In a recent post, I discussed the book An Ugly Truth that looked at how Facebook/Meta valued engagement on the site as the most important goal because its profits depended upon having more and more users and having them spend more more and more time on the site. Racist, misogynistic, homophobic and other hateful posts had the effect of creating more engagement and so the company was reluctant to crack down on on them, doing so only when their was a massive public outcry.

Now Facebook/Meta has settled a lawsuit brought by various states alleging that, among other things, the company was cavalier with the harm done to young children.

Last Wednesday, Meta reached a settlement with the attorneys general of forty-seven states, who had sued it for illegally manipulating the attention of children. The settlement will cost the company, which didn’t acknowledge wrongdoing, up to seventeen billion dollars, a striking figure. Even more striking is a detail reported by the Wall Street Journal: during the second quarter of 2026 alone, Meta spent more than two billion dollars on its legal defense.

All these companies like Facebook and X/Twitter have long argued that they not publishers responsible for the content on the site (like magazines are) but instead are merely passive platforms (like internet carriers) where others post material and thus are not responsible for what others say. They were protected by the Communications Decency Act that sought to give them protection in the early days of the internet. But this lawsuit found a way to get around that exemption, by arguing that by tweaking their algorithms to increase the addictive quality of the site, the company was indeed more than a passive platform but were influencing content.

The trial, held in Oakland, hinged on an argument that, even if social-media providers cannot be held responsible for the content that their users post—a protection established in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—they should be liable for the algorithms that shape what users see. Before the settlement, the plaintiffs had made a strong case. The states presented evidence that senior executives at Meta, intent on maximizing their company’s growth, had repeatedly set aside concerns about what its products were doing to its youngest users. A former Meta engineer testified that he had e-mailed Zuckerberg data showing that the chance of a teen encountering violent or graphic content was between a hundred and four hundred times higher than what the company acknowledged publicly.

Beyond the financial penalty, Meta agreed to make measures that could, if spread through the industry, meaningfully change the experience of social media: Facebook and Instagram will remove the “like” count on posts, do more to verify that their users are at least thirteen years old, limit the service to two hours a day for teen-agers, and restrict service entirely for those users during nighttime hours. There were signs, too, that the public pressure on Meta may yet continue. Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, stayed away from the lawsuit, arguing that it did not go far enough. After the settlement was announced, he released a statement saying, “We’ll see them at trial.”

Limiting the amount of time young people can spend on the site is a good step forward. So is removing the ‘like’ count on posts. That button was very popular and was seen as a good way to increase engagement. But for many users, the number of likes they got was seen as a measure of their popularity and striving to increase the number likes led to people obsessively concerned about it and posting things they should not have. Especially among young people, if a post did not get a lot of likes they would become dejected, even depressed. Conversely, their followers would feel pressured to hit the like button just to please the poster.

Will these steps work to reduce the damage that Facebook/Meta does? The company is notorious for appearing to want to limit damage but then finding ways to evade responsibility in its efforts to increase the engagement of its users. Facebook/Meta’s business model and its stock prices are very sensitive to these user metrics and if as a result of these measures those take a dive and cause stock prices to drop too, Facebook/Meta could well try to find other ways to raise them.