Meta settles lawsuit, pays $17.1 billion over absurd claims

Zuck is cooked: his company has agreed to pay $17.1 billion to various states that sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, over allegations of harms to children.

Mark Zuckerberg evidently thought he was likely to lose, as the public sentiment has shifted so wildly against his company — it’s common to hear people assert as fact that it’s obvious Meta is harming children. That it’s some fact we all know, even though it’s highly disputed — and even dubious — what these so called harms are.

Make no mistake what’s happening here: The government is trying to decide for you, the parents, what level of access your children, your teenagers, are allowed to have to social media and tech, based on alleged harms that happened to someone else. I state again that the mass harms to children are entirely theoretical.

The states have taken the position that Meta’s products are designed to be addictive, so that kids will keep using them: They will keep scrolling on social media, and stay there.

But of course, the content on social media is just speech and expression, which is protected by the First Amendment. And young people have First Amendment rights too: They government can’t say, we don’t want you, a 16 year old, to read that book, because we think it’s bad for you. This has been litigated over and over again, and it’s the case that yes, young people enjoy this right too.

In order to get around this, the states argued that it’s not the content on Facebook that’s the problem, it’s the features: the recommendation algorithm, liking and sharing, photo manipulation, etc. So the states assert that those features are not protected speech, which is false, and also that they are definitely harmful, which is also false. Consider one such completely ridiculous argument, that Instagram’s filter feature, which allows you to touch up your pictures, is harming teenage girls because it makes other girls look too attractive and harms their self esteem.

What are we even doing here? Why on earth is this an issue for the state to decide?

Consider next the state’s claim that Meta knew about these harms and did nothing to warn people about them. This is patently ridiculous, as my Reason colleague Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes , because there is no persuasive evidence of harm.

She writes: “The states here argue that Meta was ‘deceptive’ by not telling people that social media would harm them. But given what we actually know, it would be deceptive for Meta to say that it would.”

That’s what this case is really about: The government wants to compel Zuckerberg to admit that his product is killing kids, when the evidence of pervasive harm is at best mixed. There’s tons of evidence, of course, that social media makes a positive difference in young people’s lives, by connecting them to their friends and to news and information — that occasional negative experiences are outweighed by positive ones.

But the government wants us to ignore all that, because busybodies in both parties long ago decided that Zuck was Public Enemy Number 1. And they are perfectly willing to erect a regime of mass censorship, based on misleading or cherry-picked statistics and nebulous applications of the word “harm,” in order to get their man .

Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily commentary.