[Ava Smithing]

Even though there isn't a precedent for this kind of argument, Duncan is pretty confident it will hold up in court.

[Duncan Embury]

If we can establish that you knowingly targeted students during the time they were in school, knowing that the effect of that would impact their attention span, impact their ability to learn, and therefore impact the education system as a whole. That's why there's a duty.

[Ava Smithing]

Following their usual playbook meta, TikTok and Snap filed a motion to dismiss the school board's lawsuit. An Ontario court denied their motion, but the platforms have appealed that decision. All of which is to say this could take a while. It also means that Duncan is a ways away from the discovery process where the companies would be forced to share some of their internal documents. But many of the lawsuits in the states, including the ones filed by Raul Torres in New Mexico, are further ahead.

[Duncan Embury]

And based on even the limited amount of data that's come out through those sources, there really is every reason to think that there was a knowledge in these social media companies about the effect on on mental health and students time and their performance in the classroom. And the response to that was to continue to design algorithms that maximize the amount of time students would stare at a screen. TikTok, based on their own internal studies, had determined that it was habit forming within 35 minutes. That's terrifying. To my knowledge, there's no other product that can develop habit forming tendency in 35 minutes. But that's what this can do. If your own data tells you that your design features cause habit forming use within 35 minutes, that's probably the moment at which you need to take immediate action to change those designs algorithms. And we know that's not what occurred.

[Ava Smithing]

We asked TikTok about the claims made in these lawsuits and they told us they would not comment on ongoing litigation. Duncan and his team are making a novel legal argument against some of the most powerful companies in history that's a bit like David suing Goliath. The case could take years and the firm is working on contingency, meaning they won't see a dime unless they win. But when Duncan thinks about what's at stake, he knows it's a battle worth fighting.

[Duncan Embury]

And I don't want to be dramatic about it, but I think what's at stake to some extent is our public education system. And I always step back and remind myself what our Supreme Court has said about the value of public education. It can't be overstated. It is the fundamental tenet of a just democratic society. And many times we don't win, but we continue to fight each case and each issue on the basis that enough voices bring power.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

I'm still eating a little bit, so I need a few more minutes, but I figured I could come say, hey,

[Ava Smithing]

this is lawyer number three, Laura Marquez Garrett for background.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

The reason I'm late, we're working up another complaint. And this is a 15 year old who is like, ready to go. She's like, this is not okay.

[Ava Smithing]

As far as I can tell, Laura never stops working.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

If I did not have a family, this is literally all I would do. 24 7.

[Ava Smithing]

Laura spent most of their career as a hotshot corporate lawyer. But when they started realizing a lot of people in Silicon Valley, the people actually designing these products, didn't let their own kids use social media, Laura found a different calling.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

As somebody who had represented manufacturers, designers, developers, inventors for 20 years, my experience has always been that when somebody is making a product, they're really proud of it, right? So when you work for Nike, man, their kids are decked out head to toe in Nike, all of them. And so to see these designers say, no, of course I don't let my kids use these products, every alarm bell went off. And I knew in that moment, they are not only hurting kids, they know it. They know they're hurting kids.

[Ava Smithing]

And like a lot of us, Laura was also seeing these harms firsthand.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

When I started this work, I thought I was doing everything right. My 4 year old at the time got 30 minutes of screen time a day. And the 30 minutes of screen time was YouTube Kids. And I thought, it's YouTube Kids, right? We thought, hey, this is safe. After meeting with experts and learning about YouTube and learning about what that format, what the short form videos are doing to kids, I came home one day and said, look, we got to get rid of YouTube kids. And I told my 4 year old, no more YouTube kids. But we have Disney and we have Netflix kids. So I figured it'd be fine. She lost it. We are talking the tantrum that literally never ends. Breaking things, hitting walls. This child was not my child. And I realized in that moment, like I, I addicted my four year old child.

[Ava Smithing]

Once they started grasping the scope of the problem, Laura dove into the work headfirst.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

I want to say last week we filed maybe 60, 80 more complaints. Literally filing those complaints as fast as humanly possible.

[Ava Smithing]

Unlike Raul Torres, who represents the state, and Duncan Embury, who represents school boards, Laura represents young people directly. You've already met a few of them on this show. Cece Netner is a client. As long as I was skinny, as long as I looked like those images, those thin spill images, that's all that mattered to me. So is Carol Todd on behalf of her daughter Amanda.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

She was my pain in the ass kid, but she also taught me so much about life. Unfortunately, she taught me all about life

[Ava Smithing]

after she died, over the course of just a few years. The Social Media Victims Law center has filed more than a thousand lawsuits against technology companies on behalf of more than 4,000 kids.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

Over 4,000 kids. That should never happen. It just shouldn't.

[Ava Smithing]

Earlier in their career, Laura's specialty was combing through massive amounts of data.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

I like the data. I like what you can prove and where you can get to with it. I'm a pattern person.

[Ava Smithing]

And as Laura started interviewing their growing roster of young clients, patterns in the data started to emerge.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

I can give you a really good example. I've met with hundreds of young women and every single one of them had the experience after opening an Instagram or a Snapchat, of getting explicit photos, of getting messages that were unsolicited, of having random predatory men reach out and proposition them. Not like one or two, but a lot.

[Ava Smithing]

But the pattern wasn't just that teenage girls were being bombarded with these kinds of messages. It's that adult women weren't.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

In the last six months, I've spoken with now about a dozen young adults, maybe more. And what I am learning is that around age 16 to 20, that stops when you turn 18, I believe. And from what I've observed, these companies stop pushing your data to 40 year old predators because you're no longer engaging. And when you think about what that means, it's pretty big. It's discrimination, it's targeting. I promise you, if you were to pull thousands and thousands of users, you would find those patterns that would just blow your mind. I mean, frankly, how is that not illegal? It's pimping out our kids, basically.

[Ava Smithing]

As Laura's client list went from a couple dozen kids to a couple hundred kids, other patterns started to emerge as well.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

I get kids journals, I get kids artwork, their drawings from early on, right? So three years I've been doing this, hundreds of these kids, over and over and over. What we see are a kid that is well adjusted. Maybe they struggle with school, but they're working on it. They're, they're close with their family, they typically listen to what their parents say. Enter social media, everything falls apart. You know those rules when mom said, hey, the device goes in the hallway at 10 o', clock, that becomes a problem. All of these basic rules that parents put in place, kids start to not be okay with those rules because they can't stop, but they also can't tell their parents. And so what do they do? They start lying. They start sneaking up in the middle of the night to get the phone. That results in sleep deprivation, which that's another common Thread. Sleep deprivation is so bad for growing brains. Now you've got addiction, which leads to sleep deprivation, which leads to anxiety and depression. I don't care what content is on your app. That's all a given. And then they start to hate themselves because they are addicts. And as addicts, they start to believe, I'm a horrible kid. Look at what I'm doing to my family.

[Ava Smithing]

It's interesting that you talk about the journal piece, because I actually got brave enough to open my journal and there are so many times I had written like I was talking about how bad my life was and I had written in quotation marks like, maybe you just need to get off of Instagram. Or like, I would literally write, ava, please delete Instagram. And then I would scratch it through.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

Was that what your parents were saying to you, or was that you saying it to yourself? Because I've seen it both ways.

[Ava Smithing]

That was me saying it to myself. Me absolutely being conscious of the fact that Instagram was ripping me apart and being so annoyed with that consciousness that I would even scratch it out.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

Like, think about that. Like, that's addiction. Yeah, like, stop using. Stop using. Come on, come on, idiot. Just stop using. But you can't.

[Ava Smithing]

With more than 4,000 clients, Laura is suing technology companies for almost every harm you can think compulsive, use cyberbullying algorithms that push kids to self harm and eating disorder content. But they're also suing for a few things we haven't talked about yet.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

Family members of 60 people who died from fentanyl overdoses across the country are now suing the social media app Snapchat. They say the app is a gateway to illegal drugs. The snap snatch at fentanyl poisoning cases. We have 64 of those filed, another 70 waiting in the wings.

[Ava Smithing]

And some of Laura's newest clients are parents who say that AI chatbots have encouraged their children to take their own lives.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

AI versus free speech. That battle is playing out right now in a courtroom after a teenager was allegedly encouraged to commit suicide by a bot. There are limits on what we get to do. We don't get to stop, stand outside a kid's house and tell him he should go kill himself. We don't like nobody does. No individual does. So why do these companies get to do it?

[Ava Smithing]

Like Duncan Embury, Laura will have to make a novel legal argument to win these cases. For decades now, social media companies have largely relied on a few paragraphs in the Communications Decency act called section 230, which says they can't be held liable for the things people post on their platforms.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

They call it, what, the 26 words that made the Internet. And it basically just says that an Internet service provider can't be liable for what third parties are doing.

[Ava Smithing]

So instead, Laura is making a different argument. The social media platforms are defective, and those product defects have led to serious harm.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

This isn't third party speech, right? This is like tobacco. It's like asbestos. These are deliberate design decisions that these companies are making that are causing harm. This isn't just a kid who happens to be looking for harmful content on the Internet. This isn't a kid who happens to meet a predator. These companies are designing their products in a way that is causing these harms.

[Ava Smithing]

As someone who is harmed by these products, I'm glad we have people like Laura going after these companies. But as someone who has spent the last couple of years trying to get congress to actually regulate the social web, I can't help but wonder if litigation is the right tool here. Lawsuits are expensive, and the big tech companies have more money, lawyers, lobbyists, and PR people than anyone. It's just not a fair fight. But Laura firmly believes that these lawsuits can make a difference. And I firmly believe in Laura.

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

I think litigation is critical because the reason that companies don't kill people, the reason companies fix things, it's so they don't get sued.

[Ava Smithing]

Look, I know this episode was a lot. Hearing the allegations in these lawsuits makes me sick to my stomach. And I think it's understandable that you might be listening to this and thinking, why don't we just keep kids off of social media altogether? So in our next episode, I want to show you a different side of these technologies. I had people dming me like, wow,

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

I'm very inspired by you.

[Ava Smithing]

And I'm going to go speak out

[Laura Marquez Garrett]

about what's been happening at home, which

[Ava Smithing]

is very moving to me. Can social media, this thing that is so toxic for so many, also be empowering? People like to push this idea to young people that, oh, before the Internet, before you had all this information, like, it was great. No, it wasn't. It was actual hell. Like, young people had no voice. That's coming up on Left to Their Own devices. Left to their own Devices is hosted and produced by me, Ava Smithing. It's written, produced, mixed, and sound designed by Mitchell. Our story editor is Kathleen Goldhar. Additional reporting in this episode by Robert Cribb of the investigative journalism Bureau. Voice acting by Kendall Smithing. The executive producers for Paradigms are James Millward, Helen Hayes, Taylor Owen and Mitchell Stewart. The executive producer for the Toronto Star is JP Fozo. If you want early access to upcoming episodes of Left to Their Own devices, subscribe to the Toronto [e-mail].