Once again the masks have slipped from the faces of the capitalist profiteers, and once again the working masses are shown the true nature of capitalist “innovation.” Meta, that empire of digital surveillance, owned by the billionaire Zuckerberg, has been dragged before the U.S. Senate not for its real crime, the exploitation of billions of workers’ attention and unpaid labor, but for a scandal so grotesque that even the capitalist state must feign indignation: the exposure of children to abuse and exploitation on its platforms.
What do we learn? That whistleblowers — ordinary workers employed in “safety research” — discovered systematic risks of child exploitation on Meta’s VR products. They raised alarms. What was the response of the ruling class’s technological behemoth? Suppression. Cover-up. Erasure of evidence. Mr Sattizahn and Cayce Savage, who once lead research on the youth user experience for Meta’s VR platforms, told senators that the company demanded researchers erase evidence of sexual abuse risk on those products. Meta’s lawyers dictated what could and could not be studied, precisely because to reveal the truth would threaten the profits drawn from expanding its marketplace of virtual commodities.
This isn’t an aberration. This isn’t “corporate negligence.” This is the logic of capital itself. The guardians of the nuclear family scream endlessly about “protecting children,” yet in practice children are reduced to instruments of profit. Their attention is monetized, their dependence is exploited, and their very vulnerability becomes a source of revenue streams for parasitic billionaires.
We must be clear: the capitalist nuclear family is not a shield for youth. It is a mechanism of control, producing obedient laborers while delivering them, defenseless, into the clutches of corporations like Meta. Parents are given “parental controls,” so opaque and unusable that even state officials cannot navigate them. This is not protection — it is a cruel parody of protection, designed to offload responsibility onto individual families while the capitalists continue to profit.
Meta’s defenders, in the Senate and the press, pretend to be horrified. They call hearings, they shake their fists, they extract apologies. Yet the whole apparatus of capitalist society remains devoted to defending the sanctity of “property” — above all, the sacred “right” of the capitalist to property in the means of production, including digital platforms. Youth, meanwhile, are denied autonomy, denied collective protection, denied liberation.
Let us not forget: the very same ruling class that pretends to weep over the harms of social media is the one slashing public services, cutting youth programs, and destroying the collective institutions that could socialize care and safeguard children outside the suffocating bounds of the patriarchal household and the profiteering corporation.
Only socialism — the abolition of private property in the means of communication, the socialization of child-rearing, the liberation of youth as free and equal participants in society — can end this cycle. The capitalists will always choose profits over safety, secrecy over truth, exploitation over liberation. The working class must demand not reforms and parental controls, but expropriation of these monopolies and their subordination to the collective good.
Let the scandal of Meta be a rallying cry: for the destruction of the capitalist nuclear family as a prison-house, for the emancipation of youth from their status as property, and for the seizure of the capitalist tools of communication by the workers themselves. Only then will we end the crimes against the most vulnerable, and turn technology from a weapon of exploitation into a tool of liberation.
