It didn’t go down when word came on Wednesday that Meta had settled with the 29 US states that had argued that the company’s Facebook and Instagram platforms harmed children. On the contrary, Meta stock went up, initially surging by 5%, before levelling out at a gain of just over 1.25%. There could be no clearer proof that the money men reckon Meta dodged a bullet.
To be sure, there was plenty to hearten those who have long believed that social media damages teenagers especially, whether by exposing them to content they shouldn’t see or by sapping their self-esteem, offering them filters that show how much prettier they would look if they had cosmetic surgery or giving them a metric of their popularity – and unpopularity – in the form of a running tally of “likes” and views. For one thing, $18bn is a lot of money. For another, Meta has agreed to a series of changes in the way young people use their platforms.
There’ll be a two-hour daily cap on use; restricted access during the night and the school day; likes will not be shown automatically and assorted safety and parental supervision measures will no longer be opt-in extras but the default standard. You can see why Lori Schott of Colorado, who believes the content her daughter encountered on Instagram played a part in her suicide aged 18, declared Wednesday to be “a good day”. But look closer and you see that, for Meta, $18bn is not exactly a bank-breaking sum.
It amounts to less than a month’s revenue. And it has 10 years to pay it out: the monthly payments could come out of petty cash. What’s more, nearly a third of that sum is contingent on Meta’s rivals YouTube and TikTok agreeing to the same restrictions.
All told, the financial penalty is less than a tenth of the $200bn the 29 states were seeking, and a tiny fraction of the $1.4tn the company told the court it feared it would have to cough up. No wonder Meta’s shareholders were doing fist bumps on Wednesday. Beyond the money, Meta will be thankful it has escaped a court ruling against it, a legal verdict on the behaviour detailed so compellingly in the California courtroom in the first week of the trial before it was abruptly halted.
Jurors heard from the former Meta safety engineer Arturo Béjar, who spoke of his own teenage daughter’s experience on Instagram – how she received unwanted sexual advances, crude misogynistic insults and photos of male genitalia on the platform – and of a survey he had conducted that found 51% of teen users had had bad or harmful experiences on Instagram within the previous seven days, and that content was taken down only 0.02% of the time. Béjar reported his findings to Mark Zuckerberg directly, but got no reply. As Béjar told me when we spoke on Thursday: “They knew that harm to kids was happening, but they were telling the world it wasn’t.” Under Wednesday’s settlement, Meta hasn’t even made an admission of liability.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
