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

I'm interested in the settlement details - yes $16bn ok fine but any behavioral or structural changes? If it's just financial, nothing really changes... (EDIT: I see julianpye found some details in the WSJ, in another comment. There are some feature adjustments.)

“Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. That sum increases to $17.1 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes.

…

The settlement will effectively force Meta to make major product changes for all U.S. users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.

Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the ‘like’ button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls” [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/meta-settlemen...

The question is of course if these limits are enforced and if they are shared across other services.

This should be implemented also for adults.

And non-avoidable.

What more are you looking for?

Social media is one of the most insidious addictions, it doesn't cost money and your physical health is largely unimpacted. The real impact is on society and the family. My Facebook addict mother could be talking to friends, reading a book, or doing anything mentally/physically/socially productive other than scrolling for hours looking at junk content and AI slop.

A parent of young children could be interacting with their kids and building lasting connections instead of scrolling through tiktok to watch the mommy bloggers interacting with their kids. Or alternatively, setting unrealistic expectations of what a good parent does for their children and basically saying anyone not doing the same is a bad parent. My parents loved me and gave me a great childhood but my working mom wasn't up at 4am making trad wife breakfasts and lunches in the kitchen. My wife likes watching that stuff. I always point out how fancy of a kitchen the trad wife has and that she can afford to spend hours a day baking and cooking because she is wealthy, doesn't need to work a 9-5, and likely has a nanny to take care of the kids while she's filming and editing daily content. These aren't baking recipes being shared, this is content implying that to be a good mother you need to only shop at Whole Foods and bust your ass in the kitchen for hours on end.

A young adult is consuming vast amounts of unrealistic body imagery (whether it's "fitness" influencers or porn) and harming themselves to achieve the same. Sure, a fat and ugly person doesn't attract the same views as fit and pretty person but it turns a dark corner when the algorithm starts pushing ED content.

Grandpa is addicted to false or misleading political feeds to the point where he's near militant in his support for someone that's more interested in leveraging identity politics for power and money than actually helping improving the life of someone like grandpa. I'm still convinced that the vast amount of radical/alarmist traditional and social media my grandfather was fed manifested into depression and contributed to his suicide.

I don't think there needs to be strong limits on the content itself. Maybe some restriction on outright lies if it's not presented as entertainment or fiction. But what needs to happen is some sort of rollback on how good these feed algorithms are. It's not really healthy and no one except the social media companies are truly benefiting at the end of the day.

> You think the state should restrict what adults do on their phones?

The state already does that.

Initially read this as "can't install apps which facilitate privacy."

And that was before I got to your next sentence . . .

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, and also as an independent consideration 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.

The wealth you're talking about is almost entirely bound in owning and controlling facebook, bounces up and down a lot regardless of penalties, and it isn't a liquid asset becase he can't sell without giving up that control…

Except worse than that, because he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting 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, so you're proposing an even smaller slap on the wrist than the penalty you deride.

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.

> he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting control

Unlikely. Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits. And again the stock price falls, so does Zuckerberg's net worth and also the RSU grants of all his employees. To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.

You either don't understand finance or are being deliberately obtuse.

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.

I know a lot of my peers went to college for free with the Millennium Scholarship.

But so many young people vape now that it's becoming cool to smoke analog cigarettes. I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago. Many people that age now do.

I don't really get the point when there are many ways of getting nicotine without the smoke.

In fact, only about half of smokers die prematurely from their smoking.

I mean, I’m not saying start smoking, but also let’s at least have accurate facts.

"The lifetime risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is about 10-20%".

Yup. That's probably true. It is also incredibly misleading, because that isn't the only cancer you are at risk from. So... I wouldn't call what you just said, an accurate fact.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.33685

That’s not true, and is why I focused on lung cancer. Don’t forget that smokers don’t just die of cancer, so even if we take your source, we still don’t have the proper picture.

That’s why I also added the point that about half of smokers die prematurely due to their smoking, because I was not planning to exhaustively list every possible cause of death which could be caused by smoking.

Pipe and cigar smokers are much less likely to smoke a pack's worth of tobacco a day. You also don't inhale them into your lungs, you hold the smoke in your mouth.

Smoking cigarettes is less about getting nicotine and more about having something to do when you are stressed etc.

So really it is just about getting nicotine, but over time the ritual around the addiction adds to the addiction.

It probably can't be eliminated completely, but if they slowly make it illegal for young people to start the habit it can be reduced

So vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters.

Propylene glycol covers the alvoelae and over time (~15-20 years) blocks uptake of oxygen, causing respiratory failure and a slow, painful death.

Vegetable glycerine coats the lungs and over time (~10-25 years) blocks fluid from draining out of the lungs, causing congestive heart failure/pulmonary edema. Which ends up causing one to drown in their own bodily fluids and a slow, painful death.

If you disagree, please cite any long term studies that disprove the above. Thanks!

Also proof that people did die from respiratory failure due to propylene glycol inhaling?

You shouldn't ask for disprove studies if you don't provide proof studies.

My point was that we don't know what the long-term effects of vaping are. Because there hasn't been time for the longitudinal studies that will tell us what those effects are.

I requested studies refuting those claims because I know they don't exist. I also know that studies confirming such claims don't exist either.

Making the statement that "...vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters" is disingenuous because we have no idea what long-term (note that qualification) effects vaping does or does not have.

It might be that vaping increases human lifespan by 80%. Or it might be that vaping decreases lifespan by 25%. Or it might be that vaping either causes or prevents dementia. We just don't know. It may be that none of those things apply. Who knows? Not me. And not you or anyone else. Yet.

Because vaping hasn't been widely used for long enough to make claims about its long-term effects.

My claims are just as valid as yours ("...vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters").

That was my point. My apologies for expecting you to make the conceptual leap and understand the above by making similarly unsupported claims as the one you made. I guess that wasn't the best way to do so. I'll try to do better in the future.

I hope I've cleared up your confusion.

It's funny to see someone invent a narrative then have a conversation with himself while trying to gaslight another person that they invented the narrative.

Does it increase the risk of Alzheimers? Does it riddle your brain with cancer at a later stage?

We don't know.

We do know that it is short-term less harmful, than something where most of the concerns are long-term.

We already know there are unexpected side-effects. Like kids starting to go blind, when they start young.

I didn't use Alzheimer's as a random example above. There is a known correlation.

So... Maybe it isn't combusting plant material. But it is probably causing brain damage in some form or another - and that is precisely the kind of symptom that requires a longitudinal study to understand the impact!

I saw way more smoking 10-20 years ago. All have quit now.

I see a good amount vape but rarely see cigarettes these days