By NYA Staff
Meta Settles
Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle claims brought by most U.S. states and other jurisdictions. The states accused Meta of deliberately designing its platforms to be addictive, misleading the public about risks to young users, and collecting personal information from children without proper parental consent.
The settlement will prevent more embarrassing information from being revealed showing how Zuckerberg and his team purposely prioritized engagement over safety. All evidence to date has revealed how Zuckerberg showed no concern for the damage his products were causing.
The most significant part of the settlement is what Meta must change. For the next decade, teenagers will generally face a two-hour daily limit on Facebook and Instagram and an overnight block from midnight to 6 a.m., unless parents override the restrictions. Meta also agreed to strengthen age verification, restrict access to age-inappropriate content, turn off push notifications during school hours and hide likes and reactions from teens by default.
Meta will guarantee roughly $12.7 billion in payments over 10 years, with as much as another $5 billion dependent on competing platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat adopting comparable protections.
In short: Meta isn’t being forced to abandon Facebook or Instagram, personalized recommendations or targeted advertising. But it is being forced to acknowledge, through billions of dollars and major product changes, that the way it designed its platforms for young users has become a serious public-policy issue.
Note that NYA never liked how Facebook operated once we discovered how they were taking personal data from our address books and adding trackers to follow us from site to site. When most sites offered Facebook to sign onto their sites, we revamped NYA sign-ins to eliminate it. All of this was done to
facilitate the growth of their products that have caused so much harm. As evil as they were then, what’s being revealed in these trials is that they were much worse than anyone imagined.
Many of us grew up when smoking was cool, until it wasn’t. Despite an increasing number of medical reports connecting smoking with cancer, Big Tobacco insisted that cigarettes were safe. Tobacco companies put hundreds of million dollars into advertising schemes, lobbying, and misinformation, claiming that the evidence wasn’t strong enough to justify changing the way it did business. The companies knew far more than they admitted, fought regulation at every turn, and made billions while generations of Americans continued to die of lung and throat cancer.
Now Big Tech is having its own Big Tobacco moment. And no company is more clearly at the center of it than Meta, the company Mark Zuckerberg built around Facebook and later Instagram and WhatsApp.
It’s not about whether social media is good or bad. It’s whether companies can deliberately design products to maximize engagement, knowing that their design choices are harming users, particularly children and teenagers, and then claim that the consequences aren’t their responsibility.
For years Facebook has managed to elude responsibility, just like Big Tobacco. Despite whistleblowers – including former employees – disclosing how the company ignored research showing the harm and even the deaths their products were causing, Facebook dd nothing.
But at long last that is changing. Meta is facing a landmark case brought by attorneys general from 29 states. Prosecutors allege that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to be addictive to young people, that Meta misled the public about safety, and the company failed to adequately protect minors.
Early testimony has been damning. Former Meta engineering director Arturo Béjar testified this week that Zuckerberg and other senior executives were repeatedly warned about problems affecting young users. Béjar said the company’s culture put growth and engagement ahead of child safety and that some safety measures were ineffective because they interfered with what the company valued: time spent on the platform, engagement, and growth. And purposefully Meta never created reasonable safeguards that prevented the delivery of dangerous and harmful content to minors.
At long last Meta is facing the consequences. A New Mexico jury found the company liable for children’s safety. In California, a jury also found Meta and Google liable in a landmark case involving social-media addiction, with a $6 million award (equal to the profit they make in about 40 minutes).
But now the fines could become much, much larger. Meta has said the states’ potential penalties in the current case could reach $1.4 trillion. Let’s hope the penalties are that high and this time it will be different. Facebook deserves to suffer the same fate as Big Tobacco.