Worldwide, more than 300 million children under 18 are estimated to have experienced online child sexual exploitation and abuse over a 12-month period, according to a 2024 report by the Childlight Global Child Safety Institute, based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
In South Africa, the scale of the problem is uncertain. The best evidence comes from the 2022 Disrupting Harm report, a major international research project on the sexual exploitation and abuse of children facilitated by technology. It found that locally between 7% and 9% of internet-using children aged nine to 17 had experienced at least one form of online sexual exploitation and abuse in the previous year.
But that picture may have changed.
“We are relying on outdated statistics,” Dr Antoinette Basson of the Bureau of Market Research at the University of South Africa, told the recent International Conference on Children’s Rights in Stellenbosch.
And the nature of the risk keeps changing.
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence had put “this whole conversation in overdrive,” Dr Eileen Carter of the South African Human Rights Commission said.
“The risk has moved faster than the law,” Dr Banke Olagbegi-Oloba of the Centre for Social Justice at Stellenbosch University (SU) added. Litigation ‘Born in the USA’
Online sexual exploitation and mental-health harms linked to compulsive platform use are distinct. But both raise a common question: when should digital platforms bear legal responsibility for harms facilitated or caused by the way their products work?
In the United States (US), that accountability question is being tested in court.
In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google’s YouTube negligent in a case brought by a young woman initially identified by her initials, KGM, and later named by her lawyers as Kaley Glenn-Mills.
She said her childhood use of Instagram and YouTube became compulsive and contributed to mental-health harm. The jury awarded US$3 million in compensatory and US$3 million in punitive damages, with 70% apportioned to Meta and 30% to Google. Both companies have appealed.
Meta has said teen mental health is “profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app”, and Google that the case misunderstands YouTube, which it described as a “responsibly built streaming platform”.
Five months later, Meta agreed to a settlement – subject to court approval – worth up to US$17.1 billion with 47 US states, Washington DC and three US territories over allegations that it designed products to encourage compulsive use by young people and concealed risks.
Meta admitted no wrongdoing but undertook to introduce stronger protections for young users, including daily time limits and restrictions on overnight use and school-hour notifications. The settlement was also structured to encourage TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube to adopt similar safeguards.
Comparisons with an earlier industry reckoning quickly followed. Fortune asked whether the KGM verdict was Meta and YouTube’s “Big Tobacco moment”, and after the August settlement, the Los Angeles Times used the same description.
The analogy is not exact, but the accountability question is similar: what happens when litigation turns to what companies knew about risks associated with products alleged to have been designed to encourage habitual use?From California to Stellenbosch
US attorney Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center in that country, was in South Africa in September for the children’s rights conference.
He argued that the problem was not merely harmful content posted by users, but design features that keep young people engaged: “This is not an accident. This is not a coincidence. The platforms are designed to be addictive.”
He displayed a 2020 internal Meta exchange in which one employee wrote: “Oh my gosh yall IG [Instagram] is a drug.” A colleague replied: “Lol, I mean, all social media. We’re basically pushers.”
Bergman told the Stellenbosch audience the strategy of using litigation to hold platforms accountable for harmful design was now moving beyond the US. The next phase was to “internationalise the conflict”.
To that end, “we are actively working with lawyers currently in Great Britain, South Africa, France, the Netherlands, Australia and Italy,” he said.
There are indications that the South African leg may already be taking shape. Two local legal practices approached for this article indicated that litigation involving platform harm is being investigated or contemplated, but declined to discuss prospective cases on the record.The conference, themed “Children’s Rights in a Polycrisis”, was hosted by SU’s Faculty of Law. Acting Dean Professor Juanita Pienaar described law as “a critical tool to address the concerns that we are facing today, but also for future generations”.Could it work here?
Retired Western Cape High Court judge Patric Gamble believes South African law could accommodate a claim based on allegedly harmful platform design.
If a child becomes addicted because of the way a platform is designed and suffers a recognised injury, he asked, is there a remedy under South African law?
“The short answer is that I believe there is.”
One route would be the common law of delict, he explained. But a claimant would need convincing medical evidence of a recognised condition and a causal link to the platform.
“Expert medical evidence would be critical. Causation is extremely important.”
Another option would be the Consumer Protection Act (CPA). Its definition of “goods” includes software and code, while section 61 provides for strict liability for harm caused by unsafe goods, defects or inadequate warnings.
“Negligence need not be proved. It’s strict liability.”
But no South African court has yet applied the provision to social-media addiction, so a case using the CPA would be “breaking new ground.”
Other potentially relevant legal avenues – identified by Basson – include the Protection of Personal Information Act, the Films and Publications Act and the Cybercrimes Act, although she did not suggest that any one of these provides a ready-made cause of action.
And Gamble cautioned that South Africans should not expect American-sized payouts.
He contrasted the US$6 million (R98.5 million) awarded in the Kaley case with the damages awarded to the family of five-year-old Michael Komape, who died after falling into a pit toilet at his Limpopo school in 2014. The Supreme Court of Appeal awarded R1.4 million for emotional shock and grief across seven family members in total.SA not starting from scratch
Local litigation against digital platforms over harm to South African children is not hypothetical.In July 2025, lawyers acting for South African schoolchildren obtained a Gauteng High Court order against Meta and WhatsApp over Instagram accounts and WhatsApp channels distributing child sexual abuse material. A later agreement required the removal of 12 WhatsApp channels and 58 Instagram accounts.
It was an important accountability case, but a different kind of one: it sought to stop and trace harmful content, not damages for harm allegedly caused by product design.Beyond court cases
Basson sees litigation as part of the answer, not the answer itself.
“A stronger national approach should place clearer responsibilities on online service providers to anticipate and reduce risks before harm occurs, rather than placing most of the responsibility on children, parents and caregivers,” she said.
For Karabo Ozah, Director of the Centre for Child Law at the University of Pretoria, the wider problem is often not the absence of rights, but failure to enforce them.
“Our challenge is not to come up with new laws, but to make existing rights become a reality – in circumstances we never imagined,” she said in her keynote.
“We might have to become more aggressive.”
If Bergman’s internationalisation drive reaches a South African courtroom, it will test whether South African law has the reach – and the teeth – to hold some of the world’s most powerful companies to account.Desmond Thompson is a freelance journalist.