Exclusive | Blackburn, Klobuchar slam Mark Zuckerberg for banning law firm ads for victims of social media addiction: Disturbing
Sens.Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) blasted Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg on Friday over the tech giant’s “disturbing” move to take down ads from law firms that offered to represent victims of social media addiction.Meta started yanking ads off Facebook and Instagram in April after losing blockbuster verdicts in Los Angeles and New Mexico that found the company failed to protect kids.
One of the ads proclaimed that Meta knew its apps were causing anxiety, depression and self-harm but “kept targeting kids anyway.”Meta’s ad ban is “nothing more than an attempt to preserve a harmful business model at all costs — one that actively profits off the addiction of this nation’s youth,” the senators wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg, a copy of which was exclusively obtained by The Post.“In fact, Meta’s actions expressly conflict with its recent policy changes to ‘allow more speech’ and to stop removing or demoting content, except in the most extreme circumstances,” the senators added.Meta and other social companies are facing unprecedented heat over their failure to protect minors online.
The company is a defendant, alongside YouTube parent Google, TikTok and Snap, in more than 2,400 lawsuits in California federal court brought by school districts, state attorneys general and individuals.In their letter, Blackburn and Klobuchar pointed to Meta’s own internal documents, which showed that the company estimated in 2024 that 10% of its overall revenue — or $16 billion — was derived from scam ads that ran on its apps.“That Meta makes billions of dollars from fraudulent ads makes clear that Meta is removing these ads only to protect its bottom line,” the senators wrote.Axios, which first reported on the law firm ad removals on April 9, identified more than a dozen ads that had been scrubbed from Meta’s apps, including solicitations from major law firms like Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law.Meta spokesman Andy Stone sa...