For millions of South African parents, the question of what social media is doing to their children has moved from dinner-table worry to something closer to a public-health concern. Now it may also become a courtroom question. A growing international effort to hold technology companies accountable for the way their products are designed could soon reach South African courts, and the stakes for the country’s children, and for the public bodies charged with protecting them, are considerable.
The scale of the underlying problem is stark. Worldwide, more than 300 million children under 18 are estimated to have experienced online child sexual exploitation and abuse over a 12-month period, according to a 2024 report by the Childlight Global Child Safety Institute, based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
In South Africa, the true extent is uncertain. The best available evidence comes from the 2022 Disrupting Harm report, a major international research project on technology-facilitated sexual exploitation and abuse of children. It found that between 7% and 9% of internet-using children aged nine to 17 had experienced at least one form of online sexual exploitation and abuse in the previous year.
That picture may already be out of date. “We are relying on outdated statistics,” Dr Antoinette Basson of the Bureau of Market Research at the University of South Africa told the recent International Conference on Children’s Rights in Stellenbosch. The nature of the risk keeps shifting too. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence had put “this whole conversation in overdrive,” said Dr Eileen Carter of the South African Human Rights Commission. “The risk has moved faster than the law,” added Dr Banke Olagbegi-Oloba of the Centre for Social Justice at Stellenbosch University.
The conference, themed “Children’s Rights in a Polycrisis”, was hosted by Stellenbosch University’s Faculty of Law. Acting Dean Professor Juanita Pienaar described law as “a critical tool to address the concerns that we are facing today, but also for future generations”.
Whether that tool can be turned on the platforms themselves is being tested abroad. In the United States, a Los Angeles jury in March found Meta and Google’s YouTube negligent in a case brought by a young woman initially identified by her initials, KGM, and later named by her lawyers as Kaley Glenn-Mills. She said her childhood use of Instagram and YouTube became compulsive and contributed to mental-health harm. The jury awarded US$3 million in compensatory and US$3 million in punitive damages, with 70% apportioned to Meta and 30% to Google. Both companies have appealed. Meta has said teen mental health is “profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app”, and Google that the case misunderstands YouTube, which it described as a “responsibly built streaming platform”.
Five months later, Meta agreed to a settlement, subject to court approval, worth up to US$17.1 billion with 47 US states, Washington DC and three US territories over allegations that it designed products to encourage compulsive use by young people and concealed risks. Meta admitted no wrongdoing but undertook to introduce stronger protections for young users, including daily time limits and restrictions on overnight use and school-hour notifications. The settlement was also structured to encourage TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube to adopt similar safeguards. Commentators drew comparisons with an earlier industry reckoning: Fortune asked whether the verdict was Meta and YouTube’s “Big Tobacco moment”, and after the settlement the Los Angeles Times used the same description. The analogy is not exact, but the accountability question is similar: what happens when litigation turns to what companies knew about risks associated with products alleged to have been designed to encourage habitual use? (For a fuller discussion, see https://mg.co.za/thought-leader/2026-10-02-could-south-african-children-sue-big-tech-over-harmful-design/.)
That strategy may be heading for South Africa. US attorney Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, was in Stellenbosch in September for the conference. He argued that the problem is not merely harmful content posted by users but design features that keep young people engaged: “This is not an accident. This is not a coincidence. The platforms are designed to be addictive.” He displayed a 2020 internal Meta exchange in which one employee wrote: “Oh my gosh yall IG [Instagram] is a drug.” A colleague replied: “Lol, I mean, all social media. We’re basically pushers.”
Bergman told the audience that litigation over harmful design was now moving beyond the US, with the next phase to “internationalise the conflict”. “We are actively working with lawyers currently in Great Britain, South Africa, France, the Netherlands, Australia and Italy,” he said. There are indications the South African leg may already be taking shape: two local legal practices approached for this article indicated that litigation involving platform harm is being investigated or contemplated, but declined to discuss prospective cases on the record.
Could such a claim succeed here? Retired Western Cape High Court judge Patric Gamble believes South African law could accommodate a claim based on allegedly harmful platform design. If a child becomes addicted because of the way a platform is designed and suffers a recognised injury, he asked, is there a remedy under South African law? “The short answer is that I believe there is.” One route would be the common law of delict, though a claimant would need convincing medical evidence of a recognised condition and a causal link to the platform. “Expert medical evidence would be critical. Causation is extremely important.”
Another option is the Consumer Protection Act. Its definition of “goods” includes software and code, while section 61 provides for strict liability for harm caused by unsafe goods, defects or inadequate warnings. “Negligence need not be proved. It’s strict liability,” Gamble explained. But no South African court has yet applied the provision to social-media addiction, so such a case would be “breaking new ground”. Basson identified other potentially relevant avenues, including the Protection of Personal Information Act, the Films and Publications Act and the Cybercrimes Act, although she did not suggest any of these offers a ready-made cause of action. Gamble also cautioned that South Africans should not expect American-sized payouts. He contrasted the US$6 million (R98.5 million) awarded in the Kaley case with the damages awarded to the family of five-year-old Michael Komape, who died after falling into a pit toilet at his Limpopo school in 2014; the Supreme Court of Appeal awarded R1.4 million for emotional shock and grief across seven family members in total.
Meanwhile, local litigation against platforms over harm to children is not hypothetical. In July 2025, lawyers acting for South African schoolchildren obtained a Gauteng High Court order against Meta and WhatsApp over Instagram accounts and WhatsApp channels distributing child sexual abuse material. A later agreement required the removal of 12 WhatsApp channels and 58 Instagram accounts. It was an important accountability case, but a different kind of one: it sought to stop and trace harmful content, not damages for harm allegedly caused by product design.
For child-rights advocates, litigation is only part of the answer. Basson said “a stronger national approach should place clearer responsibilities on online service providers to anticipate and reduce risks before harm occurs, rather than placing most of the responsibility on children, parents and caregivers”. For Karabo Ozah, Director of the Centre for Child Law at the University of Pretoria, the wider problem is often not the absence of rights but failure to enforce them. “Our challenge is not to come up with new laws, but to make existing rights become a reality, in circumstances we never imagined,” she said in her keynote. “We might have to become more aggressive.”
If Bergman’s internationalisation drive reaches a South African courtroom, it will test whether South African law has the reach, and the teeth, to hold some of the world’s most powerful companies to account for the sake of the country’s children.