Stephen McDermott
HOW WOULD YOU spend €15.4 billion?
You could build about seven National Children’s Hospitals, one-and-a-half Metrolinks or – if you wanted to burn through it really quickly – run the entire Irish State for six weeks.
If you’re Meta, you could use it for something less tangible but no less valuable: peace of mind with a sprinkle of reputation laundering.
The company committed this week to paying up to that amount to settle claims brought by nearly every US state, in a figure that is higher than the GDP of each of the world’s 70 smallest economies.
It’s an astonishing figure by any reckoning, but for a company the size of Meta, it looks as much like an investment as a cost to absorb.
Before the trial was brought to an end this week, the company was facing allegations that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to get young users addicted, that Meta misled the public about the risks, and that it unlawfully collected data from children under 13.
For a maximum $18 billion price tag – to be paid over 10 years – and a pledge to place certain restrictions on how teenagers use its platforms, Meta has secured an exculpatory agreement to work on a problem without admitting that anything was broken.
Mark Zuckerberg will not be forced to testify, as had been expected. And the cost to Meta is substantially less than the $200 billion in civil penalties that states had indicated they could seek.
The new safeguards for teenagers include blocks that will lock them out of Facebook and Instagram between midnight and 6am.
If you’ve ever opened Instagram for two minutes and looked up half an hour later, you’ll understand why that’s important.
There will also be a default cap of two hours of cumulative daily use and restrictions on notifications during school hours and overnight.
One of the more startling revelations during the blockbuster trial, which was in its second week before the settlement was reached, came from Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri.
On Tuesday, he acknowledged that take-up of one of Instagram’s much-touted safety features for teenagers was at one point as low as 1.8%.
The “Take a Break” tool, launched in 2021, encouraged teenagers to stop scrolling after spending a set amount of time on the platform.
As anyone who uses these apps knows, polite suggestions to stop scrolling are incredibly easy to ignore and are not the same thing as enforcing a pause.
Meta belatedly made it a default setting for teenagers’ accounts in 2024 – after the states had sued the company.
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri was one of the high-profile names to testify during the trial (file photo) Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
So why did it take years of mounting legal pressure and the threat of a $200 billion penalty for Meta to change what it knew wasn’t working?
Part of the answer is obvious to anyone aware of the historically light-touch regulation that big tech platforms have faced, particularly in the US.
Meta had little commercial incentive to tap the brakes on the gravy train that helped it to post record revenues of more than $200 billion last year.
Seen in that context, an $18 billion settlement to be paid out over a decade starts to look like a pretty good deal.
Meta must now introduce palliative curbs that arguably should have been built in from the start. But it doesn’t have to admit any wrongdoing, and the agreement stops short of dismantling the core model that drives its gigantic revenues.
Personalised recommendations will remain, while the advertising machine that generated $196 billion for the company last year remains essentially untouched.
In other words, the mechanisms that decide what teenagers see and how long they stay on the apps will remain.
And there’s another reason the agreement may suit Meta.
Only around $12.7 billion of the settlement is guaranteed; another $5 billion becomes payable if competitors including TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat agree to similar restrictions and payments.
In other words, Meta has signed up to new rules while creating pressure for some of its biggest competitors to play by them too.
Given Meta’s approach to date, there is also the obvious question of how widely these protections will apply and whether teenagers outside the US can expect the same protections.
On Thursday, European Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said the EU was already investigating Meta “for exactly the same suspicions” as those raised in the US case and confirmed the EU has had new “exchanges” since the settlement.
The EU can, in theory, impose a fine of up to 6% of the company’s total worldwide annual turnover if it fails to comply with its obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA).
Brussels is considering remedies that arguably go beyond the US deal, like disabling autoplay and infinite scroll by default, introducing effective screen-time breaks and making its recommender systems less engagement-oriented.
Once again, the question is not whether Meta can introduce stronger protections – it demonstrably can.
Instead, it’s about whether European regulators will have to follow through with sufficiently painful consequences before it does so on this side of the Atlantic as well.
The company has already said it disagrees with the EU’s preliminary findings, which suggests Brussels may have to do more than ask nicely.
In the US, meanwhile, it fought the states’ case all the way to trial before settling only after testimony had begun and its most senior executives were being called to the stand.
Big Tech has spent years encouraging us to treat its products as almost ineluctable forces of nature.
Platforms have essentially behaved as if news feeds need to scroll infinitely, and that notifications are essential because those features are simply what social media is.
It’s amazing how quickly that supposed truth changed as soon as the threat of a $200 billion penalty was on the table.
The off switches that we were encouraged to believe were impossible to build were on the wall all along.
The Meta settlement simply exposed the reality that all of these apparently immovable design choices were exactly that – choices.
The question for governments now, including our own, is how they can apply enough pressure on social media giants to make their products better, rather than trying to plamás them into submission.
In the meantime, if the Irish government needs advice on how to make spending billions look like good value for money, it knows who to call.