From Pesticides to Social Media

Tune into all the ways commercial influence and corporate wins show up every single day, and you’ll find it tempting to fall into an apathetic pit of despair. Celebrating public and environmental health successes is vital to preserving hope and momentum in resisting harmful commercial determinants. So, this week, we’re shining a light on recent victories, both big and small, in the journey of redressing corporate harms and undue power. 

As of June 2026, around 170,000 RoundUp claims have been filed, most due to users’ development of different types of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, with Bayer being ordered to pay over $6 billion in verdicts since October 2023. On June 25, 2026, in a 7-2 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Bayer/Monsanto, the manufacturer of Glyphosate (the key ingredient in the widely used pesticide, RoundUp) that it cannot be held liable under state laws for failing to warn consumers about cancer risks. The court found that because at the federal government level the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not require the company to include cancer warnings, state laws do not apply.  While public health advocates worry that this could block thousands of ongoing lawsuits by taking away a major legal tool for holding pesticide companies accountable for their harms, the response to the ruling has been swift. On June 29, 2026, two congresspeople introduced the People Over Poison Act which would effectively reverse the decision of the Supreme Court and chip away at the pesticide industry’s legal immunity. Across the pond, last week, a coalition of organizations in the UK sent an open letter to one of the country’s biggest supermarket retailers to get paraquat out of their supply chains. Let’s see where that goes. 

It’s been a rough few months for Meta and its family of brands, like Facebook and Instagram. On February 27th, 2026, a Delaware judge ruled that insurance companies were not obligated to finance Meta’s legal defense in thousands of child harm cases because Facebook’s acts were intentional and deliberate. Then on March 24, a jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties for misleading consumers about the safety of its platform and enabling harm, including child sexual exploitation. The very next day, another jury ordered it to pay $4.8 million to a woman for negligence in designing an addictive platform that led to her mental health issues. Then just last week, a federal judge declined Meta’s bid to dismiss lawsuits against them. The 29 U.S. state attorneys general who filed the case against Meta in December 2025 claim deception in marketing and intentionally addictive design. The case cites research that links excessive usage of Facebook and Instagram by children to mental health issues, and in some cases, even self-harm. This is one to watch.