alt Hacker NewsMeta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
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>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 )
It's been eye-opening to watch people fall for the "social media is hurting the children" scam.
The best and largest observational studies don't show a strong correlation. Studies with an intervention are mixed/the effect isn't large. Extreme and compulsive social media use is bad, but it's almost maybe always a symptom rather than a cause.
I saw the trailer for the new Facebook movie last weekend. It's comical really; first people blamed Facebook for the 2016 election and now for their kids being depressed. It's classic scapegoating.
What makes this worse is the irony: in the name of protecting children, we're going to further reduce their freedom. And if there is single largest cause of children being depressed, I'd bet on "lack of freedom" over "social media use".
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.
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.
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.
a few weeks ago i was visiting my parents and caught a little bit of a documentary they had on.
it all became clear as day.
apparently in the 70s used car salesmen would manipulate the odometers in cars they were selling to make the cars appear to have really low mileage. they would also do other random stuff like put saw dust in the transmission to hide any kind of knocking noises.
the media started doing investigations into this which led to laws making those kind of things illegal.
they had tons of interviews with various owners of the car lot chains who were eventually found guilty of things like rolling back odometers. and every single one of them sounded sleazy and confident. every single one of these guys who were caught red handed blamed the buyers saying things like:
“it’s not my fault they bought a shit car.”
we allowed a bunch of greasy slimey used car salesmen to take over. slimey used car salesmen in quarter-zips who sound confident.
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.
Needs a 0 added, $160B feels fair. Mesothelioma was $35B in 90s money, so about 3x that today.
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.
Would be nice to be able to enable these features as an adult (stop autoplay videos and no algorithmic feed).
Also, I’m surprised by the lack of enforcement to remove infinite scrolling.
Why not just ban the engagement algorithm completely. Adults are just as susceptible to addiction.
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.
>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 company said 30% of that amount — about $5.3 billion — will be released to states only if rivals YouTube and TikTok meet two conditions: implementing similar safety features, including a one-hour daily time limit, a nighttime block and age-assurance measures; and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.
This is pretty shady. The $17B figure is much less impressive when a huge chunk of it is hinged on competitors choosing to hurt their business.
1% of their market cap. I don't think we'll see someone with a net worth of $100,000 paying only a $1000 fine for harming children.
Can they be sued again, once psychologists agree to recognize social media addiction and algorithmic addiction as conditions on the DSM 5?
Solution is not to have another app that is built on likes, nor on feeds. We have seen, even for adults the apps built to constrain the use of social media apps and devices are ineffective. Only way forward is to create opportunities for real time, conversations that are not chat based. It has also shown that people are less mean, when interacting in real time with a human as opposed to writing a short comment. Especially in US, where defaults are system are creating more walls between people, instead of creating more opportunities to interact in real time. People sit in car, from there isolated single family homes, and go to their destination mostly that way. There is no spontaneous opportunities to mingle with the neighbors, nor with new people at train stations or at town square. I built https://tosynch.com to do one thing, and one thing only : reconnect with friends and meet often. No likes, no feeds, no ads, no noisy notifications, setup and forget.
Meta’s stock gained 32billion in value just today on the news. So it’s not even noticeable for them
Squinting real hard to see a silver lining here, but when a settlement is reached, does that mean they can be tried again for the same thing? If the states can't, can individuals try their own class action suit?
There is part of me who would love to see the style of internet created by companies like Meta regulated out of existence but the logical part of my mind recognizes this could lead to things like age verification laws, online surveillance and other much worse government controls over the internet.
Meta pays smartphone makers to pre-install the Facebook app. And 3 more hidden services. Don't just remove the FB app, you need to remove all from FB because they will still continue to follow you.
So Zuckerberg avoids going away to a re-education camp?
the best remedy for abuses of big tech is to break them up, actually creating the conditions for a more free market rather one run oligopolies.
from meta's own statement: "The majority of the terms are required to remain in place for 10 years, but our Time Limit and Night Mode features will start with a five-year commitment. However, if industry peers sign on to the agreement, it will both extend this commitment to 10 years and prompt stronger default limits — reducing the Daily Limit to one hour per app and expanding Night Mode hours to 10:00 PM–7:00 AM (up from midnight–6:00 AM)."
I'm at loss for words at how shitty this paragraph reads. If anyone has any hope that Meta (and the rest) are even slightest concerned about the problem at hand (mental health of children), then they're very dim.
Meta literally goals on creating high-quality teen producers and consumers. Every single experiment, every single project is optimizing for that.
At least now its clear that behind the fancy marketing, its all "just business" for them and if they could, they'd sell the kids' soul to create "more shareholder value"
Technically does this not create a problem for their EPS because of the poor free cash flow? Current market consensus is $81B in Net Income for the year but a -$6.7B cashflow for 2026[1]. But the stock is up 1%. So, is the -$12B is priced in(somehow)?
[1](https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/META-PLATFORMS-IN...)
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.
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.
From $1.2T lawsuit, they settled for $16.6B; Meta got quite a bargain
So should information be free to everyone or do we need to protect children from things they are not developmentally able to handle yet? It seems like a lot of the people praising this decision think the same thing is evil when applied in other contexts.
Meta's statement claims $18B. Not sure where Reuters is getting $16.68B from.
https://about.fb.com/news/2026/08/agreement-with-state-attor...
am I taking crazy pills, or does Productive Pauses seem like a feature to make someone scroll more? Exhibit G from the settlement doc [1]
[1] https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/23-05...
I remember, vaguely*, a British polemicist once tilting at the eco-populist demons-du-jour by saying “it’s not carrier bags that are the problem, it’s supermarkets, and it’s not SUVs destroying the plant, it’s cars.”
In that spirit, it’s not Facebook that’s crippling children’s brains, it is phones and the apps that run on them. OLEDs, Retina, 120+Hz, infinite scroll, algorithmic content, and 10h battery life are all just as much to blame as Instagram stories.
It’s like recognizing over-fishing is a crisis which needs to be tackled and then suing McDonalds because they sell a lot of Filets-o-Fish.
If we were to do something then we could hold our leaders accountable for regulating all of this, but there’s such an enormous conflict of interest there (namely that they’d be regulating the golden goose that gives them so much tax revenue and economic investment) that I long gave up hope they’d play it by the book.
* Rod Liddell? Giles Fraser? Nick Ferrari?
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.
Ban engagement algorithms already, its been terrible for society
Honest question. Who got to decide to accept this decision on behalf of state and federal citizens? This seems performative rather than punitive and doesn’t seem to match the harm.
Meta stock price is up, so the market thinks paying only $16.7 billion is a win.
Hey meta, watch my kids for me.
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.
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.
> Meta will impose daily usage limits and restrict nighttime usage by children
Nothing is more addicting than regular intermittent rewards. They are literally not changing anything
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.
It’s ridiculous that so many issues affecting this country over the last two decades can be traced to the inability of Congress to pass laws.
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.
> pay a maximum $16.68 billion
Why "a maximum". Do can we expect that in practice it will be much less?
My concern about this isn't about the money. Frankly, no amount would actually satisfy everyone, and even an even-more-comically-large number won't materially impact Facebook (sorry, Meta).
My concerns are:
1. This is an agreed settlement w/ only Meta. This no impact on YouTube, TikTok, etc, and regulators can't point at this and say "Well Meta did it, you have to to!". This isn't a law, it's a handshake[0].
2. Will (or can) this be applicable to adults. If the implementation exists, adults should be able to opt in to it as well. Adults are also subject to addiction and social harms.
3. These restrictions feel like they're about 20 seconds away from being sidestepped by the first teenager that discovers they can make multiple instagram accounts and/or use multiple devices.
[0] This sentence sounds like Claude but I promise I wrote this myself.
who receives (or has received) actual payments ( other than the lawyers)? I think we need some service that is able to break this out
16.68 Billion over a period of ten years.
that is pocket change for the company. cut some jobs, reduce some snacks, push more ads. done.
That cases should end with prison sentences, not financial settlements.
We really need to elect people who won't settle cases like this and instead go for a verdict.
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.