NBJC

The National Black Justice Collective welcomes accountability, calls on Congress to pass youth online safety legislation with real teeth, and warns that age verification and algorithmic restrictions must not cut Black LGBTQ+ and same-gender-loving young people off from the spaces where they find community.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The National Black Justice Collective (NBJC) today responded to the proposed settlement between Meta Platforms and a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general, filed August 26 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and still awaiting the court’s approval.

“Accountability is good, and this is accountability,” said Dr. David J. Johns, CEO and Executive Director of NBJC. “Two juries this spring found that Meta harmed young people. A New Mexico jury found 75,000 violations of that state’s consumer protection law. The attorneys general who brought these cases did what many of us have been asking for since before there was language for it, and they deserve real credit for it. We are glad it happened.”

“And a settlement is not a law,” Johns continued. “It binds one company, in most states, for a fixed number of years, and it can be enforced by nobody who was actually harmed. Unlike Florida’s Big Tobacco Settlement, which protected kids from addictive marketing in the 1990s, no family gets anything. No child has a claim. Congress has had four years and a ninety-one to three Senate vote, and the one bill the House has managed to pass had the duty of care cut out of it. That is why one company’s negotiated terms are on the verge of becoming the national standard for how tens of millions of young people experience the internet. Parents deserve better than that, and so do the babies.”

NBJC’s response rests on three asks.

1. Congress must legislate

The proposed settlement covers 47 states, the District of Columbia, and three territories. Florida, New Mexico, and Texas are not part of it. Most of its obligations expire in ten years, and two of the most significant expire in five. It creates no private right of action and no consumer fund.

The legislative picture is worse than a stall. On June 29, 2026, the House passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, H.R. 7757, by a vote of 267 to 117, with KOSA’s duty of care removed. On August 5, the Senate Commerce Committee approved the Kids Online Safety Act with the duty of care intact. The two chambers now hold bills that differ on precisely the provision that determines whether the law has force. We support duty of care language and content-categorization standards that remove any vague “harmful to minors” frameworks that have been used to sweep up health education, HIV-prevention information, and LGBTQ+-affirming content alongside material that is genuinely dangerous. The problem is not a categorization standard in the abstract — it is who defines it, how it is defined, and who enforces it.

Litigation has done what litigation can do. Only Congress can set a durable national floor. NBJC calls on Congress to enact youth online safety legislation that creates a meaningful duty of care and pairs it with comprehensive federal privacy protections that this country still lacks. Specifically, Congress must:

• Reject age-verification requirements that force every user to hand over government identification. Require privacy-preserving alternatives, data minimization, purpose limitation, and mandatory deletion. 
• Create science-based definitions of “harmful to minors,” tied to established child-development and medical standards — not left to the discretion of political appointees, and not vague enough to ban LGBTQ+-affirming or health education content. 
• Incorporate a nondiscrimination limit on any duty of care with an appeals process, so that platforms’ safety obligations cannot be applied to discriminate against protected speech or lawful health and identity content.
• Ensure redress and appeal rights for users who are age-gated, demonetized, or removed, directly addressing documented harms from shadowbanning and demonetization.
• Congress must include a structural seat, not merely consultation, that includes formal youth, LGBTQ+, and civil rights representation on any advisory body or rulemaking process touching content moderation, data privacy, or AI.

2. Implementation must not cut young people off from affirming spaces

The settlement requires Meta to apply age assurance to every user in the settling states, not only to teenagers, and permits government identification checks and facial age estimation to do it. Within Meta’s under-13 enforcement process, the agreement directs that where there is no indication of a user’s age, Meta “shall presume that the user is U13,” and that process ends in account deletion. A person misidentified as a minor may appeal, and the agreement requires a decision “promptly”—but it sets no actual deadline, provides no independent review, and names no remedy if the appeal fails.

That design has a predictable failure mode for the communities NBJC serves. Eighteen percent of Black adults do not have a driver’s license. Forty-three percent of transgender Americans lack identity documents that correctly reflect their name or gender. Verification regimes create new databases documenting who is accessing what content. That data is a liability the moment it is breached, subpoenaed, or misused.  Additionally, facial age estimation performs less accurately for Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Southeast Asian faces.

The risk is not hypothetical. In January 2025, Instagram was reported to have blocked LGBTQ+ search terms from teen accounts for months, after a system meant to filter sexually suggestive material classified identity terms as sexual content. Meta called it a mistake. In 2017, YouTube’s Restricted Mode hid LGBTQ+ creators’ videos. And research from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that 29 percent of LGBTQ+ students report that they or someone they know has been outed by school monitoring technology.

For many young people, online spaces are the most affirming spaces they have. The Trevor Project’s 2025 national survey found that 77 percent of LGBTQ+ young people identify online spaces as supportive—more than school (57 percent) and more than home (52 percent). Among Black LGBTQ+ young people who experienced discrimination and received support, 7 percent named a parent or caregiver.

Most of the protective defaults in this settlement can be changed only by a supervising parent who knows how to access the information. That is sound design for a young person with an affirming parent. It can fail the young person whose parent is the source of the harm.

NBJC asks the parties to publish age-assurance error rates disaggregated by race and gender identity, to set a defined deadline and appoint an independent reviewer for misidentification appeals, and to build the recommendation and filtering systems so that they do not treat a young person’s identity as content to be hidden from them.

We also note what the agreement leaves out. It defines the platforms it covers as Facebook and Instagram while “excluding, in each case, any [direct] messaging features linked to or included in those platforms, such as Instagram Direct or Messenger.” The time limits and night restrictions do not apply to private messages, and when a suspicious adult opens a thread with a teenager, the agreement requires notice rather than a closed door. New Mexico’s attorney general has made the same point about the protections his state won at trial that this agreement does not carry.

3. Civil rights organizations belong at the implementation table

This settlement will be implemented, for as long as it runs, by an independent auditor, the settling attorneys general, and Meta’s own product teams. None of those bodies is required to include anyone accountable to the young people most likely to be harmed if the implementation is done poorly.

NBJC asks the settling attorneys general and Meta to establish a formal civil rights consultation role in the design, auditing, and public reporting of these systems, and to include Black LGBTQ+ and same-gender-loving young people in designing the systems that will govern their access to community and information.

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“We have watched this happen before, in schools,” Johns said. “Florida had to settle a lawsuit and formally clarify that its law never banned student clubs, never reached library books outside the classroom, and never stopped teachers and students from talking about who we are. The law itself is still on the books. But by the time the state clarified any of that, the damage was done. Equality Florida documented what happened: a Palm Beach County superintendent bypassed his own district’s review process to pull books featuring LGBTQ+ characters; Orange County administrators were advised to start removing the rainbow safe-space stickers from classroom windows; and LGBTQ+ educators were told to take their family photos off their desks. Nobody made them do that. Fear did. And when adults close affirming spaces in school buildings, young people look elsewhere. Online is where they go.”

“So build the safeguards. Build them well. Build them with us in the room, and build them for the young person who does not have an adult at home who affirms who they are. That child is the reason any of this matters.”