For years, social media companies have enjoyed the best of both worlds. They have built enormously profitable businesses around keeping people online while insisting that they are merely providing platforms on which others communicate.
A court in New Mexico has now challenged that arrangement.
A judge has ordered Meta to pay $567 million towards addressing harm caused to young people through Facebook and Instagram, following a $375 million civil penalty imposed earlier in the case. More importantly, the court found that Meta's platforms constituted a public nuisance and ordered measures aimed at protecting children.
The case challenges the notion that technology companies can escape responsibility by arguing that they are simply hosts for content created by users. The New Mexico proceedings focused on the design and operation of Meta's products and the risks those products create for children.
That should make Sri Lanka sit up and take notice.
Our children use the same platforms. They are exposed to the same algorithms, the same endless streams of carefully selected content and, increasingly, the same techniques designed to keep users coming back for more. Yet our debate about children's online safety is still largely left to parents and schools.
Parents can tell a child to put the phone down. A teacher can confiscate it during a lesson. A school can introduce a policy. But none of them designed the algorithm that keeps serving another video, another notification or another piece of provocative content. Nor can an individual parent realistically monitor everything a child encounters online.
The companies that design these systems have vastly greater resources and vastly greater knowledge about how their products affect user behaviour.
They should therefore carry a corresponding responsibility.
Sri Lanka has had warnings for years. A UNICEF study into children's online experiences found that 46.3 per cent of child internet users surveyed had communicated with people they did not know online. Of those, 27.9 per cent subsequently met an online stranger in person. The study also found that children were sharing private information and, in some cases, adult material online. Those figures are from 2018.
The fact that such data is already eight years old should be a source of concern. The online environment has changed enormously since then. Smartphones have become even more deeply embedded in children's lives, short-form video has exploded and algorithms have become considerably more sophisticated at predicting what will hold a user's attention.
And now, Artificial Intelligence has added another layer of risk.
Sri Lanka cannot sensibly address these problems with periodic warnings to parents, school seminars or moral panic whenever a new social-media trend emerges. Nor is a blanket ban on social media a serious long-term answer.
Children are not going to disappear from the internet. The digital world provides enormous opportunities for education, communication and creativity. The challenge is to ensure that those benefits do not come at the cost of children's safety and wellbeing.
That requires regulation that catches up with reality.
Sri Lanka needs current, independent research into how children use social media and the risks they face. It needs clear obligations for platforms operating in the country. It needs effective mechanisms for reporting and dealing with grooming, exploitation, cyberbullying and other forms of abuse. And it needs cooperation between schools, parents, police, health authorities, regulators and technology companies.
Most importantly, it needs to stop treating online safety as solely a parenting problem.
The problem is, the longer a person remains on a platform, the more opportunities there are to serve advertisements and gather data. Children may not be the customers in the traditional sense, but their attention is still an economic commodity.
That is where the New Mexico ruling deserves attention beyond the United States.
Sri Lanka is investing heavily in digital education and embracing new technologies. That is necessary. But digitalisation cannot mean handing children increasingly powerful devices and leaving families to deal with the consequences alone.
Technology companies cannot be allowed to argue that the harms produced by their products are somebody else's problem.
The New Mexico case may yet be overturned or narrowed on appeal. But the question it has put on the table will not disappear.
When a product is deliberately designed to capture attention, when children are among its most vulnerable users, and when the consequences can include exploitation, addiction and serious damage to wellbeing, someone must be accountable.