When Tammy Rodriguez stood before Meta’s shareholders earlier this year, she was not there as a plaintiff or a policy advocate. She was there as a mother. Her daughter, Selena, was 11 years old when she died by suicide on July 21, 2021 — the foreseeable result, her family’s lawsuit alleges, of Instagram’s dangerously defective design.
Tammy’s appearance came at the invitation of NorthStar Asset Management, an institutional investment firm that has been presenting a corporate governance resolution at Meta’s annual meeting every year since 2015. The resolution calls on Meta’s board to adopt a recapitalization plan so that all outstanding stock carries one vote per share — a structural change that would reduce Mark Zuckerberg’s majority voting control and make Meta’s leadership more accountable to the people who own shares in the company. NorthStar’s argument is straightforward: without equal voting rights, shareholders have no meaningful way to hold management responsible for the decisions it makes.
For Tammy Rodriguez, that accountability gap has a face. It has a name. It is Selena.
Listen to Tammy Rodriguez's Speech to Meta Shareholders
What Tammy Told Meta's Shareholders
In her remarks, Tammy described more than two years of watching her daughter lose herself to Instagram — an addiction so severe, she said, that Selena would become physically violent when her phone was taken away. Through the platform’s design, Selena was contacted by adult predators who groomed her to send sexually explicit videos. She was targeted by bullies on the same platform who encouraged her to take her own life. Before she died, someone filmed it and posted it to social media.
Tammy described the daughter she lost as a champion of the underdog, a caring friend, and someone with an unmistakable presence. Once the addiction took hold, that person disappeared. A child who had been the loudest, brightest voice in any room became withdrawn and easily upset.
Her message to shareholders was direct. Selena’s story is not unique. Across the country, thousands of families are living with consequences that Meta’s own researchers had already predicted. Internal company documents surfaced in litigation showed that Meta executives were aware their platforms were harming children. One message from Meta researchers described Instagram plainly: it’s a drug — we’re basically pushers. That message was written internally. It was never a reason to stop.
What the Litigation Has Revealed
The backdrop to Tammy’s speech is a legal landscape that has shifted significantly. In March 2026, juries in Los Angeles and New Mexico found Meta liable for making false or misleading statements while knowingly engaging in practices that exploited children’s vulnerabilities. The trial record made clear that the harm was not the result of unforeseen misuse. It was the predictable outcome of deliberate design choices made by a company that had been warned, repeatedly and in writing, about what those choices would do to young users.
These are precisely the kinds of cases the Social Media Victims Law Center was founded to bring. SMVLC’s legal approach does not focus on the content users encounter on social media. It focuses on the platforms themselves — on the algorithmic systems and design features built to maximize the time children spend scrolling. Infinite feeds, autoplay, persistent notifications, recommendation engines that push increasingly extreme content: these are not accidents. They are features. And when those features cause foreseeable harm to children, product liability law provides a path to accountability.
The same legal framework drove change in the auto industry, where litigation forced manufacturers to treat seatbelts and airbags as non-negotiable rather than optional. The same principles ultimately exposed what tobacco companies had known for decades about the dangers of their products. In both cases, companies understood the risks and chose to prioritize profit. Courts and juries ultimately decided that was not acceptable.
SMVLC founding attorney Matthew P. Bergman has described Meta’s situation in similar terms. The company’s own internal records, now part of the trial record, show the same pattern he spent decades documenting in asbestos litigation: a company that surfaced the risks internally, evaluated them, and chose not to act.
Why Tammy's Speech Matters Beyond the Boardroom
Shareholder meetings are not typically where families find justice. Tammy Rodriguez does not appear to have gone to Meta’s annual meeting expecting that. What she went to do was make sure the people with the power to demand change could not say they had never heard her daughter’s name.
NorthStar’s resolution — that all outstanding stock carry one vote per share — is a governance argument. But the force behind it is a human one. When a company’s leadership structure insulates executives from accountability, internal warning signs can be ignored without consequence. That is what Tammy described happening at Meta. Researchers raised alarms. Executives were informed. The platforms stayed the same.
The resolution has received majority support from outside shareholders every year since 2015. Because of Meta’s dual-class share structure, it has never passed.
Tammy’s presence at that meeting was a reminder that governance failures are not abstract. They have consequences that land on real families, in real homes, and they do not go away when the meeting ends.
If Your Family Has Been Affected
Selena Rodriguez’s case was filed in January 2022 by the Social Media Victims Law Center, which currently represents over 2,000 families nationwide in cases involving harm caused by social media and AI platforms. SMVLC is the only law firm in the country exclusively focused on this area of litigation. The firm works on a contingency basis, meaning there are no upfront costs and no fees unless compensation is recovered.
If your child has struggled with social media addiction, sexual exploitation, self-harm, or a mental health crisis connected to time spent on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, or another platform, you may have legal options. Time matters in these cases.
Contact the Social Media Victims Law Center at (206) 741-4862 or request a free, confidential case evaluation online.
If you or someone you know is experiencing thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day.
