Verdict Watch: Day of Reckoning for Meta, Google Could Come This Week

This week in The Dispatch: Meta whistleblower drops bombshells in court; House Republicans hand tech CEOs a get-out-of-jail-free card; and state lawmakers are fed up with Big Tech's stranglehold on Trump’s D.C

The Tech Oversight Project

10 Mar 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.

🏛️ VERDICT WATCH: Big Tech's Big Day of Reckoning Coming Soon: After months of damning testimony, closing arguments in the landmark social media addiction trial could come as early as Thursday — and a verdict could follow shortly after. For the millions of families who brought these cases, and for the future of youth online safety regulation, the stakes could not be higher.

The final stretch of testimony has been explosive. This was Whistleblower Week in court, and it delivered. Arturo Béjar, a former Meta safety engineer, told the court that he personally warned Mark Zuckerberg that children were being seriously harmed on Instagram, based on an internal survey of 260,000 users.

Key whistleblower revelations:

META PROHIBITED THE TERM “ADDICTION,” insisting on the term “problematic use,” which interfered with employees’ efforts to honestly address compulsive behavior.
META’S SAFETY TOOLS WERE DESIGNED TO LOOK GOOD, NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Most tools require opt-in (used by only 1-3% of people), and some include “dark pattern” design elements that discourage reporting and create a false sense of security.
META MADE SAFETY ENGINEERS REPORT TO THE GROWTH TEAM, meaning that they were answerable to people who were rewarded for increasing user engagement.
MOST USER DANGERS ARE DUE TO THE PLATFORMS’ ARCHITECTURE, not the content users post. Instagram watches how fast you scroll, where you linger, and what you click on to endlessly feed you more of what you like.

Addiction psychiatrist Dr. Kara Bagot testified that specific platform design features — including infinite scroll, autoplay, and algorithms — directly contribute to six mental health diagnoses like Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Body Dysmorphic Disorder. They do it by triggering a dopamine reorganization in the brain, forcing a "reset" of the baseline that in turn leads to withdrawal symptoms and maladaptive behaviors like hiding in the bathroom at work to scroll through social media.

For so many kids, social media addiction is the primary catalyst of mental health crises. While every child faces life stressors, it is the platforms' addictive and harmful design that strips away their ability to cope, turns those stressors into a crisis, and makes mental health even worse. Béjar said Meta could easily incorporate safety features without making the platforms less attractive to users, but the company continues to choose profit over protection.

ICYMI: New exhibits are being added to our Big Tech on Trial evidence hub microsite as they become available.

🪧 THE KIDS ACT IS A TROJAN HORSE: House Republicans gave Big Tech a boost with kids "safety" legislation that would preempt state laws, nullify court cases, and deny a duty of care. Last week, the House Energy & Commerce Committee marked up its version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), setting up a high-stakes moment for online child safety legislation.

Advocates and parents have made clear that the House version of KOSA falls short of what our kids need — and of the strong bipartisan bill that passed the Senate last year. It’s a Big Tech-friendly “compromise” that lets the platforms do even more of the very things that have harmed our kids — in fact, it would set the bar for safety even lower than some existing state laws.

“This is not the time to turn your back on kids, and people across America are aware of this,” said U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor during the hearing. “We’re not going to stand for weaker bills that put our kids’ safety and privacy at risk.”

Flashback to the strong Senate bill: after years of bipartisan negotiations, that version of KOSA passed 91–3 last Congress and now has more than 70 bipartisan Senate cosponsors. It sets clear expectations for age-appropriate defaults, algorithmic accountability, and real safety guardrails.

Why would House Republicans weaken a 91-vote Senate bill? Because Big Tech wants them to.

TOP’s Sacha Haworth: “By advancing this package, House Republicans are giving Mark Zuckerberg and other Big Tech CEOs what they want — a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s a Trojan horse for bad policy, bad politics, blanket preemption, and an industry bailout in the courts.”

FLIPPED THE SWITCH: Meanwhile, the Senate wasn’t waiting around. As the House Energy & Commerce Committee was mid-markup, the Senate flipped a switch on them and passed a strong Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) 2.0 by unanimous consent. The House has now been handed yet another strong bipartisan kids online safety bill, and should send it to the President’s desk without delay, together with last year’s Senate-passed consensus KOSA.

👀 REPUBLICAN LAWMAKERS TURN FIRE ON TRUMP FOR BIG TECH AI MEDDLING: Here’s something you don’t see every day: Republican state lawmakers are publicly pushing back on the Washington Republican effort to block state regulation of AI as a giveaway to Big Tech.

Over 50 of them signed a letter to the White House raising the alarm, saying, “We firmly believe state-led efforts are fully consistent with conservative principles and with your stated goals of promoting human flourishing while accelerating innovation.”

This is a big change. For years, with some exceptions, tech policy debates tended to fall along predictable partisan lines, but the industry’s influence has grown so massive — and it has been so successful at blocking even commonsense safety regulation — that even Republicans are pushing back.

That pushback is right in line with the popular mood. In January, we released a nationwide survey conducted with Morning Consult showing that by a two-to-one margin, Americans think the Trump Administration is too cozy with the tech giants.

TOP’s Sacha Haworth: “Big Tech giants, like Google, OpenAI, Amazon, and Meta, spent hundreds of millions to fund Donald Trump’s campaign apparatus and White House ballroom, and that cozy relationship is finally catching up to Trump. The American people believe that if we let Big Tech write the rules, we are in for a future with fewer jobs and less opportunity. If you read between the lines, the American people are getting ready to blame Trump for failing to protect families and workers.”