With Trump’s war on inclusion, life has suddenly become even more dangerous for LGBTQ youth. The CDC has removed health information for LGBTQ+ people from its website—including information about creating safe, supportive spaces. Meanwhile, Trump’s executive order, couched in hateful and inaccurate language, has stopped gender-affirming care.
Sadly, Meta’s decision in January to end fact-checking threatens to make social media even less safe for vulnerable teens. To stop the spread of misinformation, Meta and other social media platforms must commit to protecting young users.
Just a few months ago, Meta appeared to be taking a step in the right direction, launching its Teen Accounts with promises of safer online spaces. But the company’s recent decision to end fact-checking on its platforms threatens to undo all that progress—especially for teens who are already vulnerable. Among the most at risk are LGBTQ+ young people, whose safety and well-being are further endangered when harmful misinformation goes unchecked.
Adolescence is a time of self-discovery, and for many young people, that means exploring questions about their sexual identity. Imagine a teen scrolling through their social media feed—curious to learn more about interpersonal relationships and sexual identity—searching the internet to answer any questions that they may have in a place that they perceive as safer than their home or school. But that space is anything but safe now when untrue statements like “LGBTQ+ is a mental illness” spread unchecked.
These scientifically debunked statements aren’t just factual errors easily correctible by other online users—they are direct assaults on teens’ sense of self, as well as their mental health and well-being. Studies show that victimization, including anti-LGBTQ+ harassment, strongly predicts self-harm and suicidal thoughts and behaviors among LGBTQ+ young people. Young people may internalize these harmful ideas, leading to confusion, shame, or even mental health struggles like anxiety, depression, or suicide ideation. This false narrative not only stigmatizes LGBTQ+ young people and impacts their mental health but also creates an environment where young people may feel compelled to hide their identities or potentially seek harmful treatments unsupported by evidence. Adults, including those who run tech companies, are responsible for creating safe and positive online experiences for young people.
We already have experts working on this issue, too. For example, the American Academy of Pediatrics—our country’s leading group of children’s doctors—studies healthy social media use through its Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. Its co-directors, Dr. Megan Moreno and Dr. Jenny Radesky, specifically recommend platform policies that prevent the spread of untrustworthy and hateful content and more user control over settings, which are often buried.
At first, Meta seemed to be listening, instituting Teen Accounts with built-in features such as a sleep mode and limits on sensitive content. Even better, they planned to improve these features and include young people in the process. However, removing fact-checking on their platform undermines these efforts, increasing teens’ exposure to inaccurate, misleading, and/or harmful information. This contradiction sends a troubling message: while Meta claims to prioritize the safety and well-being of young users, it simultaneously dismantles one of the key mechanisms ensuring information integrity.
To be sure, Mark Zuckerberg framed his decision as a defense of “free expression” and a move away from “too much censorship.” On the surface, this sounds like something teens would wholeheartedly embrace. But in fact, the elimination of fact-checking, and the dismantling of safeguards for young users directly contradict what teens themselves deserve and desire. Young people, among the most active users of social media, consistently express a desire for safer online spaces. According to the Pew Research Center, the majority of teens prioritize feeling safe over being able to speak their minds freely; they also want enhanced safety features and content moderation. Both freedom of expression and enhanced safety features are crucial, but ensuring a safe and supportive online environment is essential to protecting teens’ well-being while fostering open dialogue.
When even teens call for more safeguards, adults—including those who run social media companies—have a moral obligation to respond. If Zuckerberg decides to scrap safeguards in fact-checking in favor of “Community Notes,” we must ensure that “Community Notes” strategies are evidence-based, expert-informed, youth-centered, and community-driven. According to research, social media companies must prioritize the following three approaches to ensure young people’s safety online:
Partnering with LGBTQ+ and other advocacy groups from marginalized communities to ensure that information shared is truthful, accurate, and rooted in the lived experiences of marginalized communities. For example, GLAAD recently released a report detailing harmful content on Meta’s platform, including the use of violent language toward LGBTQ+ individuals and the use of severe anti-trans slurs, among many others. This report prompted them to pen a letter with specific calls to action on addressing misinformation. The recommendations are there. Work with them.
Investing in youth-centered approaches. As an example, researchers at the MIT Media Lab launched Scratch (i.e., an online community for children that teaches them coding and computer science) in 2007. They implemented a governance strategy to moderate content proactively and reactively. Through youth-centered Community Guidelines and adult moderator s, they address hate speech and remove it immediately. Appropriately trained moderators serve as essential gatekeepers, ensuring that platforms remain spaces for healthy dialogue rather than havens for toxicity for young people.
Linking young people to evidence-based, culturally informed mental health resources at every opportunity. Young people are eager for online support (e.g., online therapy, apps, and social media) to manage their mental health, and they deserve access to accurate, safe, and affirming information—free from misinformation, exploitation, and harmful bias. Ensuring LGBTQ+ young people have access to mental health resources, especially to intervene early, is critical.
Zuckerberg framed the end of fact-checking as protecting free speech. Instead, he’s protecting hate speech and misinformation at the cost of young people’s wellbeing—the very thing Teen Accounts were meant to safeguard. If Zuckerberg is sincere about improving Meta’s products for young people, then Teen Accounts must be accountable—to the truth.
Claudia-Santi F. Fernandes, Ed.D., is an assistant clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center. She is a public voices fellow of The OpEd Project.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.