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Congressional Hearing: From the Courtroom to Congress: Landmark Social Media Verdicts (May 13, 2026)

Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law; May 13, 2026; Chair Blackburn (R-TN), Ranking Member Klobuchar (D-MN); witnesses Rachel Lanier (plaintiffs' trial counsel, KGM v. Meta and Google), Mary Graw Leary (law professor), Joann Bogard and Bridgette Norring (survivor parents). No S.Hrg. number yet.

This is the raw, evidence-tiered claim ledger behind the hearings hub. It is published for transparency: the source of truth, with its tiers intact, current as of 2026-07-16.

tier-down source

This hearing's official transcript is not published yet, so this ledger is built from the witnesses' written testimony, not the live question-and-answer. Treat it as the weaker-evidence tier it is; it will be rebuilt to the full standard when the official transcript publishes.

how to read the tiers

Each claim is tagged by the strength of the evidence behind it, not by how certain it sounds.

  • [ESTABLISHED]: stated in a primary source (a court order or filing, the docket, an official release) or, for a hearing, said on the official record. A fact about what was filed or said, not necessarily adjudicated true.
  • [OBSERVED]: carried by secondary coverage, or by a document read into the record.
  • [ASSUMED]: the distiller's inference, flagged as such.
  • Provenance flags ([interested-party], [advocacy-witness], [single-witness], [lawmaker characterization]) mark a claim that rests on one interested voice: reported, not adjudicated.

Reader summary (derived, plain text)

On May 13, 2026, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing built around something that had not existed before: American jury verdicts against the companies. In California, the KGM jury found Meta and Google negligent in the design of Instagram and YouTube (that verdict is on appeal); in New Mexico, a jury found Meta liable under the state's consumer-protection law for misleading the public about its apps' safety (not final; Meta has said it will appeal). The posture and details are in the lawsuit distillations in this folder. The witness who tried the California case, Rachel Lanier, walked the committee through the internal company documents she had put before the jury. Those documents, as she presented them, are the heart of this record: a 2016 YouTube presentation stating the goal to be "an app that is...Addictive"; a 2012 YouTube note that the metric was "not viewership, it's viewer addiction"; a 2020 Meta email calling the company's inability to enforce its own under-13 rule "just indefensible" and saying the product team would not prioritize a fix "until we're legally required to do it"; and a 2023 Meta employee chat, reacting to the state lawsuits, in which staff say the recommendation algorithm optimizes teen engagement "as with everyone else" and that "nobody is asking us to build 30 tools." That chat is dated three months before Meta's CEO offered the more-than-30-tools defense to the Senate in the January 2024 hearing distilled in this folder, more than two years before this one. A law professor framed the legal cause (Section 230 removes the deterrence that would force safety), and two parents who lost children asked Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act. Three cautions define what this document is and is not (see evidentiary_status in full): the official transcript is not published yet, so this is built from the witnesses' written statements, not the live Q&A; every witness was a plaintiff-side advocate and no platform was present to answer; and the verdict Lanier describes is on appeal, not final. As of the date above, this reflects that written record.

Brake-integrity relevance (why this hearing feeds the de-amplify thesis)

The pilot hearing named the fake brake from inside one company (a whistleblower). The CEO hearing made five executives answer for it. This hearing supplies the documents underneath both: the internal record a jury was shown, quoted in the plaintiffs' counsel's sworn written testimony (and disputed by the companies elsewhere):

  • The brake was never the goal; the goal was the opposite. "We aspire to be an app that is...Addictive" (YouTube, 2016) and "not viewership, it's viewer addiction" (YouTube, 2012) are the design intent stated plainly.
  • The brake was declined until legally forced. A 2020 Meta email called the un-enforced under-13 rule "just indefensible" and recorded that the product organization "would not prioritize this proactive work until we're legally required to do it." That is the missing incentive, in Meta's own words.
  • Meta employees, in the trial record Lanier presented, treated the "30 tools" as beside the point. In a 2023 Meta chat about the state lawsuits, an employee writes that the core algorithm "literally just mathematically optimizing for vpvs and sessions for teens as with everyone else, which is the thing we're being told we cannot do", and others add "nobody is asking us to build 30 tools" / "who asked you to build 30 tools" / "nobody." Three months after that chat, in the January 2024 CEO hearing distilled in this folder (more than two years before this hearing), Meta's CEO offered those more-than-30 tools as the answer. The company's own employees had already called the brake a sticker.
  • The missing brake by law is Section 230: "they face no deterrence for designing products without regard to safety" (Leary). The verdicts, and this hearing, exist to argue Congress should change that.

This is where the internal documents behind the mechanism enter the public record. Taken with the platforms' own answers in the CEO hearing and the litigation posture (including the appeals) in the lawsuit distillations, the two hearings, the two verdicts, and the companies' internal documents describe one mechanism from several vantage points, one of them adversarial to the companies and now on appeal.

Claims (the ledger)

What the hearing was (on the record)

  • [ESTABLISHED] The hearing was held May 13, 2026 before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, chaired by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), ranking member Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). (Witness testimony headers.)
  • [ESTABLISHED] It was convened around two jury verdicts: the California KGM v. Meta and Google case (which Lanier tried; on appeal) and the New Mexico consumer-protection case (not final; Meta has announced it will appeal but had not filed as of this doc's as_of date). Both are distilled separately in this folder, which carries the litigation posture; the testimony supplies the hearing's framing, not the posture. (Lanier and Leary testimony.)
  • [ESTABLISHED] All four witnesses were plaintiff-side or pro-legislation advocates (trial counsel, a law professor who has published that Section 230 is a failed experiment, and two survivor parents who founded advocacy organizations). No platform witness testified. [advocacy-witness] (all four testimonies.)

The mechanism, from the trial evidence (Lanier's written testimony quoting KGM trial exhibits)

  • [ESTABLISHED] Lanier testified that "big tech built it that way by design" and that "The companies knew children were being hurt, and they chose profits over safety." [advocacy-witness] (Lanier testimony.)
  • [ESTABLISHED, trial-exhibit via advocacy-witness] A 2016 internal YouTube presentation stated the aspiration to be "an app that is...Addictive"; a 2012 YouTube note framed the goal as "not viewership, it's viewer addiction". (Lanier testimony, quoting exhibits EX. 04502.00011 and EX. 04504.00001.)
  • [ESTABLISHED, trial-exhibit via advocacy-witness] A February 2020 Meta email to Nick Clegg on "age management decisions" acknowledged the company had "no way of enforcing" its under-13 policy, called that position "just indefensible", and recorded that the product organization "would not prioritize this proactive work until we're legally required to do it." The same record shows age-gate designs tested to steer children toward falsely affirming they were 13, rejected internally not for child safety but to "preserve legal defensibility." (Lanier testimony, quoting exhibit EX. 00009.)
  • [ESTABLISHED, trial-exhibit via advocacy-witness] A 2020 Meta email chain to Mark Zuckerberg about cosmetic-surgery AR "beauty" filters recorded a VP of Product Design's dissent, citing her own daughter's hospitalization for body dysmorphia; Zuckerberg was "supportive of moving forward" with lifting the ban, the dissent "was noted", and "The ban was lifted". This is the same internal record Sen. Butler pressed Zuckerberg on in the January 2024 CEO hearing (the court documents she cited). (Lanier testimony, quoting exhibit EX. 00012.)
  • [ESTABLISHED, trial-exhibit via advocacy-witness] An October 2023 Meta employee chat, reacting to the state attorneys general filing suit, includes: the core algorithm was "literally just mathematically optimizing for vpvs and sessions for teens as with everyone else, which is the thing we're being told we cannot do"; "nobody is asking us to build 30 tools"; and "IG is a drug... We're basically pushers." This internal characterization stands against the 30 different tools Meta's CEO offered as the safety answer in the CEO hearing distilled in this folder. (Lanier testimony, quoting exhibit EX. 00091.)
  • [ESTABLISHED] Lanier testified the trial evidence rebuts Meta's public age claims: "Mark Zuckerberg testified before this body and told you that children under 13 are not allowed on his platforms. Our trial revealed that as of 2015, Meta's own internal estimates showed over four million children under the age of 13 were on Instagram". [advocacy-witness; the CEO's testimony is the CEO-hearing record] (Lanier testimony.)
  • [ESTABLISHED] Lanier named the engineered features: "Infinite scroll", "Algorithmic feeds... optimized not for quality or safety, but for engagement and watch time", and "Push notifications: timed to pull children back in at vulnerable moments". [advocacy-witness] (Lanier testimony.)
  • [ESTABLISHED] Leary testified that the Section 230 shield removes the deterrence a safety fix would require: platforms "face no deterrence for designing products without regard to safety. Rather, the system incentivizes them to increase engagement through any means necessary". [advocacy-witness] (Leary testimony.)
  • [ESTABLISHED] Leary placed this hearing in a line of evidence, citing in her footnotes both the November 2023 Bejar whistleblower testimony (the pilot hearing distilled in this folder) and the January 2024 CEO hearing. (Leary testimony, footnotes 7-8.)
  • [ESTABLISHED] Leary cited NCMEC's 2024 CyberTipline figure of 29.2 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation, and a 192% increase in online-enticement reports. [advocacy-witness, citing NCMEC figures] (Leary testimony.)

The human stake (survivor parents, at the mechanism level)

  • [ESTABLISHED] Joann Bogard testified as the mother of Mason (15), a founding member of ParentsSOS, asking Congress to "finish the job and pass KOSA," noting the bill "received 91 votes on the Senate floor last session of Congress, and has 76 sponsors today." [advocacy-witness] (Bogard testimony.)
  • [ESTABLISHED] Bridgette Norring testified as the mother of Devin (19), who "died from fentanyl poisoning after Snapchat connected him to a drug dealer" selling counterfeit pills, and founded the Devin J. Norring Foundation. This is the same family Sen. Klobuchar named in the January 2024 CEO hearing. [advocacy-witness] (Norring testimony.)
  • [ESTABLISHED] Bogard testified her son Mason died attempting "the choking game", a viral trend "that the algorithm fed to him unsolicited", and that "I have been notified of over 100 more choking challenge deaths just since Mason died." The lethal content arrived by recommendation, not search. [advocacy-witness] (Bogard testimony.)

Quotes (attributed record)

Every quote is a verified verbatim substring of the official written testimony (cached at sources/senate-2026-05-13-testimony-combined.txt). These are written statements, not the live hearing exchange (see evidentiary_status).

Rachel Lanier (plaintiffs' trial counsel, KGM v. Meta and Google) [advocacy-witness]

  • "Children's brains are being hijacked, and big tech built it that way by design." [thesis, stated by trial counsel] (written testimony; source line 31)
  • "The children using these products were not customers. They were the product." [mechanism: the business model] (written testimony; source lines 144-145)
  • "if we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens." [trial exhibit: Meta internal document on youth acquisition] (written testimony, quoting a Meta exhibit; source line 163)
  • "We aspire to be an app that is...Addictive" [trial exhibit: 2016 YouTube internal presentation] (written testimony, quoting exhibit EX. 04502.00011; source line 122)
  • "would not prioritize this proactive work until we're legally required to do it" [trial exhibit: 2020 Meta age-enforcement email; the missing incentive in Meta's own words] (written testimony, quoting exhibit EX. 00009; source lines 235-236)
  • "nobody is asking us to build 30 tools" [trial exhibit: 2023 Meta employee chat; the internal view that the safety tools were beside the point] (written testimony, quoting exhibit EX. 00091; source line 316)

Mary Graw Leary (Professor of Law) [advocacy-witness]

  • "they face no deterrence for designing products without regard to safety. Rather, the system incentivizes them to increase engagement through any means necessary" [the Section 230 mechanism: the missing brake by law] (written testimony; source lines 980-982)
  • "While $375 million dollar and a $6 million dollar verdicts are significant, the revenue for Alphabet (Google's parent company) exceeded $400 billion and for Meta exceeded $200 billion last year" [the deterrence-scale argument: verdict-sized penalties cannot brake revenue at this scale, which is her case that litigation alone is not the fix] (written testimony; source lines 1360-1362)

The parents [advocacy-witness]

  • "I'm here today to ask Congress to finish the job and pass KOSA" Joann Bogard, mother of Mason (written testimony; source lines 572-573)
  • "I have been notified of over 100 more choking challenge deaths just since Mason died." Joann Bogard [the harm recurs at scale, and the trend that killed her son was one "that the algorithm fed to him unsolicited": delivered by recommendation, not sought] (written testimony; source lines 610-611)

A note on concentration: Rachel Lanier carries most of this quote-bank. That reflects the source, not a preference: she is the witness who put the internal company documents before the jury, and those trial exhibits are this hearing's distinctive evidence. The other witnesses are represented on their strongest distinct points (Leary's deterrence-scale and Section 230 arguments; Bogard's algorithm-delivery receipt and legislative ask); Norring's account is carried in the ledger rather than the quote-bank, and her family's earlier appearance in the January 2024 CEO hearing is cross-referenced there.

Tensions / open questions

  • This is a one-sided hearing, by design. Every witness came to make the case for legislation; no platform testified and no one presented the companies' defense. The mechanism claims are strong and largely rest on the companies' own internal documents, but a reader should pair this with the January 2024 CEO hearing (distilled in this folder), where the platforms answered under oath, to see both sides.
  • The verdict is on appeal. Lanier tried and won the California KGM case and testifies to it as established; the lawsuit distillations in this folder record that the verdict is on appeal, not final. A jury found for the plaintiff; that is accurate. That it is settled law is not.
  • The internal documents are presented by plaintiffs' counsel. The exhibits (the "addictive" goal, the "just indefensible" age email, the "30 tools" chat) are quoted from the trial record by the lawyer who put them before the jury. They are sworn written testimony and carry exhibit numbers, but they are not independently re-verified here, and the companies dispute their characterization elsewhere.
  • No official transcript yet. When GPO publishes the verbatim record, the live Q&A (including whatever the senators pressed on) becomes available and this doc should be rebuilt to the full standard.

Sources

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