US court calls social platform pollution, and Malaysians should listen

A US court has called a social media platform a public nuisance, like pollution. The ruling is American. The question is ours.

A judge in the United States recently made a company pay. The company is Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

The judge ordered the company to put US$567 million into a fund to repair the harm its platforms have done to children. That sits on top of an earlier US$375 million penalty in the same case. The company disagrees and will appeal. That is its right.

But look past the numbers.

The judge did something quietly historic. He called the platform a factory. Its content and adverts were the product. And the harm to children was the pollution that factory pumps out.

He said the features built to keep young people scrolling – the endless feed, autoplay and pinging notifications – fed a real crisis in young people’s wellbeing. That, he ruled, was a public nuisance. A harm so widespread it becomes everybody’s problem.

Sit with that one word for a moment. Pollution.

We have known how to think about a poisoning factory for a century. It does not matter that it also creates jobs. It does not matter that most people downstream are fine. If it harms the public, the public can regulate it. Fine it. Force it to clean up. The court took that old, settled idea and pointed it at a screen.

Why does an American ruling matter to us? One simple reason. The children are the same.

Our young people use the same platforms. The same engineered features. In a region younger and more online than almost anywhere on Earth. The difference is this. The rules protecting a child in the United States are written in the United States. For that child. Not for ours. And the harm does not stop at a border. So if we leave the rules to others, we get their protection late. Or never.

Here is the good news. Malaysia is not waiting.

We already have an Online Safety Act, passed in 2025 and now in force. Under it, the regulator has issued a Child Protection Code, built around age-appropriate design. Since June 2026, major platforms must verify age and keep under-16s from opening accounts. Fail, and the penalty reaches RM10 million. We have already blocked an AI tool for making harmful fakes.

Argue about the details all you like. The principle is now settled here. Engineered harm to children online is the state’s business.

So our question is not whether to act. We have started. The question is whether we act well.

Three things would decide that.

First, judge the design, not just the content. The Meta case was about how the product was built to grab attention. Not only about the worst content that slipped through.

That is the sharper test. It does not ask what bad thing appeared. It asks what the machine was built to do to a child’s time in the first place. Our codes already lean this way. Hold that line.

Second, give the rule teeth. A rule you cannot enforce is a wish. Age checks must actually work. Penalties must sting a company that earns tens of billions. Compliance must be checked, not assumed.

A fine a giant pays from petty cash changes nothing.

Third, do it together. A border means nothing to a feed. Australia has already moved, with millions of under-age accounts reportedly removed. Others near us have started their own age rules.

If Asean sets one shared standard for how platforms treat minors, no single small market can be brushed aside. And no child slips through the gap between two countries’ laws.

One warning, then one balance. The warning first.

These systems are built by some of the most powerful companies in history. They will not redesign themselves out of kindness. They move for two things: law and cost.

Now the balance.

The goal is not to wall our children off from the modern world. It is to insist the world they are handed was built with their wellbeing in mind. Not just their attention.

The judge chose the word pollution. It is a hard word. It is also a useful one. Over a difficult century, we learned that a company may not quietly poison the air and call it progress. We are now learning the same about the mind.

Malaysia has started to write that lesson into law. The task now is to mean it.

Ts Dr Manju Appathurai holds dual PhDs in Artificial Intelligence (2026) and Crisis Economics, is a licensed clinical psychologist and Licensed Technologist (Ts), and is the founding principal of Mahat Advisory and a strategic adviser to the Dutch Coalition for Defence and Security (Malaysia).

The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer and do not represent those of Twentytwo13.