Trial lawyers are poised to accomplish in courtrooms nationwide what politicians have thus far failed to write into statute. The effects of this effort — undertaken without the deliberation of the nation’s representative bodies — are likely to rival those of even the most sweeping laws.The product of social media platforms is not loaves of bread or pianos or widgets, it is speech, protected by the First Amendment.A jury in Los Angeles is determining whether Meta and YouTube are liable for design features alleged to have substantially aggravated a young woman’s psychological disorders. As thousands of similar lawsuits are ongoing — with more likely to follow — the determination of the Los Angeles jury will echo loudly in the deliberations of other juries across America.These echoes will prove dissonant with Americans’ love for, and dedication to, free speech. Meta’s Instagram and YouTube were said to have disseminated speech too well, working too successfully to configure their products to maintain users’ interest. This is supposed to constitute “addicting” their users. In fact, it is the aim of every business — from media organizations to retail stores to restaurants to attract and retain customers, to earn profits by marketing a product that consumers value. In short, it is the business of entrepreneurs to give the people what they want. The product of social media platforms is not loaves of bread or pianos or widgets, it is speech, protected by the First Amendment.Meta and YouTube are charged with having designed their products to include features — such as “infinite scroll” and individualized algorithmic recommendations — which allow and incentivize their users to view too much speech for too long. As National Review’s Andrew McCarthy put it, “the plaintiff’s lawyers argued ... a theory that the case was not about the content but about the processes by which the platforms present the content." Despite titanic efforts to harden this distinction, it melts under the heat of elementary scrutiny. Platforms’ design features are impotent absent content that intrigues users. Mike Masnick, editor of Techdirt, put it this way:Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine Instagram, but every single post is a video of paint drying. Same infinite scroll. Same autoplay. Same algorithmic recommendations. Same notification systems. Is anyone addicted? Is anyone harmed? Is anyone suing?Social media algorithms sort and distribute speech — a function without which individuals could neither access speech online nor effectively find an audience for their own speech. RELATED: The new censorship doesn’t say ‘no’ — it says ‘no one can see it’ Delihayat/Getty ImagesWhatever the plaintiff’s attorneys contend, the liability imposed upon Meta and YouTube cannot be severed from the content they host and disseminate. Without the latter, the former would never be imagined, much less found by a jury. The plaintiff in the case, a young woman known as Kaley or “KGM,” was brought up in anguishing conditions, the daughter of a mother who physically and emotionally abused her. She “was self-harming around when she was in the 6th grade,” reads the Associated Press account of the trial.It is unsurprising that she, as a young girl, withdrew to social media to find something like peace, fulfillment, and satisfaction. It is equally unsurprising that she used social media to excess and leveraged her every chance to obtain engagement.More generally, it is anything but certain that users’ affinity for social media is rightly termed an “addiction.” Likewise, research purporting to prove that social media has caused an epidemic of psychological disorders among children — the research of Jonathan Haidt, for example — has proven to be faulty, rife with faulty methodology and confirmation bias.It is obvious that some misuse social media and their lives are, consequently, diminished. But this no more indicates that the platforms are “defective” in some legally cognizable sense than the mere existence of obesity in America indicates that McDonald’s or Taco Bell’s offerings are “defective” — or that fast-food restaurants ought to be held liable for occurrences of diabetes. RELATED: Predatory gambling apps are using loopholes to avoid state laws Gabby Jones/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesHumans are a diverse bunch. That a minority, suffering from particular difficulties or vulnerabilities, cannot engage with this product or that in a healthy fashion should not, in a courtroom or the public square, constitute the basis of a totalizing rebuke.Should the Los Angeles verdict stand, social media companies, confronted with the prospect of liability, are bound to remake their products to prevent any allegation — credible or otherwise — that their platforms cause or worsen whatever psychological distress from which users might suffer.“If media companies must worry about liability whenever their expressive outputs are thought to be ‘harmful,’ the universe of available content would be reduced to the safest, blandest, and least engaging stuff imaginable,” warns Ari Cohn, the lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The operations of Instagram and YouTube broke no law enacted by Congress or a state legislature to regulate the workings of social media. Even so, this litigation, if successful, will be regulatory in its effect, resulting in the contracting of the free and open internet.

It’s a running joke in the Beltway that defense contractors put up billboards advertising, say F-35s, at the Pentagon City metro station. Your everyday commuter, even in Washington, isn’t picking up fighter jets off the shelf at Costco on Sundays. But a chunk of the people who work on defense contracts will pass through the Pentagon’s metro stop, and Lockheed Martin knows this. In practice, Beltway newsletters are funded to the hilt by the businesses they cover.In theory, the same logic fuels D.C.’s media business. In the last two decades, the capital city has become dominated by a constellation of powerful media outlets that deliver niche, social-media-based coverage of the federal government. Think Politico, Semafor, Punchbowl News, and Axios.These publications produce insider email newsletters that cover the daily pulse of Capitol Hill, foreign affairs, and the White House and are written specifically for staffers, journalists, and lobbyists. Web 2.0 made this business model possible, and it’s only grown as mass media flails.Typically a reader will see at the top of each day’s newsletter some version of “Sponsored by” or “Brought to you by” followed by the name of a major corporation or interest group. Sponsor ads will be inserted sparingly, with political motivations ranging from explicit to subtle. Examples of corporate sponsors include Meta, BlackRock, Microsoft, and many, many more.Anthropic, for example, sponsored Politico’s Playbook newsletter immediately after its high-level negotiations with the Pentagon fizzled in March. The ads didn’t have much to do with defense, focusing mostly on children, learning, and Claude’s efficiency. The goal instead was to buy goodwill — to make powerful people think nice thoughts about Claude as they read the news.This is all supposed to be aboveboard because, as ever, advertising departments insist they maintain a strong firewall that keeps journalists unaware of business decisions. Some news outlets, for what it’s worth, are very disciplined about this, but many aren’t. And nothing prevents the latent affection that can bloom between journalists and their frequent sponsors, who also regularly work with their sources and subjects.During COVID, one reporter friend of mine shared warm feelings about a major tech company precisely because that company kept its employees working during hard times. Imagine the hypothetical dilemma of a local paper forced to choose whether to blow the whistle on a family-owned landscaping business that also happens to be one of the publication’s most faithful advertisers. Then scale that up to the international level.In practice, Beltway newsletters are funded to the hilt by the businesses they cover. The system is not comparable to D.C.’s metro system — getting some advertiser cash from RTX for a few square feet of a dirty wall. The D.C. newsletter model is thoroughly corrupting.RELATED: America has a spending problem Congress refuses to fix DNY59/Getty ImagesThis is because news outlets are becoming increasingly brazen about corporate partnerships. It was somewhat amusing to see DataRepublican recently pick up on a report my colleagues at "Breaking Points" produced last year about Punchbowl News.DataRepublican, a relentless investigator of political money trails, noticed the outlet had been flamboyantly defensive of Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.). Many of Thune’s donors also happen to sponsor Punchbowl.Last year, a source leaked one of Punchbowl’s latest pitch decks for corporate advertisers to "Breaking Points." The document offered editorial influence for cash. Granted, Punchbowl dressed the offer up in corporate language, but its invitation was unmistakable. Corporations can pay them to cover a “mutually agreed upon topic” in podcast series, “editorial deep dives,” and events.The pitch deck even included a sample of Punchbowl’s work with Google on “custom content.”This is undeniably a breach of basic journalistic ethics. But nobody in D.C. bats an eye. Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer, the founders of Punchbowl, are beloved in Washington. They are called upon for sober analysis, win awards, and lecture others on journalism.What’s funny is that D.C. reporters honestly do not believe these dishonorable financial relationships influence their coverage. This is a common — and entirely reasonable — misconception about how Washington works.The wall between Washington and the world grows taller. An insular city becomes more insular, and the citizens it serves become more distant.Corporations and their lobbyists do not approach journalists and say, “Here’s $20,000, write something nice about the F-35 Lightning.” A famous 1996 BBC interview sheds light on what’s really going on. Journalist Andrew Marr asked Noam Chomsky, “How can you know that I’m self-censoring?” “I don’t say you’re self-censoring,” Chomsky replied. “I’m sure you believe everything you're saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”This is the way the system actually functions. Sherman, Palmer, and their peers in the business see themselves as genuine shoe-leather reporters, covering politics without fear or favor. The perception of the “facts” and of right and wrong just happens to fall within the same range of beliefs shared by their subjects and sponsors.Why might John Thune, the leader of the Senate GOP, share donors with a center-left Beltway rag? Thune and Punchbowl are cogs in the same machine, and the corporate cash is the grease on its wheels. Some of those wheels get a bit squeaky at times, but the machine never stops.Meta can pay a newsletter to host a breakfast on internet safety where journalists will exchange cards and conversation with executives and lobbyists. They won’t meet the parents who say Meta failed to protect their child from sex predators. Those stakeholders are typically not organized or wealthy enough to pay for face time with executives.RELATED: Tax-exempt hospitals are not putting their patients first David M. Levitt/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesAs a consequence, the wall between Washington and the world grows taller. An insular city becomes more insular, and the citizens it serves become more distant.One reporter who spent years working at one of the Beltway rags put it this way:It’s important to understand that corporate sponsorships are central to the business model. Honestly, the newsroom at Politico is only about half of the actual company. They have an entire floor in their Rosslyn office for business operations. When you have that level of financial interdependence, it inevitably spills into the newsroom. Even if there’s not an explicit bias in reporter stories or Playbook it still creates an institutional alignment with corporate interests and priorities that runs afoul of what we expect from a truly adversarial or accountability-driven press.This story isn’t as sexy as cash being exchanged for coverage in some back-alley deal. The problem is much worse than that. It’s the final form of the American media’s shared worldview with its powerful subjects. They’re in control, and the rabble must be tempered. The interests of politicians and journalists used to look like a Venn diagram: divergent with small overlap. Now that picture is just a circle.Editor's note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.

You see it constantly, some version of this claim: “The cost of child care is the single biggest obstacle to working women and families.”From there come the familiar conclusions: “The state needs to subsidize child care.” “We need affordable day care for working moms.”No, we don’t.While claiming to elevate women, feminism has steadily lowered the status of motherhood and homemaking.What we need is to recognize that it’s not normal — nor healthy — for children to be farmed out to strangers during their earliest years so that Mom can be “more than just a mom” with her career.Yes, there are millions of families in which both parents must work to keep a roof over their heads. But there are millions more who don’t need two incomes. What gets called “need” is often just lifestyle expectation. What children actually need rarely enters the calculation.Luxury expectationsModern expectations in 2026 America look less like necessity and more like luxury — something closer to the “hands-off” child-rearing of aristocratic households than to ordinary family life.People talk about “affordable day care” as if it were self-evidently necessary. It isn’t. It only sounds that way because repetition has made it seem normal.Behind it sits an unspoken belief: “It is right and proper — even ideal — to leave our children with hired strangers for most of the day.”Even 40 years ago, that would not have sounded normal. Most people still believed that all else being equal, children were best raised by their mothers (and with a father in the home). Day care might be necessary — but it was understood as a regrettable second-best option.Today, even many conservatives won’t question it. To do so invites accusations of harming mothers or failing to support “hardworking single moms.”But prolonged parental absence is not neutral. Children need their mothers, especially in their early years. We can cite studies, but we don’t need them to see what’s plainly in front of us.Strikingly, the people who claim to “need” day care are often those who don’t. What they want is a standard of living that would have been considered extravagant a generation or two ago.RELATED: Socialist Mamdani rolls out costly ‘free’ child care program to NYC workers — after crying financial crisis Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty ImagesMaxed-out minimumsTake Democrat Rep. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado. She has cultivated an image as a sainted working mother, bringing her small child onto the House floor while lamenting the lack of day care for “working moms.”There’s just one problem: Congress has had full-time day care on Capitol Hill since 1987.What’s happening here isn’t necessity — it’s performance. The question she avoids is whether her child’s needs might outweigh the demands of a camera-facing career.And it’s not just politicians. Middle-class Americans have adopted a set of “minimum” expectations that earlier generations would have recognized as indulgent:Two cars (preferably full-size SUVs). Separate bedrooms for each child. A full slate of extracurriculars. No trade-offs between career ambition and motherhood. Children’s needs subordinated to adult preferences. Government support for single parenthood without fathers in the home.Modern-day TudorsIn the feudal world, there was a distinction between a woman and a lady. A woman belonged to the working class; a lady to the aristocracy.Women raised their children directly — feeding them, caring for them, folding them into the rhythms of daily life. Ladies did not.In the Tudor royal court, for example, a noblewoman did not breastfeed. A wet nurse was hired in advance and took over immediately. Children were raised by nurses, governesses, and tutors, with parents appearing only intermittently.The result was distance — emotional, developmental, and often moral.For all our technological differences, the psychology isn’t so different today. The aristocratic habits of detachment have been democratized. What was once a marker of nobility is now treated as a baseline expectation.There are better models to follow.An old-fashioned approachI have a friend, Tasha, a Catholic mother of nine. Her husband works full-time; she manages the home.They don’t have two SUVs. They don’t have a large house. But they have what they need: a home, a van that fits everyone, good food, clean clothes, and a stable, loving family life.How does she do it? The way families did for generations — before the late-20th-century promise that women could “have it all” and should expect it immediately.She shops carefully. Buys in bulk. Reuses what she can. She hasn’t outfitted each child with personal screens to keep them isolated. Her household is structured around shared life, not individual consumption.Degraded statusWhile claiming to elevate women, feminism has steadily lowered the status of motherhood and homemaking. For decades, we’ve heard that women are “more than just mothers,” that raising children prevents them from “being someone.”Consider what that sounds like to a child.The desire for status is natural — for men and women alike. Motherhood once carried that status. As it has been stripped away, many women seek it elsewhere.But the substitute — career-first identity combined with outsourced child-rearing — is narcissistic, materialistic, and ultimately unsatisfying. It can be hard on families and hard on children.It's also hard on mothers themselves. I’ve known many women who report that their contentment increased when they let go of "girlboss" career-woman expectations to concentrate on raising their children and making the home a nurturing place for their families.Where now?How do we fix this? I don’t know. Many Western families can’t get by on a single income. Men who want to be good providers can work hard and it’s still not enough. Some mothers need to work.But we can acknowledge that economic reality without accepting how it has distorted us. We can stop demanding a government solution to what is fundamentally a problem of values. We need to reacquaint ourselves with what we really are as men and women and what we really need. I can’t give a road map for how to achieve this. But it has to start by hauling our aristocratic assumptions into the sunlight and seeing them for what they are.