Duty of Care

Who builds the room children enter?On August 26, 2026, a federal judge in Oakland approved a court-ordered overhaul of Instagram and Facebook for teenagers: default time limits, a midnight lockout, quiet hours during school, and payments of up to $17.1 billion. It was the most concrete answer yet to a question that parents, engineers, whistleblowers, scientists and judges had fought over for a decade.Duty of Care tells that story through the people who lived it: the designers who built the endless feed and later regretted it, the engineer who wrote to Mark Zuckerberg about his own daughter, the whistleblower who carried internal research to Congress, the parents who held up photographs in a Senate hearing room, and the state investigators who created a fictional 13-year-old to see what a platform would send her.It follows the law as it caught up, from Section 230 and the children’s privacy law of 1998 to the Los Angeles and New Mexico verdicts and the Oakland consent judgment, read term by term. It weighs the scientific evidence fairly, keeping allegation apart from finding, and it compares the very different paths taken by Britain, the European Union, Australia, Canada and Japan.Then it turns practical. The book sets out a ten-part duty of care standard and a Toolkit of complete, filled-in models: a youth safety impact assessment, a 90-day platform plan, a family media agreement, a school response protocol for sextortion, a public audit scorecard, model legislative language, ten questions to ask before believing a safety announcement, and an implementation register for the Oakland settlement.For parents, teachers, school leaders, policymakers, lawyers and anyone who builds technology that children use.