HARRISBURG — Nearly two years into his first term as Pennsylvania’s chief law enforcement officer, a central project of Dave Sunday’s tenure is emerging: trying to rein in social media companies’ influence on children.
The Republican attorney general often stays away from hot-button political issues, but has been notably outspoken on Big Tech. It’s an issue Sunday says is personal for him as a father, and one that observers note is helping him build a political brand.
Pennsylvania, along with most other states and U.S. territories, recently won a major settlement against Meta after arguing the company designed its platforms, Facebook and Instagram, to attract, engage, and addict young users.
Sunday announced last month that the commonwealth would receive between $516 million and $729 million over the next decade as part of the $17.1 billion deal. (Meta also agreed to safety features for children, like daily use caps, limited use during school and nighttime hours, and stricter age verifications.)
Sunday inherited the Meta lawsuit from the previous administration, but under his leadership the Office of Attorney General has taken the effort further, filing two other solo lawsuits on similar grounds against TikTok and the parent company of Snapchat in separate county Courts of Common Pleas.
His office also launched a series of listening sessions at high schools across the commonwealth in the 2025-26 academic year, in which he held closed-door talks with students and administrators about the role things like social media and AI played in their lives. It released a report on these talks in May.
Sunday often frames his interest in these issues in the context of wanting to protect children like his 11-year-old son. That was the case during a September panel in New York City where he talked about the lawsuit.
“I'm definitely afraid of the world that he has to grow up in,” Sunday said. “When I was a kid, it would take a Herculean effort on some bad guy's part to come find me. They'd have to come through my house, get through my dad, who used to be a Marine, and it’d be problematic. Any time a kid plugs into the internet — any type of social media space, gaming system — they are immediately a potential target.”
Other attorneys general are also paying particular attention to Big Tech.
The September panel saw Sunday join his counterparts from California and New Hampshire — a Democrat and Republican, respectively — at a conference hosted by The Atlantic to discuss their collaboration on the Meta case and some of their other individual priorities.
“No states have the resources to handle all this by themselves. It literally does not exist,“ Sunday told attendees. “And so what we have is a coalition of the willing, in a way, of people that want to fight these battles. And we share investigators, we share information, we share legal experts.”
Tech suits are also being pursued by other Pennsylvania officials. In 2023, Pittsburgh Public Schools filed a federal lawsuit against Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Several other Western Pennsylvania districts followed. Montgomery County filed a similar federal case in August against social media companies, including Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and Google.
The lawsuits have not escaped criticism. Some First Amendment advocates have said the Meta settlement, specifically, could pose a risk to freedom of speech and the company’s right to set its own terms. And many LGBTQ advocates say the platforms have allowed users to find a sense of community and learn about their own gender identities and sexualities. That could be threatened if their access is restricted.
Sunday addressed those concerns onstage in New York, arguing the suits are a first step to act quickly, and that policymakers can later adopt changes to existing law.
“The harm that we observed through our investigations and through just anecdotally being parents and being a prosecutor, was such that something had to be done. Period,” Sunday said.
Sunday told Spotlight PA his office is in the process of forming a proposal that would change the state’s consumer protection law, a versatile statute first adopted in the late 1960s that forms the basis of his social media litigation. He’ll likely pitch those changes to the General Assembly, he said, though he declined to provide details.
“There are a few tweaks that I think would really put us in a stronger position for success,” Sunday said.
Stephen Hladik led the consumer protection bureau inside the state attorney general’s office in the 1990s and now teaches a related course at Widener University’s law school. He and other legal experts compare Sunday’s deployment of the statute against social media companies to past efforts to regulate the mortgage servicing industry, tobacco companies, and opioid manufacturers and distributors.
Hladik noted the law has been updated several times to keep pace with digital technologies, and that it may be time to do so again to specifically name some developing scam tactics, like crypto or those implementing artificial intelligence.
Sunday’s future
Often, attorneys general follow up successful lawsuits in another way: By parlaying their experience into bids for higher office.
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, for instance, built large parts of his reputation on defending Pennsylvania’s 2020 presidential results as attorney general, as well as by releasing a probe into allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic Church clergy.
Alexander Bradley worked as a communications aide for Shapiro when the Democrat was attorney general. Bradley said representing the public interest through lawsuits and building a positive political brand among voters often go hand in hand.
“It's good to do good things,” Bradley said. “I think that voters see that, and reward that.”
Hladik agreed, saying high-profile cases "inherently have political benefits" for the attorney general. However, he said each of the three officeholders he served under had the public’s interest as their main priority.
“You can't represent an individual consumer, you can't represent an individual claim,” Hladik said. “It has to be … for the benefit of the citizens of the commonwealth.”
Sunday told Spotlight PA the idea that his tenure as attorney general could build a platform to run for future office, like governor, does not cross his mind — a message he tells people “all the time.”
“I'm grateful for the opportunity to be the attorney general,” Sunday told Spotlight PA. “I far exceeded the world's expectations for my professional life, and I'm grateful for it. It means a lot to me. And what I care about is showing voters that I'm fighting for them on the things that matter.”
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