the long shot scheme to rattle the world's biggest social platform
Knives are out for Meta in court, with politicians and lawyers eager to send a message. But how likely is it to work? And is it even a good idea?
Four states are currently in court with a single mission. They want to find a way to hit the world's largest social media company where it hurts as hard as they possibly can. Theoretically, the damages from Meta misleading kids and teens about how several of their platforms worked, and exposing them to all sorts of dangers to their safety and mental health, could max out at $1.4 trillion, roughly the worth of the entire company. Anything even within striking distance of that number means financial apocalypse.
It makes for a splashy story and good clickbait, but it's almost certainly not going to happen because every outstanding share of Meta would need to be sold off and given the sheer amount of money in question, a lot of high priced lawyers and investment fund managers will be fighting tooth and nail, and calling in every political favor they can to get that number down to something with at least three fewer zeros.
On top of that, using children as a cudgel to get companies to obey government edicts is already being abused as a back door for web censorship. If a company could now be forced to dissolve for the sake of child safety, this gives governments even more power, especially when fewer and fewer platforms control today's web. There is something not quite kosher with states teaming up to do their best impression of senators ambushing Caesar in court, especially when there are obvious political scores to settle.
At the same time, Meta is not exactly a sympathetic entity. Turning the toxicity, anger, and conspiracy theory of the 4channified web as we've come to know it, into a lucrative business was their greatest achievement. They don't seem to care about what impact their platform has on anyone, and sound like straight up amoral supervillains as they push ever more unpopular ideas on billions of their users. But par for the course for a company whose founder called his own users "dumbfucks" though, I suppose.
In short, if you've ever lamented that your feed is now full of performatively stupid and evil takes from people who seem to exist only to annoy you into engaging with them, you have Meta to thank, and it's hard for your first instinct not to be "I hope they leave Zuck on the streets in a cardboard box." But being able to go beyond that first instinct and not using your power to punish people for being deeply and noxiously unpleasant is the ultimate test of a society based on the rule of law.
If you wanted to break up Meta, the proper tool already exists: antitrust. There is ample public evidence that Facebook buys other platforms or uses its lawyers to neuter rivals before they gain traction. Nebulous claims like "it's dangerous for kids to use the apps" are far less objective, and while they might be true, cross into the far thornier issue of how much responsibility a faceless corporation built to maximize shareholder returns should play in a child's life vs. their parents. It's a difficult ideological argument to have, and one that's easy to abuse.
You can try to declare that the web should be a safe space for all ages, then use it as a cudgel against any critic or opinion that you don't like. This is the go to strategy of any modern authoritarian government, and something the Trump administration has been very open about wanting to implement as well. A matter of safeguarding children's' mental health today becomes "indoctrination" tomorrow, and thoughtcrime the day after. This is what Russia has done first with LGBTQ+ spaces, then with opposition to its war on Ukraine, and the exact playbook being deployed by the GOP now, right down to the verbiage being employed.
So, as much as it pains me to say this – because as a quick search of the archives will show, I like Facebook about as much as I like repeatedly stubbing my toes on the edge of the bed while still mostly asleep in the middle of the night – and defend Meta even indirectly, this lawsuit feels like a dry run of a strategy that shouldn't be allowed to win in court because it would set an extremely dangerous precedent for the future of the web given its current state.
Just the fact that this is the approach the system wants to take to reign in Meta and not antitrust law just shows how badly atrophied anti-monopoly enforcement has become and how much power we've ceded to corporations on the naive idea that the almighty stock market will force them to be have like good citizens despite a 50 year track record showing us that it will do no such thing. And really, that's every bit as unsettling as the precedent of using kids as a legal WMD instead.
