Programmed for Love

Counselor Paul Schmidt trained his eye on the witness in the well. The courtroom’s lights were not abrasive yet caught everything. Did the witness blink “too much” when answering opposing counsel’s questions on direct? Did he subtly yet elusively shift his weight in the swivel chair? Did he project his yes and no’s unapologetically to the jury’s hearing, or were these pronounced with a terseness to suggest reluctance? All the while, Counselor Schmidt kept the jury fixed in his peripheral vision… and it was not looking good.

Twenty-nine attorneys-general were seeking $1.4 trillion in damages from his client Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta® – the parent company to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. After the first week of the seven scheduled for this trial, the jury’s faces had turned ashen. The litany of testimony and exhibits of internal communications was wearing down the jury. Schmidt and his elite litigative team from Covington & Burling, LLP, could induce the requisite doubt about the testimony and exhibits, but beyond the cast of characters in the courtroom, Schmidt saw the bigger picture. It was pointless to spare Meta from a jury award worth billions of dollars if a full trial exposed such damning evidence that afterwards Meta would have to spend billions more on public relations. It was time to cut a deal and some big checks.

On August 26th, 2026, U.S. District Court for Northern California’s judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rodgers approved a settlement in People of California, et al v. Meta Platforms, Inc. for the sum of $17.5 billion. Meta admits no fault but will pay the money over the course of ten years to the twenty-nine states. The remaining states and territories will soon execute their own settlement with Meta (excluding New Mexico, Texas and Florida, which concluded their own similar cases against Meta). If Meta’s competitors of YouTube and SnapChat voluntarily implement the agreed design changes (detailed below), then more money will be paid to the plaintiffs. The crux of the litigation was that Meta had knowingly designed its products, Facebook and Instagram, to be harmfully addictive to young children, even those under thirteen years old whom Meta claimed were too young to be using these products.

The designs alleged to be harmful were myriad but fell into two categories. One category concerned keeping younger users engaged daily with the platforms for as long as possible. The other category concerned young users’ quality of browsing experience on the platforms.

For the quantitative category, the plaintiffs allege that Meta designed continual scrolling so that younger users could “doom-scroll” endlessly (almost like Meta’s logo of the corporate blue infinity symbol). Plaintiffs allege that Meta defaulted the applications’ “push notifications” to alert at all hours of the day and night, thereby inducing younger users to remain glued to their smartphones and tablets. Plaintiffs allege that Meta automatically played videos in newsfeeds, thereby capturing young users’ attention over longer periods of time, and such periods could extend over hours with no reminder about taking healthful breaks.

For the qualitative category, the plaintiffs allege that Meta allowed younger users to use “beauty filters” (California AG Rob Bonta dysphemized these as “plastic surgery filters”) which on impressionable youngsters imposed aesthetic standards unattainable in the real world. Finally, plaintiffs allege that despite Meta claiming to exclude users under thirteen, such children were using Meta, and Meta actively ignored evidence that such use was harming these children, as in instances of cyberbullying and sextortion.

The consequences of such designs and practices were tragic in numerous cases. Alexandra Hinks was sixteen when she committed suicide after being exposed to Facebook’s newsfeed saturated with posts about anorexia and self-harm. Gavin Guffey in South Carolina was seventeen when he committed suicide after he got into a virtual game of “truth or dare” on Instagram. He exchanged nude photos with a scammer who then demanded ransom lest the photos be sent to Gavin’s networked family and friends. Englyn Roberts was just fourteen when she hanged herself after Facebook’s algorithms detected her youthful angst and began to direct increasingly darker videos at her, including one which depicts a young woman simulating suicide by hanging.

Death was the extreme terminus along the continuum of side effects from youngsters’ use of Meta’s platforms. The more typical side effects were young users’ inability to concentrate, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, and other psychosocial maladies. Young girls proved especially vulnerable to dysmorphia correlating to their use of Facebook and Instagram. What most troubled plaintiffs is that internally Meta appears to have known about these effects, yet outwardly it vouched for its platforms’ safety and ignored evidence of such ill effects to increase Meta’s profitability.

Meta countered that it had measures to minimize its platforms’ bad effects on the young. Meta allowed Instagrammers to report content which suggested human trafficking. If an account appeared to solicit or facilitate human trafficking, users could flag it… and seventeen strikes later, Instagram would purge the account. If Facebook discovered that a user was under thirteen years old, Facebook would purge that account… but not the user’s linked account on Instagram.

More than anything, Meta maintained that correlation is not causation. Meta countered that juvenile mental health is always fraught with challenges, such that psychosocial maladies cannot be univariably traced to social media. Yet against such denials, Meta had compiled vast troves of data suggesting otherwise. It was enough for one of its user-experience researchers to remark, “Oh my gosh yall IG [Instagram] is a drug.” Another employee retorted, “We’re basically pushers.” Such scruples at Instagram were unwelcome, though, as the platform’s chief Adam Mosseri, “doesn’t want to hear it” when an internal review demonstrated how the app was addictively gaming kids’ dopamine infusions.

Much like Counselor Schmidt seeing beyond the immediate courtroom, one Meta employee realized the implications of having compiled such damning research without accurately disclosing it. The employee mused that Meta was, “going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”

The analogy to tobacco companies refers to the massive no-fault settlement of $206 billion which nearly all attorneys-general achieved against that industry in 1998. Numerous social media pundits have made the same analogy. Jim Steyer who founded and directs Common Sense Media – a public interest group devoted to child safety – observed, “This settlement is social media’s Big Tobacco moment. The message to the tech industry is clear: build child safety in, or courts and legislatures will make you.”

But Big Tobacco after 1998 did not disappear. It simply found new markets for its old products, such as developing countries in Africa. Big Tobacco also pivoted to the vaping industry, embedding nicotine compounds into vape pens to ensure the horizontal capture of customers who attempt to quit smoking tobacco by substituting what is supposed to be the less noxious indulgence of e-cigarettes. It is like the diabetic who eschews Coca-Cola in favor of bottled Dasani® water, without realizing that Coca-Cola™ owns both so that the customer can never outrun the corporation.

Meta is likewise desperate for a lucrative transition to the next best thing, whatever that is. Between 2021 – 2026, Meta blew $88 billion on the boondoggle of the Metaverse – a virtual world which real people could inhabit through avatars. No one was interested in recreating and shopping within Mark Zuckerberg’s digital dollhouse. Meta’s latest attempt to stay afloat is the Meta AI glasses.

These framed eyeglasses connect to the internet and videograph the wearer’s interactions throughout the day. The glasses can be hacked to retrieve public and proprietary information about the people whom the wearer encounters (e.g., registered Democrat, last known address in such-and-such neighborhood, 670 credit score, etc.), and display this in real-time to the wearer whilst being invisible to his interlocutors. Due to the potential infringement on privacy and safety, a growing number of public and private institutions have banned such smart-glasses, which in effect means a rapidly shrinking market for Meta’s last life-raft.

Parents’ Algorithm

In addition to the settlement’s aforementioned monetary damages, the settlement includes significant injunctive relief. Meta will limit the time during which a user under eighteen can use Meta’s platforms, such as a maximum of two hours daily. Such users will receive notifications in increments of fifteen minutes, to keep them cognizant of the time which elapses during use of these platforms. Users who are minors will be unable to access the platforms between 24:00 – 06:00, nor during school hours, 08:00 – 15:00. Meta will cancel present and future accounts of users discovered to be under thirteen years old. Meta will improve its algorithms so that younger users cannot “plunge down a rabbit hole” of consuming depressive material during possible bouts with depression. Most notably, an independent entity will review Meta’s platforms to ensure adherence to these injunctions.

These measures sound like welcome changes, yet the mentality driving them smacks of the same logic which got us into this problem in the first place. Again we are entrusting kids to an algorithm and hoping it plays nice this time around.

Yet nothing is better than parental involvement.

Parents evolutionarily have the child’s best interests at heart. Now more than ever, parents need to step into that role and get involved in their child’s upbringing rather than plopping the kid on Mark Zuckerberg’s skanky lap and hoping for the best.

The first step in that role is for parents to examine their own use of social media. If parents sit the family to dinner yet spend the time together engrossed on their own smartphones, then the kids will mirror that. If parents overshare raw emotions and thoughts into cyber-permanence on social media, then they predispose their kids to do the same.

Parents overall need to model the behaviors which they want their kids to emulate.

Kids need good literature and strenuous exercise, both in abundance. The obvious question for a parent, therefore, is when did you last read some Faulkner and jog a mile?

Kids must long-hand correspondence to relatives and friends. Rather than a teen existing as just another face and name scrolling across a smartphone, he can share his impressions and plans with real people who care about him. Ideally they should long-hand replies to him as well, so that he has some unique reminders in hard copy of their concern for him. Any relative or friend who would welcome a kid’s direct message on social media will greatly appreciate stamped correspondence from him in contrast to the regular assortment of junk mail. The obvious question now to the parent is, when did you last stamp a letter to a relative or friend?

There is no silver bullet to safeguard a child on social media. Parents must exercise vigilance of their child’s use of such platforms. The child may initially resent the intrusion but will later thank you. Years hence, the child turned adult will realize that he avoided social media’s many pitfalls because parents are programmed for unconditional love.