Meta Pays $17bn to Settle Teen Addiction Claims

There is a gate across this road, and the gate is called the algorithm that decides what a fourteen-year-old sees when she opens her telephone at eleven at night. The modern man - in this case forty-seven attorneys general and, more remarkably, Meta Platforms itself - says, “I see no reason for this gate except addiction and deceit; let us pay seventeen billion dollars and take it down.” I confess I am delighted to see it taken down. I only observe that a corporation which agrees, on a Wednesday, to hand over such a sum without a trial, without a jury, without the tedious business of having its engineers cross-examined under oath, is not a corporation confessing to a crime. It is a corporation buying back a fence it built on purpose, and hoping nobody asks what it was built to keep in.

This is the interesting thing about the settlement, and it is a thing the newspapers, being in a hurry, have not stopped to notice: the claims themselves - that Facebook and Instagram were designed to addict teenagers and deceive the public - remain, after seventeen billion dollars, entirely contested. Meta admits nothing. It writes a cheque the size of a small nation’s road budget and continues to insist, presumably with a straight face, that the fence was never really there. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It is something stranger and more modern: it is the confession made of money instead of words, because money can be exchanged without ever touching the question of guilt. The attorneys general get their number, which is politically legible. Meta gets its innocence, which is legally preserved. The only people who do not get anything settled are the teenagers, who remain exactly as addicted on Thursday as they were on Tuesday, the algorithm having been purchased out of court rather than dismantled in public.

Now here is the paradox, and I ask you to follow it, because it resolves into something the reformers will not like. The progressive assumption is that the fence - the engagement algorithm, the infinite scroll, the notification that arrives precisely when a child’s attention is weakest - was built by accident, by careless men chasing profit without malice, and that seventeen billion dollars is simply the toll for having built it carelessly. But a fence built by accident does not require forty-seven state governments and years of internal documents to prove it exists. The very scale of the settlement is evidence against the innocence it purchases. You do not pay that much to make an accident go away. You pay that much to make a design go away - and a design, unlike an accident, was built for a reason, which is that it worked exactly as intended, and made money exactly as intended, for exactly as long as intended.

So the fence was real, and it was built on purpose, and the purpose was profit, and the profit was extracted from the attention of children, and now the corporation pays for the fence without admitting it built one. This is not new safety measures protecting young users, whatever the press release says. This is a corporation discovering that the fence it built to keep attention in has become expensive to defend, and choosing to pay the toll rather than move the fence. The safety measures that follow will be real enough, and I do not doubt some children will be safer for them, in the way a man is drier for an umbrella even if he has not admitted it is raining.

But the deeper fence - the one the attorneys general have not touched, and could not touch with any settlement - is the assumption that a business model built entirely on holding a child’s attention can be reformed by fining it, rather than by asking why we built a society in which a child’s attention is the most valuable thing in the room. Seventeen billion dollars will buy a great many parental controls. It will not buy back the hour a girl in Ohio spent last Tuesday night unable to put the telephone down, because the gate was never really about money. It was about a room she could not leave, and nobody, for seventeen billion dollars, has yet agreed to unlock the door.