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Fault lines

As widely reported, Meta has settled a lawsuit brought against it by 52 American state and local attorneys general representing most states, the District of Columbia, and several territories The company will, Cecilia Kang and Eli Tan report at the New York Times, pay up to $17.1 billion or, as CNBC has it, $16.7 billion, to be split among the participating states. The higher settlement number includes more than $459 million for claims relating to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. At the Guardian, Aisha Down speculates how the settlement might give weight to the many other claims around the world that remain unaddressed. Even just within the US many other lawsuits relating to child safety are stacked waiting for takeoff.

Few are impressed by the payout; at the Guardian, Chris Stokel-Walker calls it chump change, given that Meta’s profit last year was about £60 billion – and it’s to be paid out over a decade. Seen as more of a win is that the settlement requires change: Meta will impose a two-hour daily usage limit and block use at night for under-18s, enhance age assurance, and provide additional tools for parents and guardians. You can see why plaintiffs are jazzed: settling brings faster results.

Even so, this seems like a win for Meta. It admits no fault. Paying up is cheaper than going on fighting – Stokel-Walker cites estimates provided by Meta’s PR team that legal fees could have reached $1.5 *trillion* (hyperbole, but still). It keeps Meta executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, off the witness stand. And, at Techdirt, Mike Masnick argues that Meta will benefit from the position and ammunition to demand that other platforms such as YouTube and TikTok obey the same rules; it says it will withhold £5 billion of the settlement unless both YouTube and TikTok match. As he writes, the US government could not mandate such changes under the First Amendment.

Both Masnick and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warn that increased age verification will affect all Meta users in the US. EFF also points out children’s consequential loss of access to information and their speech rights, and gives Meta legal backing to collect even more personal information about its users.

Even without that, as Stokel-Walker notes, the restrictions Meta puts in place for US users are likely to spread as other countries demand equal measures. In the UK, Robert Booth reports at the Guardian that the minister for work and pensions, Pat McFadden, has already called for Meta to extend to British teens changes such as bans preventing under-18s from displaying numbers of likes or reactions, and using cosmetic filters.

At TechCrunch, Sarah Perez spots that the settlement also includes a promise from the attorneys general that they will not sue Meta under the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) over its retention and use of children’s data. Meta is now expected to develop, train, and begin testing a model that will detect under-13s using its platforms.

More important, although campaigners say they will continue to push for further changes to enhance child safety, this settlement does nothing to change Meta’s underlying business model, the ultimate source of all the problems. Booth quotes Rachael Kent, who says the changes don’t fundamentally alter the “engagement-driven model” or the algorithms that make it work. As long as the company’s fortunes depend on keeping us all online on its services as long as possible in order to profit from our personal data, change will only be on the surface.

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Meanwhile, Max Kendix reports at The Times that US Congressman Michael Rulli (R-OH) is sponsoring the GRANITE Act, a bill that would prohibit US courts from recognizing or enforcing foreign fines relating to online speech. That is: it would block Britain’s online safety regulator, Ofcom, from pursuing US companies for failing to comply with the 2023 Online Safety Act. Kendix goes on to say “it is understood” that the bill is supported by senior members of the Trump administration.

The Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion bill was first proposed in Wyoming earlier this year. The idea has been pushed for months on X (and presumably elsewhere) by the lawyer Preston Byrne, who is representing 4chan, currently mocking an Ofcom fine of £520,000. Last year, 4chan and Kiwi Farms launched a US lawsuit against Ofcom.

As Madsen Pirie recounts at the Adam Smith Institute, there is precedent in the 2010 SPEECH Act, which protects Americans from foreign libel judgments unless they would have been found liable under US law. At the time, libel tourism was leading plaintiffs to England on the slightest of connections, particularly in a famous case involving Holocaust denialism. Byrne himself we first encountered at the 2015 Tomorrow’s Transactions Forum explaining blockchain.

Byrne’s argument is that US sites with no business presence in Britain are fully protected by the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, and frames the case in terms of Americans’ free speech rights, Ofcom’s position is that sites that are accessible in the UK and meet certain criteria must perform age verification. Seems like the simpler, cheaper response would be to do the same as much less controversial sites, like Imgur: block UK access.

The splintering of the Internet continues.

Illustrations: The Imgur home page, as seen from the UK in 2025.

Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

The Silicon Valley chronicles

We should have seen this coming. At Platformer, Casey Newton reports that Meta has discussed pulling funding for the Oversight Board after 2028 after already reducing it “significantly” this year. Who needs fripperies like independent governance after reporting billions of losses in its Reality Labs unit, the bit responsible for the seemingly now-abandoned metaverse, the smartglasses, and, of course, AI? Per Newton, there are ongoing discussions about continuing the Oversight Board somehow, perhaps by opening it up to adjudicate for other platforms.

The reality is the Oversight Board’s moment has probably passed. In 2018, creating it was an effective public relations response to a series of scandalous revelations, beginning in 2017 with Carole Cadwalladr‘s work exposing Cambridge Analytica‘s use of Facebook to collect personal data to target political advertising. Its biggest moment was probably in January 2021, when the Oversight Board backed Facebook‘s decision to ban then-“former guy” Donald Trump for two years following the January 6 insurrection. Twitter banned him, too, and there was a brief crackdown on postings calling for violence. Much public criticism followed from whistleblowers such as Frances Haugen and Sarah Wynn Williams (2025), and the Netflix documentary The Great Hack..

Today, though,the big technology companies seem not to care. Maybe they will again if usage shrinks enough – the BBC reports an Ofcom study showing that UK adults are actively posting 61% less than last year. But defunding the Oversight Board seems consistent with the general decline of content moderation on Facebook and elsewhere. Neither fines, nor spreading age verification laws, nor other constraints can be remedied by funding an Oversight Board that is already rarely mentioned.

Besides, the years since 2018 have seen the “billionaire class” take a hard turn to the libertarian right; they show little inclination to be constrained personally or corporately by national laws or governments.

In a January 2025 interview, Netscape creator and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen provided this explanation: US Democrats “broke the deal”. That is, Silicon Valley supported Democrats as long as they left technology companies free of regulation. (Democrats might reply that they were responding on behalf of the public to changes in Silicon Valley companies’ behavior.)

In addition, Connie Loizos reports at TechCrunch that the billionaires who signed Warren Buffett’s and Bill Gates’s Giving Pledge would now like it forgotten. At Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson fears most Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey’s enthusiasm for incorporating AI and robotics into more and bigger weapons. Anduril was founding in 2017, the year before Google employees petitioned the company to exit its contract with Project Maven, the Pentagon’s effort to harness machine learning and automatic targeting. By 2021, Tom Simonite was reporting at Wired that Google was bidding on military contracts. A few weeks back, at the Financial Times, Jemima Kelly called Silicon Valley billionaires “enablers, keeping us distracted and dumb”, citing a recent podcast interview in which Andreessen said he never engages in introspection.

Available to link all this together is Jacob Silverman’s new book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Musk is not the sole focus of Silverman’s “guided tour through America’s self-designated innovator class” and its resentment of government and power to change it. Much of the book, which Silverman began researching in 2023, focuses on other high-dollar funders such as David Sacks and DOGE co-mastermind Vivek Ramaraswamy (whom Silverman introduces as the boss who fired him from an early job), as well as members of the “Paypal Mafia” including Peter Thiel and David Sacks. Silverman also includes chapters on Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Saudi Arabia’s growing connections to Silicon Valley, the cryptocurrency boom, the fight over TikTok’s US presence, a so-far failed plan to take over California’s Solano County, Sam Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall, and the choice of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. The book ends with the donors’ success – that is, Trump’s election in 2024.

With Gilded Rage, Silverman revives a formerly niche publishing subgenre , which documented the beginnings of this shift. First on the scene in the US, to the best of my knowledge, was northern California native Paulina Borsook with a 1996 essay for Mother Jones, Cyberselfish. In it, and in the subsequent 2000 book, she laid out Silicon Valley’s refusal to recognize the government assistance and military funding that enabled its wealth and growth. To Borsook, who described herself in the 1998 book Wired Women as the “token hippie feminist writing for Wired“, Silicon Valley’s turn to the right and distaste for government were already visible even then. In November, David Streitfeld profiled Borsook at the New York Times and noted the price she paid for her contrarian view.

In a 1995 essay The Californian Ideology, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron pushed Europe to take a different path.

Silverman’s most recent predecessor is Douglas Rushkoff’s 2022 skewing of “The Mindset” in Survival of the Richest. In Rushkoff’s telling, these high-wealth individuals are planning their safety and/or escape during and after “the incident” – that is, whatever catastrophe is going to wipe us all out.

So Silverman is less documenting a shift than he is describing an outcome: a political wave whose emergence into the mainstream only seems sudden.

Illustrations: Political cartoon from 1904, showing Standard Oil’s stranglehold on US industry (via Wikimedia).

Also this week:
At Plutopia, we interview Paulina Borsook.

Review: Careless People

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
By Sarah-Wynn-Williams
Macmillan
ISBN: 978-1035065929

In his 2021 book Social Warming, Charles Arthur concludes his study of social media with the observation that the many harms he documented happened because no one cared to stop them. “Nobody meant for this to happen,” he writes to open his final chapter.

In her new book, Careless People, about her time at Facebook, former New Zealand diplomat Sarah Wynn-Williams shows the truth of Arthur’s take. A sad tale of girl-meets-company, girl-loses-company, girl-tells-her-story, it starts with Wynn-Williams stalking Facebook to identify the right person to pitch hiring her to build its international diplomatic relationships. I kept hoping increasing dissent and disillusion would lead her to quit. Instead, she stays until she’s fired after HR dismisses her complaint of sexual harassment.

In 2011, when Wynn-Williams landed her dream job, Facebook’s wild expansion was at an early stage. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is awkward, sweaty, and uncomfortable around world leaders, who are dismissive. By her departure in 2017, presidents of major countries want selfies with him and he’s much more comfortable – but no longer cares. Meanwhile, then-Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, wealthy from her time at Google, becomes a celebrity via her book, Lean In, written with the former TV comedy writer Nell Scovell. Sandberg’s public feminism clashes with her employee’s experience. When Wynn-Williams’s first child is a year old, a fellow female employee congratulates her on keeping the child so well-hidden she didn’t know it existed.

The book provides hysterically surreal examples of American corporatism. She is in the delivery room, feet in stirrups, ordered to push, when a text arrives: can she draft talking points for Davos? (She tries!) For an Asian trip, Zuckerberg wants her to arrange a riot or peace rally so he can appear to be “gently mobbed”. When the company fears “Mark” or “Sheryl” might be arrested if they travel to Korea, managers try to identify a “body” who can be sent in as a canary. Wynn-Williams’s husband has to stop her from going. Elsewhere, she uses her diplomatic training to land Zuckerberg a “longer-than-normal handshake” with Xi Jinping.

So when you get to her failure to get her bosses to beef up the two-person content moderation team for Myanmar’s 60 million people, rewrite the section so Burmese characters render correctly, and post country-specific policies, it’s obvious what her bosses will decide. The same is true of internal meetings discussing the tools later revealed to let advertisers target depressed teens. Wynn-Williams hopes for a safe way forward, but warns that company executives’ “lethal carelessness” hasn’t changed.

Cultural clash permeates this book. As a New Zealander, she’s acutely conscious of the attitudes she encounters, and especially of the wealth and class disparity that divide the early employees from later hires. As pregnancies bring serious medical problems and a second child, the very American problem of affording health insurance makes offending her bosses ever riskier.

The most important chapters, whose in-the-room tales fill in gaps in books by Frances Haugen, Sheera Frankel and Cecilia Kang, and Steven Levy, are those in which Wynn-Williams recounts the company’s decision to embrace politics and build its business in China. If, her bosses reason, politicians become dependent on Facebook for electoral success, they will balk at regulating it. Donald Trump’s 2016 election, which Zuckerberg initially denied had been significantly aided by Facebook, awakened these political aspirations. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg leads the company to build a censorship machine to please China. Wynn-Williams abhors all this – and refuses to work on China. Nonetheless, she holds onto the hope that she can change the company from inside.

Apparently having learned little from Internet history, Meta has turned this book into a bestseller by trying to suppress it. Wynn-Williams managed one interview, with Business Insider, before an arbitrator’s injunction stopped her from promoting the book or making any “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments” related to Meta. This fits the man Wynn-Williams depicts who hates to lose so much that his employees let him win at board games.