Zuckerberg Bought Impunity

Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion during the second week of a federal trial, ending a case that had brought the company’s treatment of minors under intense scrutiny. The settlement also prevented Mark Zuckerberg from appearing under oath and removed the immediate risk of a verdict that could have exposed the company to a penalty of up to $1 trillion.

The lawsuit, filed jointly by attorneys general from 47 US states, accused Meta of designing Facebook and Instagram algorithms to encourage dependency and damage children’s mental health. The allegations went beyond a software mistake. Prosecutors said the company’s own data scientists had identified harmful effects from Instagram on teenagers as early as 2021.

Former employees and engineers gave forceful testimony at the start of the trial. They described a corporate culture that was reluctant to put child protection first. Instagram was accused of worsening body-image disorders, anxiety, depression and suicidal behavior among adolescents.

Meta offered what it described as a package of self-regulatory commitments for users under 18. The measures include a default two-hour daily limit, overnight access blocked from midnight to 6 a.m. unless parents change the setting, and limits on notifications during nighttime and school hours. The company also said it would remove public like counts, prohibit cosmetic-surgery filters, offer a chronological feed and submit to independent audits with access to company data.

The settlement’s critics, including the article’s framing, view those measures as a substitute for corporate responsibility rather than an admission of wrongdoing. It argues that Meta had an incentive to settle before a jury could affect its value on Wall Street and potentially weaken the technology industry’s legal protections. The company’s focus on “Time Spent,” or how long users remain on its services, is presented as a reason to doubt that it will voluntarily dismantle the business metric.