Oh yeah, I bet the Meta team is really freaking out about forking over a whole 8.5% of just one year's revenue to get totally off the hook for this mess in the US. Thanks for giving us this the context it deserves, PSG.
"Move fast and break things," sounds like the Trump regime's action plan. Zuck's a cuck.
Facebook started with a pout: Zuck got jilted by a date who didn't show up and started Facebook to get revenge. He's an immoral man. And he harms children. What's the moral cost of that?
" . . . a 1% increase in market cap on a $1.4 trillion company means the settlements — breaking the fever of uncertainty — paid for themselves."
You cannot plead "economic ignorance" so the misleading nonsense of suggesting the 1% increase in market cap value of META shares held by the shareholders pays for the sins of the company is just disinformation.
FFS, you can do so much better.
Your article is a fair interpretation of the issue from your viewpoint, but there are other views.
You're more financially sophisticated -- as is your audience -- to drop such a blatant English major NYT turd.
The government can't be there to protect us from doing dumb things or to protect parents from having to be parents. America is about freedom. It is about making our own decisions not having the government make them for us. We are not like China where the people are presumed to be idiots whi must be lead by XI Jin ping thought. there ought to be a huge advantage in having a population where everybody is capable of thinking for themselves.
I don't think tobacco is a good analogy. With tobacco, actually harm has manifested in thousands of people. With META, the harm seems presumed based on some correlations. Does not seem like a lock down case. Speeding ticket seems appropriate.
Scott Galloway’s Meta essay is characteristically brilliant prose. But the tobacco analogy borrows scientific certainty it hasn’t earned.
Cigarettes cause cancer. With social media, the evidence is far messier: effects vary by child and type of use, average effects are often small, and causation can run both ways. Depressed teenagers may scroll more; scrolling may worsen some teenagers’ depression; both may reflect other problems. That warrants safeguards. It does not establish that Meta “renders” children depressed, much less metastasizes like cancer across society.
And what law, exactly, did all this supposed corporate depravity violate?
The clearest allegation was narrow: Meta knowingly collected data from children under 13 without parental consent, violating COPPA. The rest largely depended on state consumer-protection laws and claims that Meta misrepresented risks. There is no general federal law prohibiting infinite scroll, Likes or engagement-maximizing recommendations. The settlement contains no admission or judicial finding that Meta broke one.
Galloway’s market argument is shakier still. Meta did not “pay for” the settlement because its stock rose 1%; companies don’t receive their market capitalization. Investors repriced the removal of an uncertain litigation tail. Calling that corporate reimbursement is a terrific line and terrible finance.
Nor did Meta simply write a $17.1 billion check. The guaranteed amount is roughly $12 billion paid over ten years; about $5 billion more becomes payable only if major competitors adopt tougher protections. Galloway calls that provision cynical. But uniform protections across Instagram, YouTube and TikTok are supposedly the objective. Apparently child safety becomes ugly when Meta has an incentive to promote it.
His proposed cures are stranger than the diagnosis. Make platforms liable for “algorithmic amplification” and every feed, search ranking, spam filter and safety classifier becomes a litigation event—an enormous gift to incumbents with armies of lawyers. Break Meta apart and you may create three companies competing even harder for teenage attention. Tax advertising and affluent families buy privacy while everyone else keeps the surveillance feed.
Protecting children is serious business. That is precisely why it deserves causal evidence, legal precision and policies evaluated by their effects—not a tobacco metaphor doing the work of all three. Hat trick AI.
I got off FB in early 2025, right after American voters inexplicably elected a convicted felon and terminal liar to a second term in the White House, and Zuckerberg couldn't scramble fast enough to undo all of Meta's safety valves and plant his head straight up the POTUS' fat rear end.
I figured there would be a mass exodus from FB by all of my fellow, Trump-hating "progressives." But nah. They're still on there, every single day, with their memes and emojis and righteous indignation and etc. etc. A business is only as strong as its clientele. The fact that Meta continues to churn out massive profits says a lot more about its members than it does about Meta.
Scott, thanks for this great piece of journalism. Everything you say rings true, and yes, the fine was a rounding error in the same way that it was to Big Tobacco. Interesting that you didn't bring in Big Oil, but I'm guessing you're waiting for SCOTUS to rule on whether the trials can proceed?
For those interested in why I raise this, this post will tell you all you need to know about Big Oil's corporate malfeasance which, honestly, makes Meta and Big Tobacco look like a small speed bump: https://erictelltales.substack.com/p/big-oil-vs-us
Today's Big Tech platforms are steadily gaining power and remain unchecked and free to maximize their profits at the expense of their users and the rest of us. Google dropped the "Don't Be Evil" mandate years ago because it reduced shareholder value, and today it ignores all fine print regarding tracking despite having been fined $5 billion in 2024 for illegally tracking. So Meta is not alone.
Oh yeah, I bet the Meta team is really freaking out about forking over a whole 8.5% of just one year's revenue to get totally off the hook for this mess in the US. Thanks for giving us this the context it deserves, PSG.
"Move fast and break things," sounds like the Trump regime's action plan. Zuck's a cuck.
Facebook started with a pout: Zuck got jilted by a date who didn't show up and started Facebook to get revenge. He's an immoral man. And he harms children. What's the moral cost of that?
" . . . a 1% increase in market cap on a $1.4 trillion company means the settlements — breaking the fever of uncertainty — paid for themselves."
You cannot plead "economic ignorance" so the misleading nonsense of suggesting the 1% increase in market cap value of META shares held by the shareholders pays for the sins of the company is just disinformation.
FFS, you can do so much better.
Your article is a fair interpretation of the issue from your viewpoint, but there are other views.
You're more financially sophisticated -- as is your audience -- to drop such a blatant English major NYT turd.
Cheers.
The government can't be there to protect us from doing dumb things or to protect parents from having to be parents. America is about freedom. It is about making our own decisions not having the government make them for us. We are not like China where the people are presumed to be idiots whi must be lead by XI Jin ping thought. there ought to be a huge advantage in having a population where everybody is capable of thinking for themselves.
Not a lawyer but...
I don't think tobacco is a good analogy. With tobacco, actually harm has manifested in thousands of people. With META, the harm seems presumed based on some correlations. Does not seem like a lock down case. Speeding ticket seems appropriate.
Great line:
“Technology isn’t neutral; its design is a function of the degree to which economic power is concentrated.”
Scott Galloway’s Meta essay is characteristically brilliant prose. But the tobacco analogy borrows scientific certainty it hasn’t earned.
Cigarettes cause cancer. With social media, the evidence is far messier: effects vary by child and type of use, average effects are often small, and causation can run both ways. Depressed teenagers may scroll more; scrolling may worsen some teenagers’ depression; both may reflect other problems. That warrants safeguards. It does not establish that Meta “renders” children depressed, much less metastasizes like cancer across society.
And what law, exactly, did all this supposed corporate depravity violate?
The clearest allegation was narrow: Meta knowingly collected data from children under 13 without parental consent, violating COPPA. The rest largely depended on state consumer-protection laws and claims that Meta misrepresented risks. There is no general federal law prohibiting infinite scroll, Likes or engagement-maximizing recommendations. The settlement contains no admission or judicial finding that Meta broke one.
Galloway’s market argument is shakier still. Meta did not “pay for” the settlement because its stock rose 1%; companies don’t receive their market capitalization. Investors repriced the removal of an uncertain litigation tail. Calling that corporate reimbursement is a terrific line and terrible finance.
Nor did Meta simply write a $17.1 billion check. The guaranteed amount is roughly $12 billion paid over ten years; about $5 billion more becomes payable only if major competitors adopt tougher protections. Galloway calls that provision cynical. But uniform protections across Instagram, YouTube and TikTok are supposedly the objective. Apparently child safety becomes ugly when Meta has an incentive to promote it.
His proposed cures are stranger than the diagnosis. Make platforms liable for “algorithmic amplification” and every feed, search ranking, spam filter and safety classifier becomes a litigation event—an enormous gift to incumbents with armies of lawyers. Break Meta apart and you may create three companies competing even harder for teenage attention. Tax advertising and affluent families buy privacy while everyone else keeps the surveillance feed.
Protecting children is serious business. That is precisely why it deserves causal evidence, legal precision and policies evaluated by their effects—not a tobacco metaphor doing the work of all three. Hat trick AI.
I got off FB in early 2025, right after American voters inexplicably elected a convicted felon and terminal liar to a second term in the White House, and Zuckerberg couldn't scramble fast enough to undo all of Meta's safety valves and plant his head straight up the POTUS' fat rear end.
I figured there would be a mass exodus from FB by all of my fellow, Trump-hating "progressives." But nah. They're still on there, every single day, with their memes and emojis and righteous indignation and etc. etc. A business is only as strong as its clientele. The fact that Meta continues to churn out massive profits says a lot more about its members than it does about Meta.
Scott, thanks for this great piece of journalism. Everything you say rings true, and yes, the fine was a rounding error in the same way that it was to Big Tobacco. Interesting that you didn't bring in Big Oil, but I'm guessing you're waiting for SCOTUS to rule on whether the trials can proceed?
For those interested in why I raise this, this post will tell you all you need to know about Big Oil's corporate malfeasance which, honestly, makes Meta and Big Tobacco look like a small speed bump: https://erictelltales.substack.com/p/big-oil-vs-us
Today's Big Tech platforms are steadily gaining power and remain unchecked and free to maximize their profits at the expense of their users and the rest of us. Google dropped the "Don't Be Evil" mandate years ago because it reduced shareholder value, and today it ignores all fine print regarding tracking despite having been fined $5 billion in 2024 for illegally tracking. So Meta is not alone.