Meta Just Paid Nearly $17 Billion To Make Sure It Gets To Write The Kid Safety Rules For Every Other Social Media Platform

Such an absolute failure by the AGs, they made the situation worse with that deal

As noted, we already know that some of these things are directly harmful. Age assurance is a privacy nightmare. Enshrining it as the industry standard means the end of meaningful online anonymity, and it “forces” Meta to collect more data about all of us — including adults — while handing the states a pipeline to that data for whatever else they decide it’s useful for.

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This is also a perfect example of the kind of standard that only a giant can meet. A six-hour turnaround on 90% of reports is achievable when you have thousands of trust & safety staff and a decade of tooling. For a startup with four employees and a Discord server, it’s a fantasy — and now it’s the benchmark against which every AG will measure them.

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But for all the people “celebrating” this as a win “against” Meta, you’ve been fooled. Meta just cut a deal to put itself in charge of how social media works going forward. As Justin Maurer wrote on Bluesky, this is Meta taking a “please regulate me Daddy” approach to the government, and getting exactly what it really has been asking for.

We still don’t have any actual evidence that this will help anyone, let alone every kid. The state AGs didn’t have to prove how this would help kids. Meta didn’t have to prove it. The judge won’t be asked to. It’s just taken on faith. Meta offered this up, the AGs okayed it… and it all becomes a grand experiment on kids.

Real fuckin bad news