Will Dr. Zahid go after Facebook and YouTube?

A Los Angeles jury has now done what governments usually avoid: It treated social media harm as a matter of product design. In the KGM bellwether trial, Meta and YouTube were found negligent and liable for failure to warn. 

The jury fixed compensatory damages at $3 million, assigned 70% responsibility to Meta and 30% to YouTube, and also found punitive damages warranted.

That matters because it shifts the argument away from a few bad posts and toward the machinery of compulsion itself.

Judge Carolyn Kuhl let that theory reach a jury because the alleged harm was not only about what users saw, but about how the platforms were built to keep minors there: Infinite scroll, autoplay, engagement loops, notification systems, weak warnings, and weak parental safeguards.

Her rulings made clear that a design feature can itself be the source of injury and that this question belongs to a jury, not to a quick corporate escape through Section 230 slogans. That is the real significance of the case.

The law has begun to catch up with the business model.

Bangladesh should read that verdict not as an American spectacle but as a warning addressed to us.

In a March essay in The Business Standard, Faiz Ahmad Taiyeb, former special assistant to the chief adviser of the interim government, wrote that Meta pressured the government at least five times to lower the legal age of a child from 18.

He said those attempts took place in high-level government meetings, in discussions organized by the US Embassy and in bilateral sessions.

He also wrote that officials repeatedly told Meta that the definition of a child did not belong to the ICT division at all, but to the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs.

Taiyeb further argued that lowering the threshold would create a major carve-out for profiling 13-to-17-year-olds, a group he estimated at roughly 6 to 8 million active adolescent users in Bangladesh.

That allegation should transform the debate. If it is true, then Meta was not merely lobbying on a technicality. It was trying to redraw the legal boundary of childhood in a country where millions of teenagers are already trapped inside platform economies built on attention, insecurity, and data extraction.

Bangladesh has already written the moral vocabulary to resist that pressure. The 2020 National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence flags accountability, transparency, privacy, human dignity and psychological impact as central concerns, while the draft 2024 National AI Policy says AI must be human-centered, must protect rights and dignity, must safeguard products with regard to age and preferences, and must require valid consent, notice and the option to revoke the use of personal data.

The state cannot write that and then look away when Big Tech comes asking for exemptions around children.

This lands squarely on the desk of AZM Zahid Hossain, who is now the minister for Social Welfare and Women and Children Affairs.

He cannot pretend the digital dimension is outside his brief.

Tarique Rahman himself said in November that women in Bangladesh must feel safe both online and offline and called for a national online safety system, better Bangla-language moderation and rapid response channels for cyberabuse. 

If the party leadership can speak that clearly about digital harm, its minister responsible for women and children has no excuse for silence when the question becomes children’s data, profiling and platform design.

Let us also be candid about how Zahid arrived here. Public reporting around cabinet formation did not present him as a specialist in child online safety. It presented him as a BNP standing committee member, a leader of a pro-BNP physicians organization, and one of Khaleda Zia’s personal physicians.

There was even a common expectation that, as a physician-leader, he might be given the Health Ministry instead. In other words, he did not walk into this office on the strength of a known public record of protecting children from social-media harms. 

He walked in on the strength of political standing and leadership trust. That is not, by itself, a scandal. Politics works that way. But it does mean this is his opportunity to create the record he did not bring with him.

And that record would not be hard to begin. He should demand that Meta publicly answer Taiyeb’s allegation. He should ask whether any ministry records exist of meetings in which the company sought to lower the legal age of a child.

He should convene an inquiry into how Facebook, Instagram and YouTube treat Bangladeshi minors, including their recommendation systems, age-gating, warnings, reporting channels and Bangla-language moderation capacity. 

He should press for child-impact audits, age-appropriate default settings and a regulatory path that treats addictive design and failure to warn as policy questions, not family trivia. If California can force these companies into court over design, Bangladesh can at least force them into the open.

There is also an uncomfortable lesson in the Taiyeb article itself. He deserves credit for putting the allegation on the record. But even on his own telling, the public learned of Meta’s claimed pressure only after the fact, not in real time when the pressure was being applied.

That is not good enough. Bangladesh should pass a law requiring immediate disclosure whenever a for-profit company communicates with the leadership of a ministry -- minister or secretary -- about changing the legal definition of a child, or weakening any comparable child-protection rule.

The disclosure should name the company, the officials involved, the date, the requested change and the substance of the meeting. Childhood cannot be negotiated in private boardroom language and revealed later as an anecdote.

That should be the test for Dr. Zahid. Not another seminar. Not another slogan. Not another plea for “awareness” while the architecture of harm stays intact.

He was not appointed because Bangladesh had already seen in him a fearless defender of children against platform power. Fine. Then let this be the moment he becomes one. 

He can keep the portfolio as a badge of party confidence. Or he can turn it into something rarer in our politics: A record. And if he wants that record to mean anything, he should begin by demanding answers from Facebook and YouTube -- and by making sure no company ever again gets to lobby, in secret, for a narrower definition of a Bangladeshi child.

Omar Shehab is a theoretical quantum computer scientist at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, New York.