• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

The screens glowed with young faces — some goofy, some serene, some caught mid-laugh. The time frozen on each lock screen was the time they left this earth.

The Lost Screen Memorial, unveiled in New York City on April 24, stood as a poignant tribute to 50 children whose lives were tragically cut short because of social media harms.

As I walked among the screens, the young faces radiated life. Yet the time displayed on each screen marked the moment they took their own life. Though intended as a warm remembrance and a call to action, to me they resembled digital tombstones. Was it wrong to think that way?

I moved down the row of screens.

I stopped in front of Allison Lynette Workman, 16. A heart of gold, her father said. A smile that could light up a room. She died after taking a single pill laced with fentanyl, sold to her by a dealer who found her on Snapchat. Her dad — Jeremiah — told the story with a calm that broke me. He said no matter how closely you monitor your child, if the platforms stay unchecked, they will find a way in. “The platforms are getting richer while our children are being harmed,” he said.

I kept walking. I didn’t expect the stories to get heavier. But they did.

Sophie Moss, 13. She had a wicked sense of humor, her mother said. She loved people. But social media fed the darkness she didn’t know how to fight. After she died, they found her feed filled with suicidal content. “We want all parents to understand they can’t fully control what their children see online,” her mother wrote. “Until social media is made safer, every child is at risk.”

Becca Schmill’s screen hit like a punch to the chest. She was sexually assaulted by someone she met through social media. What followed was cyberbullying, pain, then silence. She turned to self-medication — and platforms that gave her instant access to drugs. Her mother wrote: “What’s worse is this is all by design. Mark Zuckerberg and his cohort know they are harming our kids, and they allow the harm to continue.”

And then there was Englyn Maydisyn Roberts. Fourteen, the baby of the family. She loved music, fashion, and cookouts. After she died by suicide, her parents searched her phone and found self-harm content — videos fed to her by Instagram’s algorithm. One of them showed a woman choking herself with an extension cord. The deeper she fell, her parents said, the darker it got. “We need a button,” they said, “an alert when kids get fed this kind of content. We need warning labels. We need lawmakers to do something.”

At that point, I had to stop. Earlier in the day I’d sat with Tony Roberts and we talked about Englyn. We talked about my two sons, and shared stories of being the parents of teens — and how hard it is to protect them, empower them, love them. It was hard long before social media. But now it seems parents are outmatched by algorithms.

I stood there, surrounded by 50 screens, and felt something shift. This wasn’t just a mourning, but a reckoning. These weren’t random tragedies. They were preventable deaths in a digital landscape built for profit. Profits, pain, parents — the phrase echoed in my mind.

These children weren’t failed by their parents. They were failed by the systems we’ve built. By companies that know exactly what their algorithms are doing. By lawmakers who’ve been too slow, too timid, too bought-off to act.

The Lost Screen Memorial doesn’t just grieve. It demands. And now that I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it.

Not one more child.

In the days following the memorial, I kept thinking about those 50 screens — the faces, the families, the stories. And then, like a gut punch, the headlines shifted to "Meta Reports Record Earnings."

On May 1, just a week after parents gathered to mourn their children lost to social media harm — Meta announced its first-quarter results: $42.3 billion in revenue. $16.64 billion in net income. A 35% year-over-year increase in profits.

And nearly all of it — $41.4 billion — came from advertising.

Emma Lembke, activist and senior fellow at the Sustainable Media Center, put it plainly: “Every ad dollar spent on Meta is a vote to keep the status quo — where young people are targeted, harmed, and too often ignored.”

The top brands on Meta? Procter & Gamble, Walmart,  Disney. Samsung, Home Depot. Target. These aren’t just advertisers — they’re underwriters of a system that knows it’s hurting kids. They’ve read the lawsuits. They’ve seen the leaked research. Still, they continue to spend.

That same week, outside Meta’s New York headquarters, Gen Z organizers and grieving parents gathered with a message for the company and its sponsors: The harm is real, and the era of silence is over.

Zamaan Qureshi, co-chair of Design It For Us, stood beside parents who’d buried their children and spoke for a generation: “Meta makes it painfully clear: they see us not as users to be protected, but as data points to be monetized. We’re no longer just users. We’re organizers. We are change-makers. And we are not going away.”

The question now is whether those advertisers — and we, the consumers — are ready to confront the cost of these profits.

Because the dollars that fund Facebook and Instagram don’t come from nowhere. They come from brands we shop, products we stream, clothes we wear, phones we hold. Those dollars are ours.

And that means we have power.

Imagine if Gen Z decided not to buy from brands that advertise on platforms they know hurt them. Imagine if parents asked retailers where their media budgets go. Imagine if advertisers had to answer for the content their dollars help deliver.

As Emma said: “Brands can’t claim to celebrate Gen Z while funding their pain.”

We don’t need another memorial. We need change —  before we add another glowing screen to the row.