Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.
No amount of money can fix that or punish them.
I think that sharing things can be wonderful, but monetizing that or adding Like counts to gamify it is very damaging to people. This idea that everyone should know better and take a ideological stand against some dumb app is ridiculous. Life can be hard at times, and these apps manipulated that.
>Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.
No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put an outsized emphases on such affirmation, whether it's reputation, status, belonging, approval, prestige, attractiveness, respectability, yadda yadda yadda. Consumer culture and mass media were already firmly entrenched and doing a damn good job of turning those into visible measures of personal worth in the form of wealth, possessions, beauty standards, popularity, professional success, celebrity... I could go on and on.
Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that we were already amplifying, and perhaps sped-run that amplification.
It is that amplification that is the problem. Everyone has a voice. But if one actor chooses which voices to amplify it is responsible for the results.
This episode will come to an end, only to be replaced by a more subtle - surely AI driven - form of amplification/attenuation.
still feels like they got away easy for raping children's minds
"Meta has long argued it could not have misled consumers about whether its services were addictive because "social media addiction" is not a recognized psychiatric condition."
that's a nice escape hatch, considering that they are using all the tricks in the book (from online gambling, etc) and then some
He's not going to willingly shutdown his company, the same reason a casino will not just suddenly close up shop. The owner would have to have a dramatic shift in worldview to delete the whole thing.
Maybe. I had the ... I'm not going to say "pleasure" or "displeasure", because it wasn't a particularly voluntary experience but it was an enlightening one ... of talking with a couple of newly extremely wealthy people, on a pretty deep/vulnerable level, about their worldview. Anecdotal and not that many data points, so grain of salt. These were two pretty different people in different situations.
The impression I came away with is that their rationalizations for continuing to accumulate/keep wealth were created perfunctorily, downstream of being wealthy. Some of their rationalizations were defensible ("I'll start a charitable foundation" or "I'm economically transforming the communities where my businesses operate"), some not. But I got the strong feeling that the rationalizations (even the ones that these people used on themselves, not for others) were developed in response to the baseline prior that they needed to keep/increase their wealth. The rationalizations weren't reflective of values that were present before the wealth, they were just a necessary buffer against cognitive dissonance given that the real core value in play was that they needed to keep their wealth. If they hadn't rationalized it with "I'm a job creator", it would have been something else, and it wouldn't have mattered. The narrative wasn't the point, they just needed something serving that purpose.
I was also surprised at how little deservedness came up. Very few of their rationalizations had to do with pride/entitlement a la "I am smarter/better than others therefore this wealth should go to me". They were more ... utilitarian reasons that they shouldn't stop accumulating money.
* Relatedly, the "Effective" "Altruism" bit, where you first have to gain power at all costs to then properly wield it for good. But even by that standard, you'd think he'd have enough power by now.
Lastly, not really his own mental steelman, but more of an external diagnosis:
* Increased wealth has been shown repeatedly [0] to be correlated with narcissistic symptoms. Maybe it's simply pathology.
Why would he do that? Billions of users prove him right. I wouldn't change my views either if I'm right. It's society's fault for being dumb fucks. This creep it's just exploiting that.
who is pretending this? the two scenarios below are not the same. surely you see this, right?
scenario 1: some interesting chemicals exist in a warehouse in the middle of a cornfield in iowa.
scenario 2: a person picks up some interesting chemicals from a warehouse in the middle of a cornfield in iowa, compiles some of them into highly addictive drugs, brings them to a child’s room in phoenix, pokes the kid to try them, uses well studied addictive mental games to reward kid. then, with his used car salesman quarter zip sweater and greasy talk, goes, “it was the kids choice. where were the parents? yeah, i knew it was a child’s room i climbed into. the parents didn’t hear me. where were the parents.”
not the same two situations. and just like always, too many people fall for the modern equivalent of greasy sleezeball used car salesmen in a quarter zip.
There were definitely horrible places on the internet pre Facebook that were popular among kids like Rotten and Ogrish. But there was not a trillion dollar company investing billions of dollars and hundreds of scientists on research to attract and hook kids to their platform. This is not remotely comparable.
The case isn't whether or not this happens, it's whether or not the Facebook knew the about the harms and made decisions that were negligent at best or deliberate at worst
The system rewards psychopaths like Mark. Decent people, like Tom from MySpace, cash their check when they have more than they need. Demons, like Mark, want more and more and more and more- they will go to any lengths to get it because screw everyone else, they are lessers. That’s Mark and that’s the system rewarding him. We all know Tom is way cooler.
Agreed. I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that ad-hoc legal action and regulations are just stop gap measures in a losing battle, and that any remedy needs to be more foundational. For example: mandate that every job description in any private corporation include a list of ethics responsibilities, and that employees may challenge management directives that in their view breach those responsibilities, and if management response is unsatisfactory, that employees may raise the concern to relevant authority. This will limit management/shareholder/board ability to pressure/incentivize an otherwise individually rational workforce to collectively behave like a psychopath.
The smoking gun here is that they actually hired psychologists and experts in creating addictive stuff from e.g. the gambling industry. It clearly shows that their intent was "make this as addictive as possible."
Then they ignored tons and tons of warning signs that this was having a negative effect especially on children and the elderly.
Now I think they need to hit YouTube, TikTok, and addiction-engineered loot box games. If we're establishing the precedent that addiction-engineering is bad, that's a huge win for our civilization.
Pretty much the entire mobile ecosystem is a hellscape of black hat attacks on the human central nervous system. You can do it via a web browser or a desktop too but when you do it on a phone the portability and something about the form factor and touch interface seems to supercharge it.
>when you do it on a phone the portability and something about the form factor and touch interface seems to supercharge it
I recall reading something a while back (maybe even by someone at Rovio) that the simple finger motions across the small screen that were then novel to Angry Birds and the other early mobile touch games had some unique effect on the brain that other interfaces don't. The game mechanics are similar to those in Flash/Shockwave games going back to the 90s, but they become a lot more compelling on a small touchscreen compared to a mouse.
> The smoking gun here is that they actually hired psychologists and experts in creating addictive stuff from e.g. the gambling industry. It clearly shows that their intent was "make this as addictive as possible."
The Games industry, including everyone's favorite Valve, does the same thing btw. And the result is no less disgusting.
not a recognized psychiatric condition as they employ how many psychiatrists on staff to specifically engineer this addition. i hate that the standard of evidence for these claims is impossibly high. Like you need an email from zuck himself that says "i want to mind rape young boys"... when there's mountains of evidence of them working to that exact goal... they just didnt say "mind rape young boys". The actions and results speak plainly enough. WE dont need zuck himself to confirm it.
> "America defaults to free. That's very unsettling for those that an authoritarian approach."
The least insane general position is to always ask "Free for who to do what?"
Freedom for you to try cocaine if you want? Ok, let's consider it, but let's have a serious discussion about public health and safety first because there are predictable public consequences to broader society.
Freedom for someone to put cocaine in your food without telling you? No, that's just actually a brain-dead, immoral position.
This is crazy, Meta is not solely responsible for people and kids having addiction to their phones (very similar if not identical to social media addiction).
Gambling has regulations all the companies have to abide by. Social media and content platforms have nothing like that.
They profited so thoroughly from building the addiction machine that they sought to lobby for legislation that imposed restrictions on internet usage that will actively and permanently add friction to computing and make the internet as a whole less free, just to try to avoid culpability for their actions. They knew what they were building.
> Gambling has regulations all the companies have to abide by. Social media and content platforms have nothing like that.
Ah, then I’m sure Meta will be quite happy to support legislation that requires a message to be displayed every time you open the app, upload a photo, or post a comment:
- “Social media use is shown to directly cause significant mental health distress, especially to children. Continue? Yes / Close / Configure allowed applications”
Imagine thinking parents stand a snowballs chance in hell fighting against products explicitly made to exploit their children from companies spending billions on it. It’s like 0.00001% of parents that has those skills, if that.
Imagine being so out of touch that you think parents are generally equipped with the knowledge, features, and emotional capacity to manage their child's entire exposure to the internet in a way they cannot or will not circumvent. Laughable.
Pay 25% from your 2025 profit for harming children since at least 2019 and be able to continue doing so. Sounds like a loss for society and a win for Meta.
Is anyone the slightest bit surprised? Our courts are no longer effective at bringing justice. They only have the law, and the law flagrantly favors the rich and their pet corporations.
The article outlines several changes Meta is having to implement that curbs the "and be able to continue doing so" argument a bit. That said, I wish these settlements included tobacco-esque requirements for ongoing funds to educate people. The tobacco settlement funds have been somewhat successful.
Meta has the pocketbook to appeal this to a non-jury setup where they'd be more likely to win (imo most juries are ready to agree to any penalty on social media companies for any reason)
And if people do not think Meta settled without input from the Trump administration and a possible reward for doing so, well, I got this bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, barely used.
I wonder which way Facebook's algorithms will tilt in this years mid-term elections....
I dunno, I kinda feel they have to pay the price for governments not having applicable regulations on this kinda stuff.
It's not reasonable to expect them to put up rules their competition don't have to abide by, and if the government has 0 rules regarding social media, what should they do?
They're not solely responsible for phone addiction but none of their competitors get sued the same...
>Meta will impose daily usage limits and restrict nighttime usage by children who use Facebook and Instagram, and enhance measures to prevent children from accessing age-restricted content.
Even if we assume children don't find a way around this, they will simply switch to a different social media app after their two hours are up, or switch to an app that doesn't have the two hour limit at all.
This is clearly a rule that would have to be mandated by the government, or perhaps parental controls on their devices (not sure why parenting was ruled out here apparently). Same with whatever opinions people have on an algorithm showing you content you'd enjoy, which has always been the goal of media since the concept of a magazine was created, they just didn't have the right tools available.
It also will only punish kids who actually gave their age no? That's not actually required (yet) to sign up for a social media app. I was probably 9 when I started clicking a random year for my age when signing up. Doesn't take you long to figure out you have to jump through hoops when your honest.
Really I have no idea what this case accomplished besides being a tax on a successful company.
The WSJ reports: "As part of the settlement agreement, Meta will also make sweeping changes to its services, Facebook and Instagram, including implementing a default two-hour time limit on its apps for users under 18."
The question is of course if these limits are enforced and if they are shared across other services.
There isn't some magical switch that's flipped on your 18th birthday where you suddenly be pragmatic and make rational decisions. Even into your 20s, your brain is still developing. My mother is in her 60s and addicted to facebook and tiktok. It takes significant willpower to overcome addictions for most people. The brain of an 18 year old addicted to social media is mashing the "do the feel good thing" button just the same as a 17 year old.
Only if we make sure it applies to your HN social media time. After all, we wouldn’t want you to get too used to your own freedom and autonomy. We must remind you that random people like me must consent to you doing what you want with a social media platform!
>Meta will impose daily usage limits and restrict nighttime usage by children who use Facebook and Instagram, and enhance measures to prevent children from accessing age-restricted content
So meta won.
The only thing I'm asking for is better control over my social media. Let me remove infinite scroll on Instagram and don't show me things I have explicitly followed on Facebook. And do this setting by default and a cigarette like warning pop-up when you try to enable the algorithms.
(I know you can do this with custom apps and I'm doing that but you have no clue how many non tech people beg me to share how and then cop out when they learn you have to download custom apk. Just add these functionalities as an default )
As someone who doesn't use social media please explain. Is it not possible for people to just delete the apps and stop using them? Is the addiction so strong at this point that people don't have the willpower to stop?
I think worse than social media nowadays is youtube shorts. That thing is so addictive to kids. I wish there was a way to delete shorts from youtube and have only long form videos available in the app.
I found a good solution. In the YouTube settings you can turn off your watch history. It’ll want you that your recommendations will not be as good. You can watch a YouTube short, but when you try to scroll to the next one, it’ll tell you that there is no next video because watch history is not enabled.
I find myself, including this thread, reading comments like snacking on junk instead of even opening the actual article. Dodging the long form content that might not be so easy to digest for the familiar site and short form comments isn’t a habit I’m proud of
Agreed, YouTube Shorts and similar pap (e.g., Tik Tok) seem corrosive to a developing mind...the mindless content, automatic looping, serving up one shallow video after another. It's no wonder the tech CEOs insulate their own kids from this stuff[1].
I can’t wait for the equal coal reckoning. What is it 20k direct deaths a year? 2 million early deaths? The Great Barrier Reef 100% dead after this El Niño. A deliberate cover up of the science?
In a top 10 harmful corporation list meta wouldn’t make my cut.
My pet peeves are junk food corporations. Companies like Mac Donald's or Coca Cola have been extremely damaging in terms of public health. And the level of marketing they use to feed people (especially kids) their poison is insane. I know it's pretty unpopular as it can be seen by some as an attack on US culture, but definitely more damaging than Meta in my opinion.
A few days ago I learned guerrilla dissent groups here in Colombia were using Facebook and Tiktok to target children towards joining them. $16.68B is too little for them.
Only to children? What about adults? Yes, I know we are supposed to be more responsible, but this things are made to be addicted and you don't realize until it is too late.
I raised my kids with devices. They hate social media for the most part, and participate in it begrudgingly.
All meta had to do to avoid this was run the occasional "you have been doom scrolling for 20 minutes, do you know what your kid is doing on social media" ad's and the problem would have been solved (for them). But parents would have to own their own social media addiction issues - Im reminded again of the old "I learned it by watching you" ad...
The earlier papers on the risk here date back to 2012. You can go all the way back to myspace and the Megan Meier case (2006) to know how things were going to turn out for kids, online, unattended.
Great meta pays the fine.
In 20 years this crop of kids will, as an outcome of therapy, go "no contact" with their parents, who refuse to own up to doing a bad job raising them with unfettered access to social media.
It’s interesting that you bring up wrongthink. Banning free speech would be something like out of 1984, but what we have is far more subtle and insidious. A system that shows you only what it wants you to see, while tricking you into thinking you’re seeing what you want to see.
Anyway, you can support free speech while hating this algorithm crap at the same time.
The system isn't tricking anyone, if an individual is not aware of how social media algorithms work that is due to willful ignorance (in the case of children that falls on the parents willful ignorance).
I do personally believe banning the algorithms begins to fall into the realm of free speech regulation. I can hate the algorithm crap without thinking the government should regulate the internet.
Market cap is generally the wrong measure. If you registered asf1254 Inc., and it was always just you, and it traded like Meta stocks trade, then "asf1254 Inc." would have a market cap ~6.2× whatever you're currently earning.
i.e., if you earn $100k/year, you'd be "worth" $620k, and 1% of that would be a fine of $6200.
Business as usual. The ownership class will always win. At this point I really doubt we will ever get anything that isn't either small payment relatively or something they can't weasel out of.
For context Meta had $61.8 billion revenue and $15.85 billion net income in Q2 2026. So this entire “existential threat” of teenage safety amounts to one bad quarter for the company, and they will continue on unscathed.
As long as you have enough money to throw billion dollar darts at a trillion dollar dart board you're gonna skate out cleanly every time. There's a bigger problem here and everyone knows it.
Shameful behavior. Anyone working on making these products more addictive or otherwise benefitting from their negative impact on society and politics should take a long hard look in the mirror.
The other big tech companies were able to keep their settlement amounts private, since they settled before this case went to court. I wonder how their settlements compare. I bet they were much smaller given Meta took an actual L in court, they probably had less leverage when negotiating this number.
As a school administrator, this is pretty disappointing.
I've included slides showing a graphic of someone in a slot machine next to a screenshot of Instagram, and would do an activity where the children themselves drew connections of what they saw/knew. It was not difficult, and they hit it out of the park every time.
The fact that the possible damages sought was over 200 billion, and this settlement clocks in at less than ten percent of that value plus "concessions" that really at this point are just tablestakes for them product itself to just be viable given the parent backlash against these things, is incredibly disappointing. They have cost people on the periphery of this A LOT more, and from a merely business proposition, the wanton disregard for safety in this case proved to be a smart business move. The lawsuit should have had a chilling effect on anyone trying to do anything similar lately, but that will not be the case.
If anything this will embolden others to continue to pursue strategies of “do harm and pay the fine.” It is simply a cost for these sociopaths doing business, and our government has explicitly endorsed that status quo for decades.
So if I write a book that your kid just can't stop reading it over and over again because I deliberately made it compulsively re-readable, and then your kid develops some kind of issues because my book is so interesting to him, you can sue me and win?
I don't like that idea. Personally, I value free speech more than some supposed "harms" done to children by content. Content that they can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.
It's established that exposing children to bad things causes harm. This isn't specific to technology. "Free speech" isn't a concept that applies to the exposure of harmful speech to children.
Yeah, and all you perverts stop telling Grok to produce kiddie porn, because Elon is a free speech absolutist who absolutely believes in his own free speech, and your own personal responsibility to close his kiddie porn generation app. So if somebody uses it to generate pictures of your children, you can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.
$16.6B versus $1.4T market cap (1.17%). So basically rob a bank of $100 million dollars, on your way out give $1.1 million to cops and you are free to go with the rest.
I’m beyond sick of how this country operates. This is small potatoes for Meta and stops the $1T+ lawsuit, which would have had an actual impact on these scumbags.
Time and time again it’s the same story: the Protestant worship of money and wealth at the expense of others. If it makes money then it’s a blessing from God, and thus cannot be evil.
Sorry, Americans, but your children will be mind raped with social media and pornography to grow the GDP. Don’t put up a fight: the government has their back. And an army.
You puritans are obsessed with porn. If you don’t like jerking off, then don’t! Hate yourself and leave the rest of us alone. You’re not protecting kids or anyone else with your moral panic.
Yup. Who brought circumcison into this country and why? Oh yeah, mad as hell conservatives who would literally mutilate their children all because gasp they might experience a bit of that forbidden, evil, no good, pleasure.
And after all, we are all sinners in a world of an angry god…
A measure of the market's perception of the threat to Meta from these lawsuits. The uncertainty is over now, so the price goes back up.
I'm interested in the settlement details - yes $16bn ok fine but any behavioral or structural changes? If it's just financial, nothing really changes... (EDIT: I see julianpye found some details in the WSJ, in another comment. There are some feature adjustments.)
“Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. That sum increases to $17.1 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes.
…
The settlement will effectively force Meta to make major product changes for all U.S. users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the ‘like’ button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls” [1].
So a literal slap on the wrist that doesn’t discourage or stop the actually harmful behavior.
Look, I get that certain demographics are terrified of another Arthur Andersen-esque collapse of a firm, but if we don’t punish companies to the point of possible insolvency, then we’re creating a moral hazard wherein more companies will continue engaging in harmful behavior because they know they won’t ever be held properly accountable.
If we actually harmed (or even bankrupted) Meta with a suitable fine relative to the harms inflicted, you’d see the wider social media industry (and adjacent tech companies) clean up their shit really fucking fast to avoid a similar fate.
No amount of money can fix that or punish them.
I think that sharing things can be wonderful, but monetizing that or adding Like counts to gamify it is very damaging to people. This idea that everyone should know better and take a ideological stand against some dumb app is ridiculous. Life can be hard at times, and these apps manipulated that.
No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put an outsized emphases on such affirmation, whether it's reputation, status, belonging, approval, prestige, attractiveness, respectability, yadda yadda yadda. Consumer culture and mass media were already firmly entrenched and doing a damn good job of turning those into visible measures of personal worth in the form of wealth, possessions, beauty standards, popularity, professional success, celebrity... I could go on and on.
Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that we were already amplifying, and perhaps sped-run that amplification.
This episode will come to an end, only to be replaced by a more subtle - surely AI driven - form of amplification/attenuation.
Social media is manipulation. Period.
Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malevolent actions.
"Meta has long argued it could not have misled consumers about whether its services were addictive because "social media addiction" is not a recognized psychiatric condition."
that's a nice escape hatch, considering that they are using all the tricks in the book (from online gambling, etc) and then some
I’d love for someone to get me into Mark Zuckerberg’s head on why he should keep doing what he’s doing.
Even without the government telling them, they shouldn't be damaging children.
The impression I came away with is that their rationalizations for continuing to accumulate/keep wealth were created perfunctorily, downstream of being wealthy. Some of their rationalizations were defensible ("I'll start a charitable foundation" or "I'm economically transforming the communities where my businesses operate"), some not. But I got the strong feeling that the rationalizations (even the ones that these people used on themselves, not for others) were developed in response to the baseline prior that they needed to keep/increase their wealth. The rationalizations weren't reflective of values that were present before the wealth, they were just a necessary buffer against cognitive dissonance given that the real core value in play was that they needed to keep their wealth. If they hadn't rationalized it with "I'm a job creator", it would have been something else, and it wouldn't have mattered. The narrative wasn't the point, they just needed something serving that purpose.
I was also surprised at how little deservedness came up. Very few of their rationalizations had to do with pride/entitlement a la "I am smarter/better than others therefore this wealth should go to me". They were more ... utilitarian reasons that they shouldn't stop accumulating money.
* The whole Atlas Shrugged self-deification bit
* Relatedly, the "Effective" "Altruism" bit, where you first have to gain power at all costs to then properly wield it for good. But even by that standard, you'd think he'd have enough power by now.
Lastly, not really his own mental steelman, but more of an external diagnosis:
* Increased wealth has been shown repeatedly [0] to be correlated with narcissistic symptoms. Maybe it's simply pathology.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23963971/
>Dumb fucks.
Is an attitude he never grew out of.
Why would he do that? Billions of users prove him right. I wouldn't change my views either if I'm right. It's society's fault for being dumb fucks. This creep it's just exploiting that.
Also, I’m sure Peter Thiel being one of his first major investors has something to do with it.
It is like contending with that monstrous child from the Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life".
It's good what you did to those children, Mark. And it's a good thing you paid billions in hush money, too.
scenario 1: some interesting chemicals exist in a warehouse in the middle of a cornfield in iowa.
scenario 2: a person picks up some interesting chemicals from a warehouse in the middle of a cornfield in iowa, compiles some of them into highly addictive drugs, brings them to a child’s room in phoenix, pokes the kid to try them, uses well studied addictive mental games to reward kid. then, with his used car salesman quarter zip sweater and greasy talk, goes, “it was the kids choice. where were the parents? yeah, i knew it was a child’s room i climbed into. the parents didn’t hear me. where were the parents.”
not the same two situations. and just like always, too many people fall for the modern equivalent of greasy sleezeball used car salesmen in a quarter zip.
Last I checked Facebook didn’t have Rotten content on it.
It is incredibly naive to believe so
Then they ignored tons and tons of warning signs that this was having a negative effect especially on children and the elderly.
Now I think they need to hit YouTube, TikTok, and addiction-engineered loot box games. If we're establishing the precedent that addiction-engineering is bad, that's a huge win for our civilization.
Pretty much the entire mobile ecosystem is a hellscape of black hat attacks on the human central nervous system. You can do it via a web browser or a desktop too but when you do it on a phone the portability and something about the form factor and touch interface seems to supercharge it.
I recall reading something a while back (maybe even by someone at Rovio) that the simple finger motions across the small screen that were then novel to Angry Birds and the other early mobile touch games had some unique effect on the brain that other interfaces don't. The game mechanics are similar to those in Flash/Shockwave games going back to the 90s, but they become a lot more compelling on a small touchscreen compared to a mouse.
So long as the changes produced (to their belief) increases in advertising revenue, they didn't care. More ad money was all that mattered.
The Games industry, including everyone's favorite Valve, does the same thing btw. And the result is no less disgusting.
Maybe all these state AGs knew there was a good chance of losing because the facts aren't as strong as the narrative?
The least insane general position is to always ask "Free for who to do what?"
Freedom for you to try cocaine if you want? Ok, let's consider it, but let's have a serious discussion about public health and safety first because there are predictable public consequences to broader society.
Freedom for someone to put cocaine in your food without telling you? No, that's just actually a brain-dead, immoral position.
Gambling has regulations all the companies have to abide by. Social media and content platforms have nothing like that.
Ah, then I’m sure Meta will be quite happy to support legislation that requires a message to be displayed every time you open the app, upload a photo, or post a comment:
Similar to tobacco products.They literally don’t care.
I wonder which way Facebook's algorithms will tilt in this years mid-term elections....
It's not reasonable to expect them to put up rules their competition don't have to abide by, and if the government has 0 rules regarding social media, what should they do?
They're not solely responsible for phone addiction but none of their competitors get sued the same...
Companies keep getting away with this "cost of doing business" fines, the justice department keeps failing at its duties.
The fines either need to wipe out these companies to the point the share holders hold the leadership accountable or nothing will change.
Even if we assume children don't find a way around this, they will simply switch to a different social media app after their two hours are up, or switch to an app that doesn't have the two hour limit at all.
This is clearly a rule that would have to be mandated by the government, or perhaps parental controls on their devices (not sure why parenting was ruled out here apparently). Same with whatever opinions people have on an algorithm showing you content you'd enjoy, which has always been the goal of media since the concept of a magazine was created, they just didn't have the right tools available.
It also will only punish kids who actually gave their age no? That's not actually required (yet) to sign up for a social media app. I was probably 9 when I started clicking a random year for my age when signing up. Doesn't take you long to figure out you have to jump through hoops when your honest.
Really I have no idea what this case accomplished besides being a tax on a successful company.
The question is of course if these limits are enforced and if they are shared across other services.
This should be implemented also for adults.
And non-avoidable.
So meta won.
The only thing I'm asking for is better control over my social media. Let me remove infinite scroll on Instagram and don't show me things I have explicitly followed on Facebook. And do this setting by default and a cigarette like warning pop-up when you try to enable the algorithms.
(I know you can do this with custom apps and I'm doing that but you have no clue how many non tech people beg me to share how and then cop out when they learn you have to download custom apk. Just add these functionalities as an default )
Unless we make sure in print to specify "Meta, the company found to have harmed children, …".
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...
In a top 10 harmful corporation list meta wouldn’t make my cut.
Also, I’m surprised by the lack of enforcement to remove infinite scrolling.
I raised my kids with devices. They hate social media for the most part, and participate in it begrudgingly.
All meta had to do to avoid this was run the occasional "you have been doom scrolling for 20 minutes, do you know what your kid is doing on social media" ad's and the problem would have been solved (for them). But parents would have to own their own social media addiction issues - Im reminded again of the old "I learned it by watching you" ad...
The earlier papers on the risk here date back to 2012. You can go all the way back to myspace and the Megan Meier case (2006) to know how things were going to turn out for kids, online, unattended.
Great meta pays the fine.
In 20 years this crop of kids will, as an outcome of therapy, go "no contact" with their parents, who refuse to own up to doing a bad job raising them with unfettered access to social media.
Are these not the same apps
Anyway, you can support free speech while hating this algorithm crap at the same time.
I do personally believe banning the algorithms begins to fall into the realm of free speech regulation. I can hate the algorithm crap without thinking the government should regulate the internet.
i.e., if you earn $100k/year, you'd be "worth" $620k, and 1% of that would be a fine of $6200.
Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.
I've included slides showing a graphic of someone in a slot machine next to a screenshot of Instagram, and would do an activity where the children themselves drew connections of what they saw/knew. It was not difficult, and they hit it out of the park every time.
The fact that the possible damages sought was over 200 billion, and this settlement clocks in at less than ten percent of that value plus "concessions" that really at this point are just tablestakes for them product itself to just be viable given the parent backlash against these things, is incredibly disappointing. They have cost people on the periphery of this A LOT more, and from a merely business proposition, the wanton disregard for safety in this case proved to be a smart business move. The lawsuit should have had a chilling effect on anyone trying to do anything similar lately, but that will not be the case.
I don't like that idea. Personally, I value free speech more than some supposed "harms" done to children by content. Content that they can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.
A bit like millionaires who park illegally because "it only cost $100 to park here, and my PA will do the admin"
Time and time again it’s the same story: the Protestant worship of money and wealth at the expense of others. If it makes money then it’s a blessing from God, and thus cannot be evil.
Sorry, Americans, but your children will be mind raped with social media and pornography to grow the GDP. Don’t put up a fight: the government has their back. And an army.
And after all, we are all sinners in a world of an angry god…
Fuck WASPs.
I'm interested in the settlement details - yes $16bn ok fine but any behavioral or structural changes? If it's just financial, nothing really changes... (EDIT: I see julianpye found some details in the WSJ, in another comment. There are some feature adjustments.)
“Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. That sum increases to $17.1 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes.
…
The settlement will effectively force Meta to make major product changes for all U.S. users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the ‘like’ button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls” [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/meta-settlemen...
Look, I get that certain demographics are terrified of another Arthur Andersen-esque collapse of a firm, but if we don’t punish companies to the point of possible insolvency, then we’re creating a moral hazard wherein more companies will continue engaging in harmful behavior because they know they won’t ever be held properly accountable.
If we actually harmed (or even bankrupted) Meta with a suitable fine relative to the harms inflicted, you’d see the wider social media industry (and adjacent tech companies) clean up their shit really fucking fast to avoid a similar fate.