Changes to Facebook and Instagram are key part of Meta’s $17B settlement with the states over harm to teens

Filed 57m ago · Via The Conversation · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: MSwierenga · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Meta has agreed to pay up to $17 billion over ten years to settle claims from 47 state attorneys general that it designed Facebook and Instagram to hook children, misled the public about the harm, and improperly harvested data from kids under 13.

The settlement, still awaiting a judge's approval, ends a federal trial in Oakland before it barely began, and requires design changes including default two-hour daily time limits for teens, overnight app blocks, and the ability to turn off autoplay.

Separate cases in Los Angeles and New Mexico, worth hundreds of millions more in judgments against Meta, remain untouched by this deal. Meta continues to deny wrongdoing throughout.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A company that built its fortune on engineered compulsion is now being praised for agreeing to sell slightly less of it, for five years, under an auditor who clocks out before the contract does. Seventeen billion sounds enormous until you remember it's roughly one percent of a decade's expected revenue — a rounding error dressed up as accountability. The real tell is that Meta insists none of this means it did anything wrong, which is the settlement equivalent of paying for the vase you swear you didn't break.

Source: Read the original at The Conversation → Scored: Fox Tale Waltz Part 1 Instrumental · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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