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.
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.