Tammy Rodriguez lost her 11-year-old daughter Selena to suicide in 2021, and five years later she is still showing up in Washington, D.C., to tell lawmakers that a landmark financial settlement with Meta is not enough to protect kids online. Selena had struggled with bullying and body image issues, was admitted to an inpatient facility after she stopped eating, and used Snapchat under restrictions her mother had imposed. Rodriguez says federal legislation covering every social media company, not just Meta, is the only real fix.
Rodriguez's advocacy comes just weeks after Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and dozens of other state attorneys general finalized a multistate settlement with Meta, which as reported by the Hartford Courant will pay millions of dollars to most states, including Connecticut, to address social media harms to children. Tong has called it the largest settlement in American history involving a single defendant, according to the same report, and said TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat are next. Connecticut is expected to receive up to $265 million from the deal, money state officials say will support reducing youth harms on social media, mental health and crisis intervention programs, after-school and summer programming, and phone-free school zones.
Meta did not admit wrongdoing as part of the agreement, per the Courant's reporting, but it did commit to implementing minor safety features for at least five years. Those include pauses after 15 minutes of continuous app use, restricted access between midnight and 6 a.m., and limits on weekday use during the school year. Meta has also called on YouTube and TikTok to adopt similar parameters, though additional settlement money depends on Snapchat and TikTok agreeing to settle and implement their own guardrails.
A Mother's Private Conversation With the Attorney General
Rodriguez spoke privately with Tong on the day the settlement was announced, the Courant reported, and Tong has said he will allow advocates and parents to weigh in on how the settlement funds get allocated. Rodriguez wants that money steered toward mental health groups and toward educating teachers and school staff, rather than diffused across broader state priorities. Connecticut officials called Rodriguez in late August and invited her to the following day's press conference, where she learned about the multistate settlement with Meta in real time.
Her advocacy did not start with this settlement. Rodriguez traveled to Washington in 2022 to meet with members of Congress, and in 2024 she held a direct-action demonstration at the Apple Store in Grand Central Station. That same year, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized to families at an online safety hearing. Rodriguez was the first person to file a case with the Social Media Victims Law Center, the Seattle-based firm founded in 2021 by attorney Matthew P. Bergman after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's congressional testimony; the firm now represents more than 2,000 families in social media harm litigation. Her lawsuit against Meta and Snap, filed in January 2022, alleged product defect and negligence rather than content liability, and remains pending.
Why Lawsuits Lean on Product Design, Not Content
That product-liability framing exists because tech companies routinely invoke Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to seek broad immunity against lawsuits over user content, as explained by TechPolicy.Press. That forces plaintiffs like Rodriguez to argue that features such as infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations are defective product designs rather than protected speech, a legal strategy at the core of the Social Media Victims Law Center's broader litigation. The approach has already produced results elsewhere: a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent in a bellwether trial in March 2026, ordering Meta to pay $4.2 million and YouTube $1.8 million to a young woman whose mental health was harmed by app usage, as detailed in earlier Hoodline coverage. A New Mexico jury separately found that Meta misled people about the safety of its apps that same month.
Rodriguez says companies do not implement safety measures without legislation or coercion, and she and other advocacy groups have urged Congress for years to pass the Kids Online Safety Act. The Senate passed a combined version of KOSA with COPPA 2.0 by a 91-3 vote in July 2024, Congress's most significant bipartisan child online safety vote in nearly three decades. But the bill stalled afterward — Senator Richard Blumenthal, who co-authored the Senate version alongside Senator Marsha Blackburn, attempted to pass it by unanimous consent, only to have Senator Rand Paul object.
Duty of Care Splits House and Senate Versions
The Senate version of KOSA would let children and parents disable infinite scroll and video autoplay, enable stronger privacy settings, and opt out of algorithmic recommendations. Crucially, it also includes a duty of care provision requiring platforms to mitigate harms to minors — a provision Rodriguez supports. The House took a different path in June, passing the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act by a 267-117 vote, but the package stripped out that duty of care language entirely, a move that led Senate co-authors to declare the House version dead on arrival, according to K-12 Dive.
Snap, X and Microsoft have all expressed support for KOSA, while the tech trade group NetChoice has lobbied against both the Senate and House versions of the legislation. Meta did not respond to a request for comment, per the Courant's reporting. The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation voted to advance an updated version of KOSA in August alongside a broader slate of youth artificial intelligence and privacy bills, a procedural step reported by the International Association of Privacy Professionals.
Blumenthal has said he hopes to see action on KOSA during the lame-duck session. The Senate began a month-long recess that ends after the November 3 elections, and Congress will try to advance the bill once lawmakers return. Deb Schmill, another parent advocate, has also advocated on the issue. Meanwhile, some states have not waited for Washington: Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont signed Public Act 26-15 in June, restricting addictive algorithms for minors without parental consent, and expanded protections under the Connecticut Data Privacy Act took effect in July, banning the sale or targeted advertising of minors' data.
For Rodriguez, none of these state-level moves substitute for a nationwide standard. She continues advocating for federal online safety legislation, arguing that only a law applying across all social media companies — not settlements negotiated state by state — can force the industry to change how it designs products for children.
