Last week I sat in a congressional hearing room watching legislators mark up a bill called the Kids Act — a bill with “online child protection” in its title. From my seat, holding a photo of my son, I watched a representative argue for the importance of shielding tech products from civil liability. The language had been carefully inserted into an immunity clause. It was not subtle if you knew what you were looking at.
Today is the sentencing of the man who killed my son. I am not in the courtroom. I can’t sit in a courtroom and not say the truth. So I’m saying it here instead.
Two settings. 6 days apart. Same problem from two directions.
In the hearing room, I watched the system that is supposed to write the rules work to ensure that the companies most responsible for enabling harm to children remain legally untouchable. Civil liability is the only mechanism that has ever forced these platforms to open their files. It’s the only reason we have internal documents showing what they knew and when. Strip that away — inside a bill named after kids — and there is no tool left to compel transparency.
In the courtroom today, the system that is supposed to deliver justice is compressing years of documented harm into a single transaction. No legal warning for the community.
Two stacks of paper.
On one side: what these systems say they do. Congressional bills titled after children. Platform safety statements. Press releases with percentages. Plea deals that close cases.
On the other side: what actually happens. A dealer who operated without fear for years because no institution stopped him. A warrant that sat with Snapchat for twenty days before they responded. An encrypted file with no instructions. A dealer’s account still active weeks after my son died. And a hearing room where legislators looked past the photos of dead children to protect the companies that connected those children to harm.
I started this podcast with two stacks of paper. After this week, the stacks are taller. The gap between them hasn’t closed.
“Muted Cases” is the story the courtroom wouldn’t tell — built from testimony, timelines, and documents the legal system never put on the record.
