Meta settlement should be only the first of many

Who knew? A massive company knew its products were harmful to children and teens, and not only kept its products on the market, but worked to make it more addictive to build their own profits.

Welcome to social media, and a huge settlement in a case against online giant Meta.

First, the cash in the settlement: Meta will pay US$12.1 billion to settle suits by 47 U.S. states, which had argued Meta knowingly exploited teenage weaknesses. (A lot of money, until you consider that Meta’s revenues last year were US$200 billion.)

Meta is promising to limit teens’ access to social media platforms to two hours a day (unless parents allow more), block sites between midnight and 6 a.m., block notifications during school hours and stop allowing image modifications for teens, among other things.

The company is also promising to bring in age verification, halting “like” counts on teen postings, and make it harder for unwanted contact with strangers to occur.

And if other social media sites such as TikTok and YouTube chip in US$5 billion apiece, and similarly limit access to teens, Meta will pay another US$5 billion, bringing its total penalty to US$17.1 billion — and it will also roll back the daily time limit for teenagers to one hour per day.

All of that is fine, but it’s also baby steps. What’s more revealing is the detail that has come out in evidence and discovery about Meta’s actions involving teens, about the ways they knew that teens were particularly susceptible to social media’s addictive qualities, and how the company actively used it to squeeze more and more viewing and posting time from teens.

Meta staff talked in plain terms in internal communications about the way the company knew that postings caused addictive dopamine hits in users, particularly in young users, and discussed the damage being done.

The harm didn’t matter — the bottom line did.

In other words, the corporate morality of the bad old days of Big Tobacco.

There’s something about that in the settlement, too — Meta wants other social media companies to make similar pledges, so Meta doesn’t surrender any competitive advantage by settling.

Where we are now is that, after losing two other significant lawsuits about targeting teens, Meta has settled the largest suit it was facing — a multibillion-dollar tacit admission that yes, it targeted vulnerable teens, and that the targeting was not a byproduct of its operations, but a goal.

It begs a significant question: if teens in 47 U.S. states were damaged by Meta’s actions, what about teens in Canadian provinces and territories?

The same technology was weaponized against them, and the harms are similar.

Perhaps damages should be paid here, as well.

And it raises another significant issue: if Meta and its social media sites are legally responsible for the manner in which its content is delivered to customers, if it’s responsible for weaponizing that content and if it’s responsible for the harms done, why shouldn’t it be fully responsible for the posts it accepts and publishes?

Social media sites like to argue that they are just a utility, a pipeline delivering someone else’s creation to your eyes and ears and therefore should be immune to being sued for the bilge they allow to be publicly posted.

It’s a stretch for them to claim to be some sort of disinterested observer, especially if their involvement extends to manipulating how and when content is delivered.

They’re not a passive delivery service — they are certainly delivering your social media food, but they’re drugging it, too. And they know it.

The Meta lawsuit is one chicken coming home to roost. There should be many, many more.

» Winnipeg Free Press