Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children

JumpCrisscross

“Shares of Meta rose 4.4% in pre-market trading.”

julianpye

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.

asf1254

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.

kwanbix

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.

_ink_

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.

buellerbueller

Shame; the states involved has an opportunity for actual redress of harms, as opposed to just some campaign-worthy soundbyte.

hugodan

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

4ndrewl

Table stakes. Just the cost of doing business. A bit like millionaires who park illegally because "it only cost $100 to park here, and my PA will do the admin"

jbombadil

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.

ChicagoBoy11

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.

fivetenpen

Why not just ban the engagement algorithm completely. Adults are just as susceptible to addiction.

dbbk

I absolutely hate these settlement endings. The states were going to win.

alpineman

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.

paxys

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.

itsryanlenk

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.

gib444

Pocket change

datakan

Who gets the money?

stego-tech

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.

Ekaros

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.

iso1631

Isn't this just the EU wanting to tax big american businesses?