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Big Tech’s Tobacco Moment Is Here — and the Truth About Harming Kids Is Out
For over a decade, child victims and their parents have been denied the chance to get justice for the harms they have suffered from social media’s products — ranging from anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, suicide, sextortion, and, in the starkest cases, death. Starting this week, they will finally have their day in court.
On Tuesday, the first bellwether trial against social media companies began in Los Angeles, serving as the initial test case for many more pending lawsuits. Meta, TikTok, Snap and YouTube face more than 3,000 lawsuits in California alone, along with more than 2,000 additional cases in federal court. Startling evidence is already coming to light. One internal Meta employee message exchange compares Instagram to drugs and slot machines. “Oh my gosh yall IG is a drug,” “Lol, I mean, all social media. We’re basically pushers.”
This is a landmark case. Never before have we been able to see this evidence, to reach this stage of litigation with social media where courts, and the public, can finally see for themselves the choices these companies have made when it comes to minors.
An AI Toy Exposed 50,000 Logs of Its Chats With Kids to Anyone With a Gmail Account
Earlier this month, Joseph Thacker’s neighbor mentioned to him that she’d preordered a couple of stuffed dinosaur toys for her children. She’d chosen the toys, called Bondus, because they offered an AI chat feature that lets children talk to the toy like a kind of machine-learning-enabled imaginary friend. But she knew Thacker, a security researcher, had done work on AI risks for kids, and she was curious about his thoughts.
So Thacker looked into it. With just a few minutes of work, he and a web security researcher friend named Joel Margolis made a startling discovery: Bondu’s web-based portal, intended to allow parents to check on their children’s conversations and for Bondu’s staff to monitor the products’ use and performance, also let anyone with a Gmail account access transcripts of virtually every conversation Bondu’s child users have ever had with the toy.
Without carrying out any actual hacking, simply by logging in with an arbitrary Google account, the two researchers immediately found themselves looking at children’s private conversations, the pet names kids had given their Bondu, the likes and dislikes of the toys’ toddler owners, their favorite snacks and dance moves.
In total, Margolis and Thacker discovered that the data Bondu left unprotected — accessible to anyone who logged in to the company’s public-facing web console with their Google username — included children’s names, birth dates, family member names, “objectives” for the child chosen by a parent, and most disturbingly, detailed summaries and transcripts of every previous chat between the child and their Bondu, a toy practically designed to elicit intimate one-on-one conversation.“Do I really want this in my house? No, I don’t,” he says. “It’s kind of just a privacy nightmare.”
Food Allergies in Children Are Rising: What Parents Need to Watch For
Food allergies are no longer a rare concern. Across clinics and classrooms, more parents are grappling with sudden reactions, confusing symptoms and anxiety around everyday foods. Doctors say the rise is real, and understanding the warning signs early can make a critical difference.
Food allergies happen when the body’s defence system mistakes a normal food for something harmful, explains Dr Kalale Nikhil Nagaraj, Consultant — Paediatrics & Neonatology, Aster RV Hospital. When the food is eaten again, the body reacts by releasing chemicals that cause symptoms such as rashes, swelling, vomiting or breathing problems.
Children with a family history of asthma, eczema, recurrent rashes or frequent colds carry a higher genetic vulnerability. Certain gene variants affect immune regulation and the skin’s protective barrier, increasing the likelihood of allergic sensitisation. “The skin barrier plays a key protective role,” Dr Nagaraj explains. In children with atopic dermatitis (eczema), allergens can enter through damaged skin, triggering immune responses even before foods are eaten.
Environmental shifts also matter. Reduced exposure to microbes, often described under the hygiene hypothesis, along with rising pollution levels, may be altering immune development.
Maternal Diabetes Tied to Infection Risk in Infants
Both maternal gestational and pregestational diabetes were associated with an increased risk for infections in infants during the first 6 months of life, a prospective study showed. Maternal pregestational diabetes was also associated with reduced neonatal immunoglobulin G (IgG) repertoire diversity, and infants of mothers with diabetes who had low IgG diversity had a higher risk for infections than infants of mothers without diabetes with high IgG diversity.
Maternal diabetes during pregnancy has been associated with adverse maternal and child health outcomes and altered infant immune function, leaving newborns and infants younger than 6 months especially vulnerable to infections. Researchers analyzed 2702 mother-infant pairs from the Boston Birth Cohort, enrolled at birth and followed up prospectively, to examine whether maternal diabetes in pregnancy was associated with the risk for offspring infections in the first 6 months of life.
Amazon Found ‘High Volume’ of Child Sex Abuse Material in AI Training Data, Center Says
Amazon reported hundreds of thousands of pieces of content last year that it believed included child sexual abuse, which it found in data gathered to improve its artificial intelligence models. Though Amazon removed the content before training its models, child safety officials said the company has not provided information about its source, potentially hindering law enforcement from finding perpetrators and protecting victims.
Throughout last year, Amazon detected the material in its AI training data and reported it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The organization, which was established by Congress to field tips about child sexual abuse and share them with law enforcement, recently started tracking the number of reports specifically tied to AI products and their development. In 2025, NCMEC saw at least a 15-fold increase in these AI-related reports, with “the vast majority” coming from Amazon. The findings haven’t been previously reported. An Amazon spokesperson said the training data was obtained from external sources, and the company doesn’t have the details about its origin that could aid investigators.
It’s common for companies to use data scraped from publicly available sources, such as the open web, to train their AI models. Other large tech companies have also scanned their training data and reported potentially exploitative material to NCMEC. However, the clearinghouse pointed to “glaring differences” between Amazon and its peers. The other companies collectively made just “a handful of reports,” and provided more detail on the origin of the material, a top NCMEC official said.
