Below is my column on Fox.com on the Meta settlement over social media harms. These damages often seem like monopoly money for a corporation that could wipe out the loss in the market and pass on costs to consumers. If so, Mark Zuckerberg just pulled a community chest card to collect money from every other social media player.
Here is the column:
It is not every day that a company can settle a case for over $16 billion and celebrate. However, Meta’s settlement with 29 states is a remarkably good deal for a company facing a demand of over $1.4 trillion and years of litigation. In the end, it may not even take a loss from the litigation.
The settlement ends the latest mass liability case, following similar settlements in tobacco, opiates, and other products. It will require Meta to make changes to its platform, though the company already appeared to be moving to make such changes.
The maximum payment of closer to $17 billion is tied to whether competing platforms (like TikTok and YouTube) adopt parallel protections for children. Otherwise, the company is on the hook for at least $12.1 billion over 10 years under the agreement.
The company agreed to impose daily time limits for underage users as well as “nighttime blocks” from midnight to 6 am (as well as notifications linked to school hours).
It is doubtful that these “fixes” will actually fix the problem. Social media is enormously popular with adults and children alike. It is also ubiquitous and accessible, particularly for tech-savvy kids. The burden will remain with parents regarding access to and use of social media, not the company.
Meta was looking at a long slog in the courts. Some of us were skeptical of the legal basis for some of these claims. The line between a popular and an “addictive” product is fairly subjective. It was hard to see where the line would have been drawn in this litigation. However, Meta likely would have faced similar demands for changes to its platforms through legislation even if it prevailed in litigation.
Those legal questions will now have to wait for another test case. The settlement leaves other companies in a more exposed position. This massive settlement is like a dinner gong for plaintiff’s lawyers who will now fan out in packs in pursuit of companies like dusk on the Serengeti. Companies are already facing thousands of such lawsuits.
Meta has already lost cases in California and New Mexico over consumer safety and negligence claims. The priority was to limit the potential damages rather than to make new law.
The actual damages are not as daunting as it may seem. The tobacco multistate settlement was over $206 billion, not counting separate state settlements worth tens of millions more. The opiate settlements resulted in damages of roughly $60 billion.
Even at $16 billion, for a company the size of Meta, this is like monopoly money (literally so, if you ask some critics). The value of settling the case alone can wipe out that loss through stock-market gains and other pricing changes. After the tobacco settlement, companies like Philip Morris enjoyed market gains that effectively washed out the loss. Moreover, these companies enjoyed a very inelastic market, so they internalized costs with price hikes that left smokers holding the bag.
Ironically, if social media is as addictive as claimed by litigants, the market is equally inelastic. Big media will be able to easily recoup these damages as did Big Tobacco. Much of these damages will ultimately be passed on to and borne by social media users, operating like a tax for states receiving the funds.
The platform will clearly make positive changes that will assist parents. These are straightforward changes that have long been needed. Hopefully, these states will not just take this money and run as many did with the tobacco windfall. Instead, it would be a great help if the money went to enhancing programs for child mental illness.
Social media remains one of the most transformative inventions in history, including a powerful tool for free speech and political discourse. That popularity comes at a price. It will remain part of our social fabric, as are alcohol and tobacco products despite their abuse.
Meta did not create these social costs alone. We all did. We found ourselves overwhelmed by a technology with endless applications and potential for expression. This settlement will not erase those social costs any more than the tobacco settlement erased cancer or the opiate settlement erased addiction. The ultimate child-protection regulation will remain parents monitoring and educating their own children.
Meta’s corporate slogan, “Meta, Metamates, and Me,” may capture the problem. It is often hard for people to separate themselves from their virtual selves. This is a technology that is both liberating and captivating. Ultimately, despite the progress under this agreement, no settlement will protect us from ourselves.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
The liberal CBC – Canadian Broadcasting Company – now says 9/11 was not a terrorist attack. Just a hijacking. Perhaps the planes slamming into the WTC and Pentagon was a steering error.
That is not parody. It’s real.
Can’t define woman. Can’t define terrorist. Can’t define terrorist attack. Can’t tell if men can get pregnant. Can’t say if calling for genocide of the Jews is contrary to official university policy. The modern left for ya. This is legit mental illness on a huge scale, people.
9/11 was a Mossad operation of controlled demolition after “elevator” refurbishment; building 7 was hit by nothing.
The U.S. is now completing the Mossad plan in Iran.
Yeah, riiiiiiiiiiight.
Sorry, This is nonsense. I watched the video as the planes slammed into the WTC towers.
And I told my wife that firefighters had hours at most before the buildings came down.
Steel loses strength rapidly as temperature increases.
The planes impacting the towers damaged a significant amount of the structure – increasing the load on the rest
The impact would also have damaged a substantial amount of the fire protection for the steel – which BTW does NOT permanently protect the steel, it just buys time to put the fire out.
The normal design factor of safety for steel is 1.6 – which is the only reason the towers did not collapse immediately after impact.
Regardless after the impact most of that factor of safety was used up. The fire which after burning jet fuel – under optimal conditions can burn hot enough to cause steel to lose 50% of its strength, But worse still – the jet fuel ignited the contents of the building paper, furniture, paint, etc burn even hotter.
The instant the building started to move – even a little – it was coming down – The structure of a building has very little ability to resist dynamic forces which are FAR greater than static ones – particularly Vertical movement – most steel building move under horizontal forces like wind and earthquakes. But get them moving vertically and they are coming down.
Physics and the structure of the building dictate that they are coming straight down
As to the rest – the buildings near the towers were a few hundred feet from the epicenter of a 2.3 magnitude earthquake. That might not seem like much but the force declines as the square of the distance. This force was equal to a magnitude 10 earthquake at very short distances.
Further they were hit by shrapnel.
No Mossad had nothing to do with it.
What you think Mossad arranged for 19 Saudi’s to fly five planes into multiple buildings as a cover for a controlled demolition ?
You clearly have never heard of Occams razor.
19 Saudi’s to fly five planes into multiple buildings as a cover for a controlled demolition ?
The idea that the taking down of the two main towers was merely cover for the purposeful demolition of a nearby much smaller tower is absurd on its face. But Jew haters gonna hate Jews and blame everything on Israel, so there ya go. In their twisted minds everything bad in the world was done by Mossad, including everything Epstein. In their minds, Mossad is apparently God, able to control the whole world.
The stupid part John. The FBI knew about these people learning to fly but not land and they did what?
ZIP.
Rockets Now Launch Almost Daily From U.S. Soil
Rockets are now lifting off from the United States almost every day, although most missions do not carry astronauts.
Elon Musk’s space company plans to spend $100 billion to build a new spaceport in Louisiana to launch rockets
Satellite operators are in panic mode due to a worsening launch crisis
During the last three years, an average of 270 orbital rockets have launched from Earth, a more than threefold increase from only a decade ago.
With a growing number of constellations big and small, there is a huge and growing demand signal. The Commercial Space Federation predicts demand for thousands of satellite launches annually in less than a decade. Analysys Mason forecasted that more than 37,000 satellites will need to be launched between 2023 and 2033.
Trump Wants 1,000 Rocket Launches Per Year, More Than 5 Times Today’s Rate
The louisiana spaceport alone is supposed to be able to do 30 launches a day by 2030.
And that is only SpaceX and I beleive they are all supposed to be Starship launches not Falcon 9 – which means something like 40 times the payload of Falcon 9
We are not Meta’s customers. We are Meta’s product.
More accurately, Meta’s raw material that it harvests and converts into advertising revenue. Perhaps another way to say it – the Facebook users are bait for advertising agents to spend their money.
I just had the most horrible dream that Donald Trump was the president of the United States.
Have any of you had the same dream?
I had a horrible dream that America was taken over by illegal alien invaders, past and present, who just would not go home, for obvious reasons: all of those reasons were other people’s money.
I had a dream that tedious and dirty jobs were taken over by people happy for the work. Like elves, putting shoes together while the shoemaker slept. In return millions of people were saved from terrible lives in impoverished nations, instead increasing the wealth of this country.
I had a dream that the open border gave drug traffickers and human traffickers access and control, and let in thousands of convicted rapists, murderers and gang members to rape and murder people like Laken Riley and drive down wages for blue collar workers and free ride off the honest taxpayers through welfare fraud, and then blog commenters justified all the law breaking and economic destruction by appealing to an ends justify the means argument while ignoring all the lawbreaking, death, rapes, and economic hardship that was caused.
“It’s the [parents], stupid!”
– James Carville
Here is a pretty sound (if chilling) announcement of the individual privacy implications of this settlement from Reclaim the Net:
The Meta Settlement: What It Means for Your Speech and Privacy
https://reclaimthenet.org/the-meta-settlement-what-it-means-for-speech-and-privacy
Only $12.1 billion? That’s a quarter of the Facebook Holiday Party catering bill!
There is a way to monitor a child’s internet usage but requires a degree of IT know how.
On the device itself, create a sys admin account with sys admin privileges. Create a internet black list of sites they are not to go to.
Then, do the same on the router.
But the real way to do it, dont give them these devices to them in the first place. Point out how harmful social media can be.
Good points, Upstate. The wife and I made the policy that they don’t get a phone until the day they graduate high school. That was helpful to my kids. In the meantime, the high school also “saw the light” and banned cell phones in school for the last few years, which has helped all the students improve in terms of both discipline and academic performance.
OldManFromKS,
It is not lost on me how many school districts or even mandates at state level to ban cell phones in schools, to include many blue states.
Estovir, you’re using Old Man here. Since when does Old Man have school age children?
^ Anonymous is Estovir
No. Estovir is clever. Anonymous is a dolt, an idiot, a dunce, and a moron (four different personalities, each stupider than the previous one).
My 9 year old daughter – now 30, googled “sax and pain” and got BDSM sites – not what she was looking for, and mom and dad had to explain BDSM to a 9 year old.
After that – trying to block our kids internet seemed futile.
If you raise your kids well – you should not have to be concerned about what they are doing on the internet.
If you do not instill good values – even if the internet disappeared – they are in trouble.
I personally do not beleive these lawsuits should have seen the inside of a court.
Absolutely there are negative impacts of social media, and positive ones, just as their are negative and positive impacts of rock jazz, rock music, hip hop, video games and whatever parents were blaming for the decline of our youth in prior ages.
Regardless, instill good values in your children and you have your best shot at being proud of them as adults.
Just to be clear – I do not have a problem with reasonable rules for kids.
I think school uniforms are a good idea. I think that anything at school that distracts from education should be banned.
I think parents should have rules for their kids at home. But those rules need tempered by the age of the child and the degree of responsibility they have shown.
Further we do NOT want to raise children in a bubble – we KNOW that is very bad. Kids who do not get hurt, skin their knees, …. have far more problems – both physically and emotionally than those who do not. Over protection results in fragility. What you want is your children to grow up to be “anti-fragile” adults.
You WANT your children to have opportunities to fail – as early as possible with consequnces that are real but not life altering.
You WANT your children to experience the natural consequences of their own choices – not imperious judgements from their parents.
Skin your knee – and it hurts for a while. Parents only need to apply bactine. The lesson teaches itself.
That is what we want – as much as possible
Typical commenter who has no children.
Need a degree? What a heap of nonsense.
Please do not compare your lack of skills and knowledge with anyone everyone else.
Gigi, you are mentally ill. You need help.
But oh, annony! As I have stated on the good professor’s blog more than a few times, I have children. Both are successful.
I said, “. . . requires a degree of IT know how.” Not a DEGREE in IT.
I learned it from a book.
And look how successful I am.
How is it my fault Blue state ran public education, higher-indoctrination camps in DEI failed you? The reason why you are a failure to launch.
I on the other hand, have learned from . . . books.
Even now, in college, I am finding most of what is being taught, I have learned from books. You see, when I made this decision, I went all in. I bought books before even being accepted to the college, on the subjects I would be taking. I am already ahead.
Estovir, do Upstate Farmer and Old Man both have kids? You introduced these characters as older, rural conservatives.
Get your puppets straight!
^ Anonymous is Estovir.
older, rural conservatives
Right, because Kansas has no cities at all, right doofus? Hahahahahaha, what a numskull.
Speaking about the lack skills.
Reading ano’s BS post sure proves it.
Set the devices DNS address to 1.1.1.3 and its secondary DNS to 1.0.0.3 – that will prevent access to malware and adult content.
These are Cloudflares “family friendly” DNS servers.
That is the simplest means of limiting childrens access to adult content.
It is not perfect and older children can get arround it. But you are not going to stop teens with a great deal of free time on their hands.
“On the device itself, create a sys admin account with sys admin privileges. Create a internet black list of sites they are not to go to.”
That works fine on a personal computer, or even an Android or iOS tablet connected through WIFI; not so much on a smartphone, which is what most of these kids are using.
“dont give them these devices to them in the first place.”
There is the real solution.
“”On the device itself, create a sys admin account with sys admin privileges. Create a internet black list of sites they are not to go to.”
That works fine on a personal computer, or even an Android or iOS tablet connected through WIFI; not so much on a smartphone, which is what most of these kids are using.
“dont give them these devices to them in the first place.”
There is the real solution.
You gotta love the righteous indignation on the part of “concerned” parents who facilitate and actually provide their children with the devices that furnish access to the addictive cyber “heroin” in the very cyberspace where Meta plies its trade and its wares.
Are you —-ing kidding me?
Parents, not to worry; you’re not responsible, someone else is.
There is always
META MOMMY!
“It Takes A Village”
AI Overview
Under communist regimes, children were treated largely as “children of the state,” with governments heavily involved in their daily care, education, and political loyalty to diminish the influence of traditional families.
There’s a good reason that some folks have no social media presence
When they want to speak with family or friends, they phone them
SM is not just about family and or friends. You clearly have no idea.
I find it interesting how many of the problems on the Internet trace back to it being “free”. If social media required a paid subscription, the lawsuits wouldn’t exist or would look very different. If parents don’t like what social media is doing to their kids, the obvious question would be “then why do you continue to pay for the subscription?”
“Free” is by far the most expensive thing about the Internet, and the source of most of it’s problems.
There’s a saying that, if something on the Internet is free, the product is *you*.
There is no such saying. The product is not you, the product are the ads, the user is just a placeholder.
When it’s free they’re gathering information about you and selling it to others. Your ignorance is exactly what they rely on.
Oh, but there is.
OldManFromKS is correct.
For those of us who are educated, we know how to use internet tools to prevent ads. I do not even see much of some sites ads. With my knowledge, I can see entire articles that would use ads to block me from seeing them. That is what real education can bring you.
firefox to start. Linux too. I never see ads. Not even on youtube.
You’re kidding right? Everyone has heard that line. What planet are you from annony?
Monopoly Money: Why Meta “Likes” the $16 Billion Settlement
Clever headline. Congrats to PT or whoever came up with it.
This amounts to $1.2b — $1.7b per year for ten years. Meta’s revenue for 2025 was about $200b and for 2026 is predicted to be about $243b. Annual revenue is likely to increase each year during the ten year period. So the settlement each year will be at most 0.6% — 0.85% of annual revenue, and likely will decrease each year as a percentage of revenue.
So what.
Daniel is saying it’s a tiny percentage of their revenue, but percentage of revenue is less meaningful than percentage of profits. A company may have huge revenue but still have razor-thin profit margins, in which case a multi-billion-dollar payout would be significant. I doubt that’s true of Meta, but it would’ve been informative to spell that out.
In 2025 income from operations was about $83b and net income was about $60b.
The whole thing is about social construction. Are beliefs really just social constructs? Can people be convinced, truly think and believe, men and women don’t exist?
Does early exposure to computer algorithms change the physical structure of the human brain? Of course.
“Beliefs”? Social construct? Early exposure? Just like when you gobbled thousands of hours f TV as a kid… and still do?
No, it was metered by adults.
OFF TOPIC ~ F.Y.I.
USCP Arrests Driver with Guillotine in Truckbed
The United States Capitol Police (USCP) seized a guillotine, which was spotted in the bed of a pickup truck along the 100 block of East Capitol Street.
By: United States Capitol Police ~ August 25, 2026
https://www.uscp.gov/media-center/press-releases/uscp-arrests-driver-guillotine-truckbed
D.C. – Judge releases man accused of driving guillotine to Supreme Court
‘He didn’t even threaten anyone,’ the judge said. The California man, who is charged with a misdemeanor, told police the guillotine was the ‘real deal,’ according to an arrest report.
By: Ben Conarck – The Washington Post ~ August 25, 2026
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2026/08/26/judge-releases-man-accused-driving-guillotine-supreme-court/
Moral of the story is:
Don’t be driving around with your Guillotine in your Billy Bob truck bed. Even if you’re going to the carwash to wash off the blood.
Great deal for Meta, which got to design the changes, optimized for it’s business model. Pressure on other social media companies to go along with Meta’s design, the cost of which they must amortize over much smaller user bases. Meta also used the election cycle, as state officials can campaign on their big money settlement. Money is fungible, so it will go not necessarily to improvement in kids’s health, but improvement in the poll numbers of the politicians in charge of spending it.
“GRAND FRAUD!”
Meta secured a highly favorable settlement by shaping platform changes around its own business model, creating a costly and disproportionate burden for smaller competitors. Additionally, state politicians are using the election cycle to campaign on the payout, exploiting the fungible funds to boost their poll numbers rather than guarantee improvements in children’s health.
In other words, cut the bull—-, parents should—no, must—take care of their children.
Should parents wash all fruits and vegetables before they feed them to their children?
Well duuuuhhh!
I eat apples without washing them. I live on the edge.
If you expect business to do the responsible thing, you have to first unambiguously define what that is. I see two primary issues here, that naturally break down into even more sticky issues.
1) Just what exactly are social media actions and content that are legally acceptable/unacceptable?
2) How can an online business tell the difference between a minor and an adult in a way that is legally sufficient yet doesn’t require consenting adults to sacrifice their privacy rights.
1: A business should be able to expect the law to provide an unambiguous answer to that question, yet it does not. Expecting businesses to guess the answer to that question is not fair or reasonable. Businesses exist to create profit for their owners (part of the IRS definition). Generally speaking, the more profit the better within the limits of the law and hopefully some basic level of morality. Users of social media will generally not pay for the service and anyone with the ability to reason should know that the service is paid for through advertising income – getting users to consume ad copy AND/OR provide information about the user that allow advertisers to better target their advertising. That is the ‘contract’ between the user and the business. Limiting user’s access to the service is generally not in the business’s interest, and in some cases could even be illegal. If the law intends to require the business to limit the service, it needs to specify those limitations unambiguously and in a way that is technically and practically possible for the business to implement.
2: I think the answer to this one is that it can’t. That means that some compromise needs to be made either to the requirement (telling an adult from a child) or protecting privacy rights. If you compromise on the requirement to tell adults from children, you pretty much have the current situation, and you shouldn’t fault the business for failures if a child user misrepresents themselves as an adult. On the other hand, forcing adults to provide identity before speaking quickly transforms into a first amendment quagmire as it can have a ‘chilling effect’ on what they feel comfortable saying. Having said that, I think that eventually we’re going to see some technological solution in the form of a national (or global?) digital ID that can be used to provide semi-anonymous age verification (see https://avpassociation.com/ for current state of the art). Anyone who doesn’t totally trust Government or Big-Business is likely to be unhappy with that, but if society insists on different online rules for adults and children, I can’t imagine any other solution that can provide businesses with the legal protection they need in our current litigious climate.
BTW: I haven’t mentioned parental responsibility here because I don’t think parents currently have the tools required to effectively limit their children’s access to social media. Children disobey their parents regularly and are often more technically literate than their parents. Creating the tools parents would need to effectively limit their access will require someone working out a solution to the 2nd question above first.
I’m unimpressed by the libertarian opinions saying parents can and should supervise their childrens’ media habits and consumption. It would be different if the workplace allowed adults to bring their children to work. It would be different if parents didn’t need any sleep time. It’s unrealistic that parents maintain 24/7 vigilance — that’s impossible — and that’s why we have these lawsuits demanding the tech platforms help parents with the needed supervision.
This is just the beginning of the blowback against the enormous concentration of power in these media-tech giants.
I wouldn’t mind seeing their biz plans eviscerated, and go back to thousands of smaller size media operations supported by local advertising.
The Founders warned against over-centralization of power, and here we are with corporations so enormous that the legal system finds itself barely able to establish even minimal, common-sense regulations.
“The Founders warned against over-centralization of [*government*] power . . .”
Now your statement is accurate.
Given the effects of Social Media (i.e.: Facebook, etc.) and the rise in political advertising to wit weaponizes targets with “identity politics”, Adults are susceptible to the effects of social media political-grooming (Ad campaigns) in a similar manner as Children.
Nothing Left (Except Corporate-Friendly Identity Politics)
Evan Barker’s debut book exposes the rot hollowing out the Democratic Party.
In Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, Evan Barker, a former fundraiser for the party, offers readers a behind-the-scenes look at that evolution.
By: Harrison Berger – The American Conservative ~ Aug 22, 2026
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/nothing-left-except-corporate-friendly-identity-politics/
What’s the $18 billion being used for?
Last time, Mark Z gave a $100 million to Newark NJ.
Uses include trips to Las Vegas, mink coats, BMW, kitchen & bathroom upgrades.
so ‘we’ are the injured victims, but the money goes to the states. Sounds about right.