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The Supreme Court appeared inclined Tuesday to side with a group of parents objecting to their school district including books with LGBTQ themes in its elementary school curriculum.

Across more than two hours of arguments, a majority of the justices sympathized with the Montgomery County, Md., parents’ claims that the lack of an opt-out option substantially burdens their First Amendment rights to freely exercise their religion.

“What is the big deal about allowing them to opt out of this?” conservative Justice Samuel Alito asked.

Montgomery County, which serves more than 160,000 students in the Maryland suburbs of the nation’s capital and is one of the country’s most diverse school districts, began introducing LGBTQ-inclusive books in its elementary school language arts curriculum at the start of the 2022-23 school year.

The books include titles like “Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope,” which is centered on the author’s transgender son, and “Love, Violet,” which tells the story of two young girls in a same-sex romance.

Read more here.

The KiDS: Keep It Digitally Safe Campaign is a global contest designed to solicit creative ideas from the public on what social media warning labels could look like and say. The goal is to warn youth and adults about the harms of the social media platforms they are about to use, or are currently using. The campaign actively seeks submissions, particularly from young people, inviting their best and brightest ideas for these warning labels.

Throughout the campaign, we will showcase these submissions on social media and other platforms to further raise awareness about the dangers of unregulated digital spaces. By amplifying these creative ideas, the campaign aims to spotlight the real-life consequences of harmful content on social media and encourage meaningful change.

The campaign also seeks to ensure that social media platforms disclose real-time data and report on the various harms that have been brought to their attention. The campaign demands that platforms disclose, in detail, the specific steps they have taken to address these harms and resolve individual complaints. This transparency is critical to holding platforms accountable and protecting users from continued harm.

Learn more here.

A recent report from Northeastern University highlights significant shortcomings in the U.S. health care system’s response to child sex trafficking victims. The study, led by Professor Amy Farrell, director of criminology and criminal justice and WGSS affiliated faculty at Northeastern, underscores that while hundreds of cases are reported annually in Massachusetts alone, the actual numbers are likely higher due to underreporting.

The report emphasizes that health care providers often struggle to establish trust with young victims, who may be hesitant to seek medical assistance. This reluctance hinders effective identification and treatment. To address these challenges, the report recommends comprehensive training for health care professionals to recognize signs of exploitation and to understand the complex relationship between exploitation and health.

Read more here.

A U.S. judge on Friday denied Sean (Diddy) Combs’s bid to delay his upcoming sex-trafficking trial by two months.

U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian said the hip-hop mogul made his request too close to his trial. Jury selection is scheduled to start on May 5, with opening statements on May 12.

Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to five criminal counts, including racketeering and sex trafficking. Prosecutors with the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office say Combs used his business empire to sexually abuse women between 2004 and 2024.

Read more here.

Investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz reported a startling statistic from an internal Snap Inc. email quoted in a court case against Snap Inc., the company which owns Snapchat. The email noted that the company receives around 10,000 reports of sextortion each month—and that figure is likely “only a fraction of the total abuse occurring on the platform.”

This statistic prompted us to investigate what else Snap Inc. knows or believes about the impact of its product on users, particularly teens (We estimate that roughly 13 million American 13-17 year-olds use Snapchat). Over the past several months, we have examined multiple court cases filed against Snap Inc., many involving severe or fatal harm that was (allegedly) facilitated by Snapchat’s features. From 2022 through 2025, as part of the Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) and Judicial Council Coordinated Proceedings (JCCP) against social media defendants, more than 6001 such lawsuits specifically named Snap Inc. as a defendant. In addition, state attorneys general from Nevada and New Mexico have brought significant cases against the company—two cases which we will draw heavily from in this post.

Following the format of our previous post about the “industrial scale harms” attributed to TikTok, this piece presents dozens of quotations from internal reports, studies, memos, conversations, and public statements in which Snap executives, employees, and consultants acknowledge and discuss the harms that Snapchat causes to many minors who use their platform. We group these findings into five key clusters of harms:

Read more here. 

Washington, DC. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the witness stand Monday to defend his company against accusations by the Federal Trade Commission that it bought competing social media companies to dominate the market with a monopoly.

It was the first of what is expected to be two days of testimony for Zuckerberg, who will seek to explain two of his company’s most important acquisitions, Instagram and WhatsApp.

And although Zuckerberg is no stranger to defending his company, the stakes in this case may be higher than ever before. If the FTC wins, Meta could be forced to break itself apart and spin off WhatsApp and Instagram, which would upend the company’s core digital advertising business and reshape the broader social media ecosystem.

Read more here.