Social Media’s Reckoning; AI Super PACs and Epstein Files Overlap

This week in The Dispatch: Big Tech CEOs who appear in Epstein files pouring tons of money into AI super PACs

The Tech Oversight Project

10 Feb 2026 — 7 min read

Welcome back to The Dispatch from The Tech Oversight Project, your weekly updates on all things tech accountability. Follow us on Twitter at @Tech_Oversight and @techoversight.bsky.social on Bluesky.

🚬 BIG TECH'S BIG TOBACCO MOMENT: Meta Hauled to Court in Two Child Safety Trials. As opening arguments began yesterday in the landmark social media addiction trial in Los Angeles and in New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s trial against Meta in Santa Fe, as damning evidence continues to be released, we called out this week as “the split screen of Mark Zuckerberg’s nightmares”:

“These are the trials of a generation; just as the world watched courtrooms hold Big Tobacco and Big Pharma accountable, we will, for the first time, see Big Tech CEOs like Zuckerberg take the stand. Dozens of state attorneys general, thousands of families, and school districts nationwide are building the legal architecture to protect young people and future generations. The world is watching, Meta’s reckoning has arrived, and the consequences have just begun."

– Sacha Haworth, Executive Director of The Tech Oversight Project

On the eve of opening arguments in Los Angeles, bereaved parent advocates gathered outside the courthouse to hold a vigil for kids lost to social media harms. The parents held pictures of their deceased children and stood for 2,000 seconds (33 minutes), one for each of the more than 2,000 related personal cases that have been filed against Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and Google.

Here's a recap of the first day of trial:

Plaintiff’s attorney, Mark Lanier, described the case as easy as ABC: Addicting the Brains of Children, citing key internal documents from Meta and Google—showing that they were targeting children as young as four.
Jurors saw internal documents showing YouTube comparing itself to a “digital babysitter,” and Meta referencing a mysterious “Project Myst,” an internal study concluding that young people who had gone through trauma and stress were particularly vulnerable for addiction; and that parental supervision and controls were useless tools against it.
Lawyers for Meta began attacking the plaintiff, K.G.M., claiming her depression and mental health condition is a result of family dynamics, not social media addiction. This unfortunately is exactly what we expected to see from Big Tech since they can’t defend against the actual evidence.
On the steps of the courthouse, after the day ended, plaintiff’s attorney Mark Lanier notified reporters about key dates regarding Mark Zuckerberg, Adam Mosseri, and Neal Mohan’s testimony.

More on trial developments:

New York Times: Meta and YouTube Created ‘Digital Casinos,’ Lawyers Argue in Landmark Trial
AP: Landmark trial accusing social media companies of addicting children to their platforms begins
The Guardian: What to know about the jury trials of Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube
Tech Policy Press: Social Media Giants on Trial in California as Courts Revisit Tech Immunity

💰 BIG TECH BILLIONAIRES UNITE: AI’s Super PAC Power Play: The biggest players in AI aren’t just building products, they’re also pouring staggering sums of cash into industry super PACs with names like “Leading the Future” and “Think Big”, alongside their mega-MAGA donations.

The AI giants are aiming to blow up any chance of meaningful federal or state AI regulation by trying to pick winners and losers in key races in this year's midterm elections. This is the same playbook that crypto CEOs used two years ago to get friendly candidates into office, thus influencing Congress.

Some of the big AI spenders trying to swing elections and kill regulation for good:

$50M combined from VC giants Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and their A16Z firm
$25M from OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife
$500K from Big Tech billionaire Ron Conway
100K from Perplexity

All this spending has one goal: buy a rubber stamp Congress to make sure the tech giants can keep raking in billions in profit. These big-money donors are on the wrong side of pretty much everyone else: 36 state AGs, dozens of federal and hundreds of state lawmakers, hundreds of nonprofits and advocacy organizations, survivor parents, and teachers have all loudly opposed any plan to block AI regulation.

Oh, and the same thing’s happening at the state level, too: Meta put $65 million into PACs to sway elections in states like California.

Should a handful of wealthy tech insiders get to buy immunity from accountability using dark money? We’re fighting to sound the alarm and say NO.

🏝️ EPSTEIN ISLAND: The AI Super PAC people are also the Epstein people. In a surprise to absolutely no one, the same tech executives who are funding the White House ballroom and bankrolling AI super PACs have also popped up somewhere else unsavory: the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Newly-released emails show multiple Silicon Valley power players tied to AI lobbying show up repeatedly in Epstein-related records.

Mark Zuckerberg was having lunch with Epstein in 2015, 7 years after Epstein was convicted by a Florida state court of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute

this is the guy who now makes AI companion bots that sext with kids pic.twitter.com/PpqsXA3WAG
— Sacha Haworth (@sachalouise) February 2, 2026

During his decades of coordinating and perpetrating sexual abuse, Epstein worked to cultivate an elite web of influence in Silicon Valley grounded in a demented worldview that prioritizes genetic “optimization,” centralized control, and using technology and wealth to shape society from the top down, and to get rid of anything standing in their way.

What's most troubling? It doesn't seem like many Big Tech bigwigs saw anything wrong with that. And that's why the guilt-by-association rings true here, and that's why it should come as no surprise that the safety and well-being of minors on their platforms ranks so low on their list of priorities. For them, putting safety last for young people isn’t an accident: it’s a moneymaker, no matter the heartbreaking human cost.