Inside the Meta Settlement: $16.7 Billion, No Fault, and a Clause That Saves Meta $5 Billion.

Meta and the states have settled.

They've announced the largest child safety settlement in history, but 30% of the money they're collecting is conditional on the states going out and settling with Google and TikTok, and Meta keeps that money if they fail to do so.

This is "The Rip Current." I'm Jake Ward.

We look at the big invisible forces shaping our lives.

And I have to tell you, this settlement, I'm trying to be objective and journalistic about it, but it is really upsetting to me, I have to say.

Because I think I was imagining something else.

I was at the very least imagining that as a society, we've been building up a, a mountain of evidence that would change, as I've tried to articulate here many, many times, our attitude in the United States around harm from believing that there's only such a thing as financial harm and physical harm to believing in behavioral harm, understanding that there is such a thing as changing how people behave at scale through these platforms in ways that can be very harmful to them.

And this case, in my view, was going to be a way of really establishing that, enshrining that as precedent in law.

And instead, because of the nature of a settlement, the two years of work the states put into assembling all this stuff, all the discovery that we got, which was invaluable to me as a reporter and to people like me, all that stuff can't be used in future.

And so that's a tough thing.

But before I get into all of this, I'm gonna rant a little bit about it in a, in, in a while and tell you all the implications about it, what it means for the states, how it compares to other historical settlements, and some very interesting caveats here that I think are worth understanding.

I'm gonna first just sort of give you some of the basics here.

Meta and the states have settled.

They've announced the largest child safety settlement in history, but 30% of the money they're collecting is conditional on the states going out and settling with Google and TikTok, and Meta keeps that money if they fail to do so.

This is "The Rip Current." I'm Jake Ward.

We look at the big invisible forces shaping our lives.

And I have to tell you, this settlement, I'm trying to be objective and journalistic about it, but it is really upsetting to me, I have to say.

Because I think I was imagining something else.

I was at the very least imagining that as a society, we've been building up a, a mountain of evidence that would change, as I've tried to articulate here many, many times, our attitude in the United States around harm from believing that there's only such a thing as financial harm and physical harm to believing in behavioral harm, understanding that there is such a thing as changing how people behave at scale through these platforms in ways that can be very harmful to them.

And this case, in my view, was going to be a way of really establishing that, enshrining that as precedent in law.

And instead, because of the nature of a settlement, the two years of work the states put into assembling all this stuff, all the discovery that we got, which was invaluable to me as a reporter and to people like me, all that stuff can't be used in future.

And so that's a tough thing.

But before I get into all of this, I'm gonna rant a little bit about it in a, in, in a while and tell you all the implications about it, what it means for the states, how it compares to other historical settlements, and some very interesting caveats here that I think are worth understanding.

I'm gonna first just sort of give you some of the basics here.