Exactly. Meta basically got out of this without any meaningful penalty or deterant for the future. Paid out to the 50 states, it only averages $36M a year per state. I can't believe all of the state AGs signed on for this no-op.

Have they?

I know a lot of my peers went to college for free with the Millennium Scholarship.

But so many young people vape now that it's becoming cool to smoke analog cigarettes. I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago. Many people that age now do.

The changes seem based on age, which just makes it more imperative that phone manufacturers perform even /more/ reliable age verification...

The business model, incentives, and practices that led them down this road? No, those don't need to change.

Somehow I have no faith that these changes will be enforced, or appropriately drawn up by parties who actually have the knowledge to do so.

Interesting point. Clear and visible warnings similar to tabacco and gambling websites (at least here in NZ) would be great. A clear and explicit call out of the dangers and a direct link on how to get help would be a good place to start.

I really like the idea of small scale social media, that's focused on small groups of like minded people and communities, but damn Facebook is a cesspool of not-that.

And what will be the penalty when they inevitably fail to make meaningful changes? Another fine as weak as this one? No. The penalty now should be ten or a hundred times as large as this.

Is anyone the slightest bit surprised? Our courts are no longer effective at bringing justice. They only have the law, and the law flagrantly favors the rich and their pet corporations.

This was a settlement. The court did not get a chance to issue a ruling or do any of the things you're pretending to be angry about.

And while they paid a reasonable amount of tax in 2025, that was a one off. They normally pay 3-5%.

The children are free to file their own lawsuit to get money.

Meta has the pocketbook to appeal this to a non-jury setup where they'd be more likely to win (imo most juries are ready to agree to any penalty on social media companies for any reason)

And if people do not think Meta settled without input from the Trump administration and a possible reward for doing so, well, I got this bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, barely used.

I wonder which way Facebook's algorithms will tilt in this years mid-term elections....

You can't use the word "reasonable" when dealing with companies with more power than most governments

Yeah, exactly.

Who can expect smol bean Meta to not act like rapacious vultures when all the other social media corporations get to?

So what should the law be? Don't be negligent? Don't be reckless? It already functions that way. Do we need to have statutes expressly dictating what people are allowed to do?

>Is it not possible for people to just delete the apps and stop using them?

Some people have friends, and some people also have friends that are very distant (geographically, life style, stage of life, etc).

Social media can allow you to keep in touch with these people in a very convenient way. For me, being able to see life updates of friends with 8h+ timezone differences is very nice perk, because planning a call or having energy to chat with someone that far away is tricky and many people understandably then drop it if that's the only way. (same applies if I want to talk to my digital nomad friend or, new-dad-overwhelmed friend). It's much easier to facilitate meeting up when I'm traveling too.

But even for people that want to use it for that purpose only, FB/Instagram will shove down infinite scroll and stories/reels/updates of people/entities you can care less about.

And yes for some it is hard to have "the willpower" as you want to frame it. (although we know it's not so much willpower, from addiction studies around nicotine and how loss of socialization around smoking usually is a detriment to quitting smoking for example)

And yes just removing / blocking those features help. There are also unofficial side-loadable app out there. So for me it works.

And for your life maybe there's no loss in socializing by just walking away. Good for you. But maybe the examples can shed some light in how social NETWORK (social media before algorithm and attention economy) is useful for many in different predicament than you, while the social media aspects, many would rather opt out.

And unfortunately only a select few of my friends (nerds/techies) are outside it (signal, discord, good old email) but almost everyone at least have an account. Many of the people I know move often enough that phone numbers aren't even a reliable way to keep in touch

You describe the apps as though they are recreational drugs with no other purpose but to produce endorphins. These 'apps' have a high level of utility - which is, I imagine, why most start to use them in the first place.

HN is also social media :)

but let's say friends sending links to group chats (or through direct messages) and you open it, and uh you see you got messages from other people on Instagram, or on Facebook you see that someone had a baby/wedding/whatever, and ...

also I see that people install these limiter apps on their phones, and then just override them many times a day.

and of course if every few days you spend 30 minutes giggling while looking at funny cats/dogs, sure, great. but on bad days you end up doing it for hours and escaping into it, ignoring something else, or using it after stressful meetings to "clear my head" (which becomes a coping mechanism for anxiety)

the problem is obviously (right?) that this happens to everybody. kids are probably more susceptible, but in general we withdrew into our screens and do our flight/fight/fawn/freeze responses online (videogames, outrage porn, porn porn, food porn)

https://www.slowboring.com/p/from-bowling-alone-to-scrolling...

> Is the addiction so strong at this point that people don't have the willpower to stop?

Yes. I've stopped Facebook and Instagram, and it simply got replaced by more time on HackerNews and YouTube. I've failed to cut those out as well. The addiction is a lot stronger than we'd all like to assume in my opinion.

Just. That word again.

So why don't you just override your monkey brain that hordes of clever people trick in to scrolling more? Why don't you just get all of your social circle to move off Meta? Why don't you just use Ebay over FB Marketplace? Why don't you just convince your housing development to use something other than WhatsApp for sharing equipment? Why don't you just find a different channel through which to promote your small business? Why don't you just accept to be a social outcast?

The vast, vast majority can't pay that price.

And yes, some programmer somewhere has his programmer friends in Matrix. And no, that doesn't work beyond that very case. Why is this so hard to understand?

I don’t understand either. Usually someone responds with something like “the local <whatever> only posts updates on <app> so what choice do I have” or something to do with peer pressure or FOMO. I don’t doubt that people deal with those problems but they seem like better ones to have. But it seems like a lot of people just cannot imagine living without the apps anymore.

I beleive I deleted facebook in 2013ish.

If I need to access for some business reason, I have a fake account. Otherwise I have zero desire to be on social media.

For my son, I built a web site based on my dog. The dog aka Prof Nubbs. Essentially it's a dogs against social media, if you on social media then you are not playing with your dog! Dogs against social media.

You fall out of society, basically. In my circles, most people expect everyone our age to have Instagram, even though it's been blocked by the government since 2022.

As far as I'm concerned, the algorithmic part that shows me content from strangers is a tacked-on extra, and not a very welcome one.

I deactivated Instagram about 6 months ago and while there are definitely benefits I also miss out on a lot of local events and updates. It can be a useful tool if done right.

That being said I never use any of the features that feed you new content - strictly used it for people I knew in real life and events / local fitness groups / etc.

Facebook I deactivated way back and never looked back. Maybe it was useful in 2008

In some countries there is no alternative. News, events and many businesses only publish on social media

it may be possible for some people, I don't know.

does Meta have internal research that uses the word addiction that would come up in discovery? probably.

so there's more than one side of this. a little bit of a chance in the health & science department, a little bit of a chance in the legal department, that the plaintiffs would prevail.

that said, are people willing to ban alcohol and tobacco fully? and most "recreational" drugs? the cultural side is the least informative, because you can't litigate culture, it's arbitrary, hypocrisy is the rule, not the exception.

Nope.

in more detail: Largely no.

Theres many ways to explain this, but this is the shortest: You have an average person, with a phone.

This person, with their average life experience, average brain development and biology, is facing off against research programs, data analysis, engineering teams, product designers, financiers, operations teams, who all want to give them the best digital experience they possible can have.

The algorithms are A/B tested to as close as possible, the content is generated from a dog-eat-dog creator economy that finds the most distracting methods to grab your attention.

A good part of this is because our society has never had to deal with information technology of this scope and scale. Quantity is its own quality. As a result people never had support and the firms had carte blanche.

It took us decades to go from the Libertarian ideal of "More speech is free speech" to knowing that content moderation is required to have functional online communities.

Do individuals have free will and choice? Yes.

Are people going to respond to incentives? yes.

Are people going to be able to compete fairly against a far more resourced claimaint for their attention and money? No.

iOS app installation (what some people call "side-loading") is done by signing up as a developer and then installing the apps as if you're developing them. You have to refresh them every 7 days in Xcode or they'll get deleted from your phone as that is one of Apple's anti-using-developer-mode-to-actually-install-things measures, and you can only install up to 3 apps this way, though apparently there's some kind of chameleon app that wraps multiple other apps with a menu.

So what? Media can write "Donald Trump, the confirmed child rapist and embezzler" but it won't actually make anyone stop liking him.

All the recent evidence (https://www.npr.org/2026/03/09/nx-s1-5736553/fast-food-scree...) is that people who are best at self-regulation don't do it by surrounding themselves with tempting things and will-powering themselves not to indulge in them, they do it by changing their environment so the tempting things aren't an option. They're changing the environment via the courts and the ballot box. The people with no self-regulation are the ones complaining about the possibility of having their dopamine toys taken away.

> Which means, IMO: (1) regulation should be limited to what the general public's gut on average agrees with, since science won't be the neutral arbiter we want it to be for the foreseeable future. (2) I personally want to severely limit my kids access to social media because my gut says it's addictive and harmful. But I don't expect society as a whole to agree with me on that.

Well:

(1) there is no "the general public's gut" -- the general public is millions of separate guts that don't agree with each other;

(2) our political system defines explicit boundaries for the reach of regulatory power, especially where communication, expression, and social interaction are concerned, regardless of anyone's gut feeling on these issues;

(3) science can't be the arbiter here at all, since science only answers "is" questions, but this is an "ought" question; which leads us to

(4) as you alluded to in your final remark, this is a purely cultural issue which families/parents must address according to their own normative values, independently of each other, and there is no legitimate political or legal question here.

I agree with you that nothing has been proven either way. But I would say that, because people hate social media so much, we should perhaps be a little skeptical of claims that it causes harms. It's very easy to believe "X thing I hate" causes harm, even when the evidence is not solid.

> So since I can't wait another century for their to finally be good science about social media, I have no choice but to go with my gut.

Doing nothing seems fine!

That seems like a very lame claim, given that Social Media is data in abundance by design, and for at least 2 decades now.

Of course they did? What do you think school is? Just because it's useful to society doesn't mean it isn't also a reduction in freedom.

Meta-analysis, very large, shows small correlation between unhappiness and social media use: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

Large AU observational study. Moderate social media use correlates to the happiest kids, high use and no use correlates to unhappiness: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...

Swedish obervational study, after adjusting the data there was no correlation: https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(26)00162-X/full...

I can't find the specific inverventional study I mentioned. As I recall, it was mixed but possibly I remembered wrongly.

Some studies do show a significant correlation between unhappiness and social media use, but causation has not been established and the bigger, better done studies have weaker correlations. People believe in causation because it suits their bias against social media.

I dislike social media but I doubt it's harmful. This substack summarizes my view on what really makes children unhappy: https://substack.com/home/post/p-186087964 (school). I'd guess that lack of freedom is what makes school so awful; modern schools are like little totalitarian states, where every minute of your day is accounted for and there is no privacy.

You're doing the exact same pitchfork thing but against the diffuse group of "parents".

> Anything to shift blame from parents, I guess.

Shifting blame from parents presumes there is a problem to blame on them, but isn't the determination of whether anything here constitutes a problem in the first place up to the parents themselves?

For just the ads, there's also YouTube premium.

The Unhook extension on Firefox does a very good job of hiding various parts of YouTube (including Shorts) that you don't want to see/access.

I use the YouTube app very rarely, but out of curiosity I went to iOS YouTube app settings, and I wasn't expecting this, but apparently in Time Management you can set Short Feed limit to 0 and this hid shorts completely from my YouTube app home feed and I can't scroll to the next Short when I open one.

I find myself, including this thread, reading comments like snacking on junk instead of even opening the actual article. Dodging the long form content that might not be so easy to digest for the familiar site and short form comments isn’t a habit I’m proud of

Nebula has many of the better creators from Youtube.

Nebula has no comments section. I find this to be a big indicator that it is built to enable creators to deliver good videos to their fans, rather than serving some other master.

Delete your HN!

I'd put it differently. The affirmation we were accustomed to generally had some substance. If someone called, sent you a postcard, or met with you, it probably meant they cared at least to some extent.

Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.

This also makes us feel that we constantly need to work for these affirmations. If you don't post, no one likes you. This is not a Facebook problem, but Facebook built its business around it, so they deserve to be singled out.

> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. > [...] > Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that *we* were already amplifying, and *perhaps* sped-run that amplification.

No, pick one. If it's the former, it's essentially the same as saying they warped society.

I agree that these traits are human and were there before social media, but amplifying, gamifying and exploiting addiction is reprehensible.

It is that amplification that is the problem. Everyone has a voice. But if one actor chooses which voices to amplify it is responsible for the results.

This episode will come to an end, only to be replaced by a more subtle - surely AI driven - form of amplification/attenuation.

Social media is manipulation. Period.

Tobacco existed for eons, and then American tobacco companies engineered it to make it a hundred times as addictive with full knowledge of what they were doing. They intentionally created dependencies. I have no sympathy for them. This is too light of a settlement.

> Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation

> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put

Those statements are the same. Our species was not designed to deal with the pressures of a A/B tested content fairy, designed by the most well paid minds our most advanced societies have trained, running on infrastructure that is more expensive than the GDP of many nations.

There are bounds within which a system functions optimally. When pushed far beyond those bounds, indefinitely, it is absolutely accurate to say the system becomes warped.

> No, Meta just amplified

No. "Just" is understating the effect.

This is the “If I wouldn’t have done it, somebody else would have”. And I personally find it to be a very lame excuse.

Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malicious actions.

Banning phones from schools only is not enough.

There are of course bigger threats, but have you ever talked to one of these gen Z zombies that have fried their brain on their phone? My nephew is one. He has the thousand yard stare, can barely have a conversation, and has no ability to do anything off his phone. Of course, it's not everyone, but the effects of phone use are beyond obvious and clearly destructive.

No it isn't.

Okay, I don't like capitalism either

Capitalism forces parents to let their kids use their phones and social media all day?

Hm, odd. I didn't know parents didn't have authority or agency. Good to know.

Two hours is two hours too long.

Adults can’t decide for themselves?

Only if we make sure it applies to your HN social media time. After all, we wouldn’t want you to get too used to your own freedom and autonomy. We must remind you that random people like me must consent to you doing what you want with a social media platform!

You think the state should restrict what adults do on their phones?

Why do you support a nanny state that tells adults what content they are allowed to consume?

and in reverse chronological order, so you can actually pick up where you remember leaving off previously. what a novel idea.

The problem wasn't as simple as it caused harm, it was the companies knew it caused harm and did nothing.

Just like how Meta, it's staff and leadership all knew they were making decisions that harmed people, and did nothing to stop it while profiting immensely.

>the social media addiction stuff stand on pretty dubious science to say the least.

There are multiple studies showing that social media use leads to worse mental health in users.

Well, they are being asked to make changes as well, which presumably prevents the damage.

It can be argued the changes don't go far enough so maybe "pay fine, reduce harm, but harm still permitted..."

If you are on Android, you can use Revanced Manager or Morphe to patch the YouTube apk with all kinds of controls that include the ability to hide shorts and the comments section. Ad blocking works well too but using those patches requires a bit of a cat and mouse game since YouTube backend updates break things and require occasionally patching a newer apk version. You can also enable all of the client-side YouTube premium features.

You may earn 100k/y and have 10M real estate + 2M in bank. Why would you dumb down market cap to earnings?

Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.

Then they may as well pay out 10% of the stock.

Money isn't real, yet that's how we size a lot of things.

it's funny how it's real money when it's useful and fake money when it's not

It’s interesting that you bring up wrongthink. Banning free speech would be something like out of 1984, but what we have is far more subtle and insidious. A system that shows you only what it wants you to see, while tricking you into thinking you’re seeing what you want to see.

Anyway, you can support free speech while hating this algorithm crap at the same time.

Not GP, but I'd define it as anything which presents or orders/prioritizes user-generated content based on preferences not explicitly specified by the consuming user. That'd be something like "default to chronological friends-and-follows-only, with an option for friends-of-friends and an option for 'most liked within a time window', and (if Facebook is feeling magnanimous to a very few power users) a preference pane which allows controlling overrides to the chronological-ness like 'show posts up to X hours out of order if they have more than Y likes'". No recommendation/you-might-also-like system, but you can make the "accounts friended/followed by" button for a user's existing friends/follows as big as you like--so long as the list presented is only sortable only by name/follower count/date-added.

My hot take is that the courts should find that doing anything beyond that is a first-party editorial behavior and thus not immune to liability under section 230. You can operate social media, but if your content and recommendation sort algorithms aren't explicitly controllable by and legible to (that means no "you might like"; no direct payouts for content creators to be engaging on your platform; recommendations based on dumb sorts from people you already know or dumb sorts over keyword searches only) your users, you're liable.

Anything that engages users?

reddit is trivial, but why hackner news as well?

In the UK there are fairly strong rules against advertising junk food to kids.

Of course these are all being subverted on social media because of Meta et al. being uncooperative and pretending they can't identify kids (they know the real age of most accounts even without having to do ID checks).

Fast food and snack companies are the absolute masters of marketing to children. If the United States really cared they'd put a blanket ban on advertising to children like some jurisdictions (Quebec) have done.

Completely agree. Talk about designing for addicted kids

4chan doesn’t use tricks to get people addicted to their feed. Similarly, most platforms cannot hire the smartest people to build addictive algorithms. The danger is much lower.

It's basically contingent on the AGs suing those companies as well.

> and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.

So it's a bucket of crabs

> the settlement details

“Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. That sum increases to $17.1 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes.

…

The settlement will effectively force Meta to make major product changes for all U.S. users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.

Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the ‘like’ button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls” [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/meta-settlemen...

What's he gonna do? There is no "enough" with some personalities, there is only "more".

There was an ad going around for a while on how Instagram was trying to be safer for teens with parent controls, etc.

If I were to guess, he's thinking he can get the good (if there is any good to be found) without the bad still using more controls/technology.

He's not going to willingly shutdown his company, the same reason a casino will not just suddenly close up shop. The owner would have to have a dramatic shift in worldview to delete the whole thing.