08/27/2026
Those who know me, know that my previous background is in Social Work and mental health working with teens and adolecents... so this hit home to me while writing.
So yesterday was a MONUMENTAL day in the mental health of our children. ***THIS IS A MUST READ*** something that I have spent the past 24 hours working on to professionally address the outcome of what really happened to the META lawsuit that we have heard about regarding the mental health our our precious loved ones.
If you've been following the lawsuit against Facebook and Instagram over how addictive these platforms are for kids, yesterday was a big day. Let me walk through what actually happened, because I've been following this closely and a lot of what's floating around out there isn't quite right.
Quick background. For years now, families have been coming forward about kids who got pulled into these platforms in a way they couldn't get out of. Some of those families lost their children. Attorneys general started building cases, and eventually it turned into a trial in federal court in Oakland.
That trial started earlier this month. It was supposed to run into October. It didn't make it through the second week.
Meta ended up settling. The number you'll see in most headlines is around $18 billion, paid out over ten years, and attorneys general from all 50 states plus DC are part of it.
Now here's where I want to slow down, because the money is the part everyone repeats and honestly it's the least interesting piece of this.
Meta pulls in somewhere around $200 billion a year in revenue. So $12.7 billion guaranteed, spread over a decade? That's not a punishment to them. That's a speed bump you took at 25 in a 15 zone. LOL You wince, you turn the radio down for a couple minutes, you listen for a weird noise, and then you keep driving hoping nothing bad happened! hahah I think we've all done that. If you judge this settlement by the check, Meta got out cheap.
But that's not what the states were actually after.
Think about why a company with basically unlimited lawyers would fold nine days into a trial they'd spent years getting ready for. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, had already testified. Zuckerberg was expected to be next. Arturo Bejar, the former Meta engineer who tried to warn leadership about what their own internal research was showing, was part of the states' case. Every day that trial kept going, more of that record was getting read out loud in public. And at the end of it, a jury of regular people was going to decide what all of this was worth.
That's the part I keep coming back to. Meta didn't settle because they wanted to. They settled because the other option was letting twelve strangers put a number on what they did to a generation of kids. The states were suing them for 1.4 TRILLION! One might say: "well how'd they come up with that number?!" Well simple, Metas Market Cap of all its shares publicly traded amounts to 1.4T so essentially, the states were putting the price tag of the entire company on the line for the jury to chose the amount.
So what did the states take instead of chasing the biggest possible dollar figure? This is the good part.
Under this agreement, if you're under 18, your account gets a default two hour daily limit across Facebook and Instagram combined. There's a blackout from midnight to 6 a.m. Notifications get muted during school hours, 8 to 3 on school days. Like counts are hidden by default. Those filters that reshape a kid's face are restricted. There's an option for a feed that isn't algorithm driven, autoplay can be shut off, and they're on the hook for getting better at catching kids who lie about their age.
Parents can loosen any of it, which is how it should be. Nobody's taking the decision away from families. The whole point is what happens when nobody makes a decision at all. For the first time the default setting is built around the kid instead of around engagement.
And then there's the piece almost nobody is talking about, which I think is the smartest thing the Attorney General's did.
About $5 billion of that settlement is contingent. Meta only pays the full amount if TikTok and YouTube put similar protections in place and put up similar money. Read that again. The states didn't just win against one company. They gave the biggest player in the industry a financial reason to drag its own competitors to the table. Meta's chief legal officer basically said it out loud, that teens move across dozens of apps so the fix has to be industry wide. That's a company that just got handed a reason to push for the exact rules it spent ten years fighting.
Now, I'm not going to oversell this.
It's a settlement, not a law. Settlements get fought over at the edges for years, and these companies are going to comply as narrowly and creatively as they can get away with. Anybody telling you childhood got fixed yesterday is selling you something.
But something real did change. For ten years the argument was whether these products were built to be hard for a developing brain to put down. That argument is over. And it's not over because Meta admitted it. It's over because Meta wouldn't let a jury hear the evidence.
The rest of it is on us. The defaults finally moved in our direction, but a default only helps a kid whose parents leave it alone. No court order is walking into your living room at 11 at night. That was always going to be our job.
The difference now is we're not doing it by ourselves.
***Side note, lets see how long it takes before I get a notification from meta as to why this whole thing got deleted and taken down 🤣😅 LOL ***
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