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.)
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.
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.
> Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.
One person managing to harm children at this scale would likely get a penalty much smaller than $16 bn.
Of course even "20-life" is a penalty much smaller than $16 bn, given the average American's lifetime earnings are around the $3m level, i.e. it would take 5000 mean lifetimes to repay the actual fine in the headline.
It's nonsensical to scale down a %-of-wealth fee to one person without also considering that the offence would likely be smaller, or alternatively how difficult it would be for one person to commit the acts.
The sibling comment, talking about Schrödinger, is correct for the wrong reason.
The share price is essentially always fake, because the ticker price of any given symbol is in a superposition of all possible values until it gets traded. The bigger the trade you try to make, the bigger the shift you directly cause to the value while you're attempting to make the trade.
What % of META (shares) are owned by Meta Platforms Inc.?
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for e.g. Zuckerberg personally to be ordered to hand over all his shares as any given penalty, but as stated what you describe sounds like a way to avoid paying a penalty.
The wealth that is almost entirely bound in owning and controlling facebook, that bounces up and down a lot regardless of penalties, and that it isn't a liquid asset becase he can't sell without giving up that control…
…unless he orders the business to print more shares and give them to him, which he may be able to do at any time because of that control. See e.g. Musk and his BS trillion dollar performance carrot at Tesla where the board is suspiciously arranged in his benefit, or Musk and his BS voting control structure with SpaceX. IIRC Meta's dividends are pathetic and Musk's nonexistent.
> it isn't a liquid asset becase he can't sell without giving up that control…
And that doesn't matter. If Meta is forced to issue 10% more shares to the plaintiff the value of all shareholders' shares fall 10%. And if the plaintiff dumps all the shares on a single day, they fall even harder.
Zuckerberg's 57% control of a $1.6t company means a lot more than my 50% control of Triceratops Inc. Not because 57% > 50% but because $1.6t > undefined.
> And that doesn't matter. If Meta is forced to issue 10% more shares to the plaintiff the value of all shareholders' shares fall 10%. And if the plaintiff dumps all the shares on a single day, they fall even harder.
And why should Zuckerberg care? You can observe by looking at what he's doing that the only thing he wants to own with 99% of his wealth is Meta itself. If Meta stocks were to literally and permanently devalue by 99%, he's still a multi-billionaire and keeps his various mansions and so on, modulo whatever loans he has.
> Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits.
> To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
The recent fire-rehire scheme, the one where the firing was blamed on AI even though he got many of them back again, appears to be in aid of breaking the requirement to give out all those stock options.
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.
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.
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.
This was a settlement. The court did not get a chance to issue a ruling or do any of the things you're pretending to be angry about.
The other article says: "OAKLAND, California, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab will pay up to $18 billion over the next decade" [1]
So it's 1.8 billion per year and that's a lot less than 25%.
Exactly. Meta basically got out of this without any meaningful penalty or deterant for the future. Paid out to the 50 states, it only averages $36M a year per state. I can't believe all of the state AGs signed on for this no-op.
The pain inflicted is way worse than the cash. They now must make teens have aggressive time limits and time of day boundaries. Meta knows this means teens will leave forever to competitors and never come back as they age. That is a death sentence for them unless they can somehow convince their competitors to follow suit. I kind of hope the competitors laugh and watch Meta burn. Then each get sued to the same end individually.
Except that the settlement includes making YouTube and TikTok implement the same stuff. The settlement amount stops by a third if the states don’t make their competition make the same changes.
The US politicians class is corrupt and captured by special interests. These 17B were already as provisions on their balance sheet. They will spend four times this in the next data center....
This is when Frances Haugen joined Facebook and later leaked documents from that time. So while Facebook probably was harmful before that time, since then we have it on paper.
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
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.
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.
Why do you need to be in his head? Something that applies to many powerful billionaires is that they believe their money and power make the superior human beings, entitled to shape the world as they see fit. Without that, they're nothing.
Isn't that what most people in democracies think though? When you cast your democratic vote on a candidatr, aren't you hoping to dictate how the whole country should be run?
The only difference between someone like Zuckerberg and your average citizen is that the latter is powerless as an individual.
> Isn't that what most people in democracies think though?
They do think that, yes. But they're not dictating anything. They're giving someone a millionth of a mandate to do something, and then hope that happens.
> The only difference between someone like Zuckerberg and your average citizen is that the latter is powerless as an individual
That's quite the difference. It's exactly the only one that matters from what we can see around us every day.
People are always the hero from their own perspective. I'm certain in his mind that he's just connecting friends, family, and improving society's ability to socialize, so forth and so on. Put more cynically - the first person a good liar lies to is themselves, though I think often it doesn't even start as a lie. People just end up pursuing something and ultimately creating something entirely different, but remain unable to see that.
One of the things I'm most thankful for is growing up before social media and such became ubiquitous, and permanent. Imagine if you had things you said in your teen years, in private, following you for the rest of your life. He was 19 but, especially in modern times, that's still a lifetime away from being a mature adult.
It's one reason I'm happy to see social media disappear and, if not that, then at least age restricted. My kids will say stupid things in those years - we all do. And I don't want that to follow them as they look back on their earlier selves and invariably cringe.
Those messages were posted on some rando site that doesn't seem to exist anymore - Silicon Alley [no typo] Insider. And I think the lawsuit was mostly them just wanting some of the big Facebook cash rather than actually feeling that Zuckerberg stole anything. Facebook, especially early on, was not a particularly unique nor complex to implement idea. He just hit on some good business ideas by making it feel trendy and elite with the whole university only invite only stuff, ideas Google would go on to copy with Gmail.
In any case though I'm not here to argue that Zuckerberg is some amazing person. But the GP up in this thread wanted to know what was going on Zuckerberg's head, and most people are seemingly incapable of understanding how other's perceive the world without resorting to cartoonish child-like caricatures of villainy. I blame a failing education system that demonizes the past rather than teaching to understand how easy it is to find yourself in the shoes of the villain.
And on that note I think most people would probably end up acting similar to Zuckerberg in his shoes right now. By now he probably loathes social media and its users. But he's also probably unable to give it up simply because it makes billions of dollars, and his other ventures are mostly failures. So he's having kids, playing with politics, and generally living life, while milking his golden goose for all its worth.
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.
> 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.
Some nations have great laws that deal with lootboxes. I beleive one approach is making odds known, and another is simply placing fines on firms that use loot box mechanics.
>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.
From the casinos (Natasha Dow Schull and Addiction by Design) to Stanford and BJ Fogg's Persuasive Design Lab fast forward to AI to hyperboost the addiction and that's where we're at.
Not even grown ups have the capacity to resist the brainwashing capacity and the power asymmetry.
> It clearly shows that their intent was "make this as addictive as possible."
Isn't engagement the holy grail of any startup though? What was wrong (from a legal standpoint) about what Meta did here? I hate social media as much as the next guy just curious as to the grounds on which they were brought to justice. I have seen a couple allusions to their deliberately hiding the harmful effects of their products but have yet to see any specifics.
Again and again crime, fraud, and terrorism is legal. There will never be justice and a $1 penalty is only a threat to the poor and a means to silence victims.
The only way they’ll learn is if for other means of justice to take care of the problem.
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.
This is a settlement between Meta and 48 states. Individuals can still sue them for harm, and one notable case had them pay 4.2 million. There are hundreds of thousands of claims pending. The federal government still has the ability to sue or fine Meta as well.
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.
even if you do freedom as in freedom of speech it seems somewhat diminished.
> there was a good chance of losing
now that is a good question. When a large multi-national corp offers you ~4% of yearly turnover to fuckoff, does that sound like a company confident it would win?
there's a difference between allowing exposure to unsafe content, against systematically and deliberately doing everything their psychologist/behavior economists could do to make sure kids were addicted to the product.
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 packaging, brings them to a child’s room in phoenix, pokes the kid to try them, uses well studied addictive mental games to reward the kid. then, with his used car salesman quarter zip sweater and greasy talk, goes, “it was the kids choice. where were the parents?”
surely you recognize the two situations above are not the same.
and just like always, too many people fall for the modern equivalent of greasy sleezeball used car salesmen in a quarter zip who confidently says “it’s not my fault they bought the shit car.”
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.
Democracy was also extremely hard to imagine and considered impractical (even in the face of ancient Greek evidence) a few hundred years ago. And then it became the norm.
This requires critical analysis and secondary considerations to be present, if not well developed, in a critical percentage of the population. That population does not exist, and the entire motion of modern culture over the last 50 years has been to reduce the critical analysis and secondary considerations of the general public. This effort has been extremely successful too. We are at a point where the general public is questioning advanced educations at all. Eloi and Morlocks: here we come!
Definitely not! Texting was so small-scale, and text-only, that it was fine. Big chat groups where people are bullied (or some are not invited), and nasty images are the problems there.
This is a massive gift to FB. $17B paid is a few weeks of revenue and a single quarter’s worth of profit. But even worse, this is paid out over 10 years! A billion dollars per year to eliminate this major risk is an absolute gift from the AGs. They’re cowards who should be ashamed.
I mean downvote all you like, but you know there's a team in place already doing their damnedest to define dark UX patterns to enable them to technically meet the restrictions.
If you are on Android, you can use Revanced Manager or Morphe to patch the YouTube apk with all kinds of controls that include the ability to hide shorts and the comments section. Ad blocking works well too but using those patches requires a bit of a cat and mouse game since YouTube backend updates break things and require occasionally patching a newer apk version. You can also enable all of the client-side YouTube premium features.
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.
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.
I actually don’t think banning “the algorithm” is the right solution either, nor are the identity verification disguised as age gates. But I would like to see the US government do something. I actually think Lina Khan was doing some good things.
Not GP, but I'd define it as anything which presents or orders/prioritizes user-generated content based on preferences not explicitly specified by the consuming user. That'd be something like "default to chronological friends-and-follows-only, with an option for friends-of-friends and an option for 'most liked within a time window', and (if Facebook is feeling magnanimous to a very few power users) a preference pane which allows controlling overrides to the chronological-ness like 'show posts up to X hours out of order if they have more than Y likes'". No recommendation/you-might-also-like system, but you can make the "accounts friended/followed by" button for a user's existing friends/follows as big as you like--so long as the list presented is only sortable only by name/follower count/date-added.
My hot take is that the courts should find that doing anything beyond that is a first-party editorial behavior and thus not from liability under section 230. You can operate social media, but if your content and recommendation sort algorithms aren't explicitly controllable by and legible to (that means no "you might like"; no direct payouts for content creators to be engaging on your platform; recommendations based on dumb sorts from people you already know or dumb sorts over keyword searches only) your users, you're liable.
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.
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.
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.
On the one hand, I think destroying Meta and social media in its current form would be a net good; same with fossil fuel companies.
Though you raise an issue (“what about folks whose livelihoods depend on the harm perpetuated”) rather than reject the premise using such reasoning, which is the absolute right attitude to have. It’s easy to sit on my high horse and tut-tut folks reliant on Facebook Marketplace or Gas Station Convenience Store shifts for their livelihoods, but that’s not helping jack shit. Personally, I believe part of the punishment should be leveraging the fines or damages collected to build social support systems for genuine victims - which includes working class folks who had to choose between starving/homelessness or survival. I lack the policy expertise to make specific pitches, but we do need to keep those folks in mind as a means of learning from Arthur Andersen and Enron: punish those creating the harm, while helping those who were casualties of the collapse but not directly complicit themselves.
It’s hard. It’s complex. Some folks will fall through the gaps due to our abysmal social safety nets. That being said, those numbers are infinitely smaller than the folks harmed by social media in its current form, and thus the trade is a net good.
Using this new problem to justify not addressing the current one is the worst move we could make.
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.
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.
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 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
Nebula has many of the better creators from Youtube.
Nebula has no comments section. I find this to be a big indicator that it is built to enable creators to deliver good videos to their fans, rather than serving some other master.
Indeed, but it shows they're not "innovative" as in not willing to iterate on their platform to maximise user satisfaction. They see it as, essentially, a folder full of mkv files. Which you could also publish, but nobody would actually use it just like nobody uses Nebula. I subscribe to Nebula because I think we need to incentivise that kind of project but I don't actually use it.
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.
The Unhook extension on Firefox does a very good job of hiding various parts of YouTube (including Shorts) that you don't want to see/access.
I use the YouTube app very rarely, but out of curiosity I went to iOS YouTube app settings, and I wasn't expecting this, but apparently in Time Management you can set Short Feed limit to 0 and this hid shorts completely from my YouTube home feed and I can't scroll to the next Short when I open one.
I use brave browser on iOS which has a feature to block YouTube shorts. It’s clearly a cat and mouse as YouTube keeps changing the selector but works 95% of the time
Absolutely! I had to sign out from YouTube on mobile (I was only using YouTube via browser anyway, not the app) to reduce the time I spent watching them. After signing out the shorts are so random I lost the interest in them.
If I pay for a streaming service, I'll compare it with other paid streaming services.
Youtube is, for me, the worst streaming experience - by a significant margin. Terrible curation. Terrible recommendations. Terrible UI. No way would I pay for it.
(Oh, and if I paid, can I get it not to show me any Shorts?)
I'd be happy with it as a service where I search for a video, and get a decent result, and not see shorts.
In particular, what I don't want to see is a hundred videos where all the person does is use clips from other videos as background and just states talking points. An example is searching for "2026 Ioniq 5 Review". I'm looking for someone who test drove a car, and is reviewing it. While those exist, I get a lot of videos from people who've likely never seen the car, and are just narrating talking points from other videos. The video is spliced stuff from other videos, and the audio stream is that of the narrator.
Pure waste. This happens over, and over again for any review I search.
If I get so much crap when I'm searching, why the #$I&%(* would I pay them money?
But that's the hook of social media, isn't it? Be media, but make it look social. The most popular YouTube creators get paid millions - it's their full time job and they have a team of staff. That's no different than Netflix.
(Originally it actually was social, but by now, not for at least a decade)
Not just kids. With one of my friends, even when I'm playing a game together with them, I'll sometimes hear some audio over their headset... There was a dull moment for like 10 seconds and they're already on their phone... "Are you watching YouTube Shorts again?" "No, this time it's Reels!" Shorts, reels, clips, doohickey whatever-the-fucks it doesn't matter what they're called, I hate it.
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.
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.
This is the part all the articles are glossing over. If the settlement terms include age (identity) verification, this is a big loss for everyone's privacy. The plaintiffs will take this template and apply it to other networks like Discord and push to normalize id collection everywhere.
This isn't regulation. If it was regulation, Meta could just read the regulation and comply and they'd be in the clear. This is the judicial branch making up and enforcing regulations that don't exist based on their own personal opinions about what causes "harm". No way to know what you need to do to comply until after you're already getting sued.
> personal opinions about what causes "harm
"
Source that it was their personal opinion?
I've personally read multiple research papers, worked in the field, AND read the transcripts where people at Meta told their leadership that their choices were causing harm. For years.
Sorry, but have you read the details of the case, or am I missing something?
So if a person at your company claims you're "causing harm" in a way that's not explicitly against the law, you're still legally obligated to both agree with them and change your whole business model to accommodate that? Apparently yes, but I personally think that's pretty dumb.
What in ?
> Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.
This is researchers and internal teams finding causal evidence of harm from their products. Not just once either.
This case is one of the most significant cases of our time. None of this is based on some random person at work having an opinion.
Separately, How does it not being your full time job, save you from having to back up your opinion or your own thoughts?
I fully recognize you don't have to be an expert on my neck of the woods, so sharing info is natural.
But you are doubling down after I am giving you information. Do you think that the lawyers for meta, the courts and the plaintiffs would have gotten away with such throw away arguments?
What were they legally required to do after their research uncovered this "causal evidence" in your opinion? Shut down?
Cars get into crashes and kill people everyday, yet I don't think it would be appropriate to sue car manufacturers for this harm, solely under the grounds that they "knew about it and ignored it", even if they conducted a study finding a clear causal link between the existence of cars and roadway deaths.
In general, I think our legal system ought not to punish people or organizations for failing to do things that they have no clear legal mandate to do. This is a general claim that I don't feel I need to know all the details of the case to make, though you're certainly welcome to provide specifics if you think they would change my opinion.
There's an appreciable difference between creating a compelling work within an established medium like literature and inventing a (digital) machine that exploits psychological vulnerabilities (ie intermittent reward cravings) to keep the target engaged.
> Content that they can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.
If staying away from social media is this trivial to you I applaud your self discipline but googling 'social media addiction' suggests a very real phenomenon where people, children and adults alike, often find themselves incapable of self regulating their usage.
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.
360 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 3734 ms ] threadI'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.)
The question is of course if these limits are enforced and if they are shared across other services.
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.
The point is "Market cap is BS".
> Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.
One person managing to harm children at this scale would likely get a penalty much smaller than $16 bn.
Of course even "20-life" is a penalty much smaller than $16 bn, given the average American's lifetime earnings are around the $3m level, i.e. it would take 5000 mean lifetimes to repay the actual fine in the headline.
It's nonsensical to scale down a %-of-wealth fee to one person without also considering that the offence would likely be smaller, or alternatively how difficult it would be for one person to commit the acts.
The share price is essentially always fake, because the ticker price of any given symbol is in a superposition of all possible values until it gets traded. The bigger the trade you try to make, the bigger the shift you directly cause to the value while you're attempting to make the trade.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for e.g. Zuckerberg personally to be ordered to hand over all his shares as any given penalty, but as stated what you describe sounds like a way to avoid paying a penalty.
Diluting existing shareholders by 10% would send a much stronger message than whatever's happening now.
The shareholders already can't remove Zuckerberg, he has 57% of voting control.
And by diluting all shareholders it depresses the price in the future.
…unless he orders the business to print more shares and give them to him, which he may be able to do at any time because of that control. See e.g. Musk and his BS trillion dollar performance carrot at Tesla where the board is suspiciously arranged in his benefit, or Musk and his BS voting control structure with SpaceX. IIRC Meta's dividends are pathetic and Musk's nonexistent.
And that doesn't matter. If Meta is forced to issue 10% more shares to the plaintiff the value of all shareholders' shares fall 10%. And if the plaintiff dumps all the shares on a single day, they fall even harder.
Zuckerberg's 57% control of a $1.6t company means a lot more than my 50% control of Triceratops Inc. Not because 57% > 50% but because $1.6t > undefined.
And why should Zuckerberg care? You can observe by looking at what he's doing that the only thing he wants to own with 99% of his wealth is Meta itself. If Meta stocks were to literally and permanently devalue by 99%, he's still a multi-billionaire and keeps his various mansions and so on, modulo whatever loans he has.
> Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits.
So was Tesla until it wasn't: https://eu.delawareonline.com/story/money/business/2024/06/1...
> To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
The recent fire-rehire scheme, the one where the firing was blamed on AI even though he got many of them back again, appears to be in aid of breaking the requirement to give out all those stock options.
First, that would be communism, and second, what would the government be able to use that for?
That would be news to all of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund
> what would the government be able to use that for?
Even if the government didn't have such a fund, it could sell all the shares at once. Or slowly over time.
They literally don’t care.
This was a settlement. The court did not get a chance to issue a ruling or do any of the things you're pretending to be angry about.
So it's 1.8 billion per year and that's a lot less than 25%.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-reaches-18-billion-set...
Tiktok and YouTube are going to cannibalize Meta.
For rich people, fines are just the price of doing things
Facebook was already immensely popular a decade before that.
ftfy
Inexcusable behaviour and Meta needs to be skinned. These measures are a joke.
"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.
Also, I’m sure Peter Thiel being one of his first major investors has something to do with it.
>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.
I think the word you're looking for is "sociopath."
Isn't that what most people in democracies think though? When you cast your democratic vote on a candidatr, aren't you hoping to dictate how the whole country should be run?
The only difference between someone like Zuckerberg and your average citizen is that the latter is powerless as an individual.
They do think that, yes. But they're not dictating anything. They're giving someone a millionth of a mandate to do something, and then hope that happens.
> The only difference between someone like Zuckerberg and your average citizen is that the latter is powerless as an individual
That's quite the difference. It's exactly the only one that matters from what we can see around us every day.
If I were to guess, he's thinking he can get the good (if there is any good to be found) without the bad still using more controls/technology.
The Insta Ads: Teens can set daily watch time limits.
The reality: When the teen exceeds their set daily watch time limit, the notification includes option to skip and continue watching !!!
It's one reason I'm happy to see social media disappear and, if not that, then at least age restricted. My kids will say stupid things in those years - we all do. And I don't want that to follow them as they look back on their earlier selves and invariably cringe.
Besides, this message came out in a lawsuit Mark lost and was not a public message. He was in a lawsuit because he stole people's ideas.
The guy still has the same heart and mind he did when he wrote this. He proves it every day.
In any case though I'm not here to argue that Zuckerberg is some amazing person. But the GP up in this thread wanted to know what was going on Zuckerberg's head, and most people are seemingly incapable of understanding how other's perceive the world without resorting to cartoonish child-like caricatures of villainy. I blame a failing education system that demonizes the past rather than teaching to understand how easy it is to find yourself in the shoes of the villain.
And on that note I think most people would probably end up acting similar to Zuckerberg in his shoes right now. By now he probably loathes social media and its users. But he's also probably unable to give it up simply because it makes billions of dollars, and his other ventures are mostly failures. So he's having kids, playing with politics, and generally living life, while milking his golden goose for all its worth.
It’s that simple.
The guy just bought a castle in Ireland.
He's doing it so he can buy another castle, then continue to tell everyone how in-touch he is with the regular person.
Then they ignored tons and tons of warning signs that this was having a negative effect especially on children and the elderly.
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.
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.
Not even grown ups have the capacity to resist the brainwashing capacity and the power asymmetry.
Isn't engagement the holy grail of any startup though? What was wrong (from a legal standpoint) about what Meta did here? I hate social media as much as the next guy just curious as to the grounds on which they were brought to justice. I have seen a couple allusions to their deliberately hiding the harmful effects of their products but have yet to see any specifics.
The only way they’ll learn is if for other means of justice to take care of the problem.
Fear is the only avenue left.
Ok so if most individuals that care sue them it will become a.. $17B fine. Doesn't sound that impressive either.
Maybe all these state AGs knew there was a good chance of losing because the facts aren't as strong as the narrative?
I mean does it?
even if you do freedom as in freedom of speech it seems somewhat diminished.
> there was a good chance of losing
now that is a good question. When a large multi-national corp offers you ~4% of yearly turnover to fuckoff, does that sound like a company confident it would win?
The dishonesty of not acknowledging the existing problems with the internet, suggests we are trying to scapegoat Facebook.
Discord for example is contributing to this.
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 packaging, brings them to a child’s room in phoenix, pokes the kid to try them, uses well studied addictive mental games to reward the kid. then, with his used car salesman quarter zip sweater and greasy talk, goes, “it was the kids choice. where were the parents?”
surely you recognize the two situations above are not the same.
and just like always, too many people fall for the modern equivalent of greasy sleezeball used car salesmen in a quarter zip who confidently says “it’s not my fault they bought the shit car.”
It is incredibly naive to believe so
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.
A bit like millionaires who park illegally because "it only cost $100 to park here, and my PA will do the admin"
Also, I’m surprised by the lack of enforcement to remove infinite scrolling.
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.
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.
My hot take is that the courts should find that doing anything beyond that is a first-party editorial behavior and thus not from liability under section 230. You can operate social media, but if your content and recommendation sort algorithms aren't explicitly controllable by and legible to (that means no "you might like"; no direct payouts for content creators to be engaging on your platform; recommendations based on dumb sorts from people you already know or dumb sorts over keyword searches only) your users, you're liable.
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.
Personally idgaf about them - I feel they contribute. But I want to know what you think.
On the one hand, I think destroying Meta and social media in its current form would be a net good; same with fossil fuel companies.
Though you raise an issue (“what about folks whose livelihoods depend on the harm perpetuated”) rather than reject the premise using such reasoning, which is the absolute right attitude to have. It’s easy to sit on my high horse and tut-tut folks reliant on Facebook Marketplace or Gas Station Convenience Store shifts for their livelihoods, but that’s not helping jack shit. Personally, I believe part of the punishment should be leveraging the fines or damages collected to build social support systems for genuine victims - which includes working class folks who had to choose between starving/homelessness or survival. I lack the policy expertise to make specific pitches, but we do need to keep those folks in mind as a means of learning from Arthur Andersen and Enron: punish those creating the harm, while helping those who were casualties of the collapse but not directly complicit themselves.
It’s hard. It’s complex. Some folks will fall through the gaps due to our abysmal social safety nets. That being said, those numbers are infinitely smaller than the folks harmed by social media in its current form, and thus the trade is a net good.
Using this new problem to justify not addressing the current one is the worst move we could make.
No industry this large, will be without second and third degree effects.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...
Nebula has no comments section. I find this to be a big indicator that it is built to enable creators to deliver good videos to their fans, rather than serving some other master.
I use the YouTube app very rarely, but out of curiosity I went to iOS YouTube app settings, and I wasn't expecting this, but apparently in Time Management you can set Short Feed limit to 0 and this hid shorts completely from my YouTube home feed and I can't scroll to the next Short when I open one.
[1] I'm not fundamentally against ads, but the Youtube ad situation has gotten ridiculous. They're far worse than cable TV ads.
Youtube is, for me, the worst streaming experience - by a significant margin. Terrible curation. Terrible recommendations. Terrible UI. No way would I pay for it.
(Oh, and if I paid, can I get it not to show me any Shorts?)
I don't see YouTube as a streaming service - more as a social(ish) video sharing/Indy publishing platform.
For things like conference talks or training techniques and so on.
If I had to watch ads, I'd stop using it.
In particular, what I don't want to see is a hundred videos where all the person does is use clips from other videos as background and just states talking points. An example is searching for "2026 Ioniq 5 Review". I'm looking for someone who test drove a car, and is reviewing it. While those exist, I get a lot of videos from people who've likely never seen the car, and are just narrating talking points from other videos. The video is spliced stuff from other videos, and the audio stream is that of the narrator.
Pure waste. This happens over, and over again for any review I search.
If I get so much crap when I'm searching, why the #$I&%(* would I pay them money?
But that's the hook of social media, isn't it? Be media, but make it look social. The most popular YouTube creators get paid millions - it's their full time job and they have a team of staff. That's no different than Netflix.
(Originally it actually was social, but by now, not for at least a decade)
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.
I've personally read multiple research papers, worked in the field, AND read the transcripts where people at Meta told their leadership that their choices were causing harm. For years.
Sorry, but have you read the details of the case, or am I missing something?
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
This is researchers and internal teams finding causal evidence of harm from their products. Not just once either.
This case is one of the most significant cases of our time. None of this is based on some random person at work having an opinion.
Separately, How does it not being your full time job, save you from having to back up your opinion or your own thoughts?
I fully recognize you don't have to be an expert on my neck of the woods, so sharing info is natural.
But you are doubling down after I am giving you information. Do you think that the lawyers for meta, the courts and the plaintiffs would have gotten away with such throw away arguments?
Cars get into crashes and kill people everyday, yet I don't think it would be appropriate to sue car manufacturers for this harm, solely under the grounds that they "knew about it and ignored it", even if they conducted a study finding a clear causal link between the existence of cars and roadway deaths.
In general, I think our legal system ought not to punish people or organizations for failing to do things that they have no clear legal mandate to do. This is a general claim that I don't feel I need to know all the details of the case to make, though you're certainly welcome to provide specifics if you think they would change my opinion.
> Content that they can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.
If staying away from social media is this trivial to you I applaud your self discipline but googling 'social media addiction' suggests a very real phenomenon where people, children and adults alike, often find themselves incapable of self regulating their usage.