On Wednesday, August 26th, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced an unprecedented $17 billion settlement with Meta. The State of California positioned itself to pocket the staggering sum from a settlement with Meta over its kids’ safety features. The deal forces Meta to implement sweeping changes for its underage users, such as limiting minors to two hours of daily use, blocking access from midnight to 6 a.m., and banning “beauty filters,” among other safety features. California alone is poised to receive between $1.5 billion and $2.1 billion.
Attorney General Bonta announced that they had “secured a settlement with Meta that will make social media less dangerous for our kids and make a world of difference for children and their families.” On the surface, this looks like a victory: a massive corporation will finally be held accountable for the widespread psychological damage it had indirectly caused America’s youth. But let’s pause the victory lap for a moment and look at this through a different, more uncomfortable lens. What exactly are we celebrating? A massive financial penalty against a tech giant, or a massive institutional absolution of personal responsibility?
The settlement embedded mandatory age assurance protocols directly into Meta’s platform. Under these new terms, Meta must deploy an age‑verification system with a false‑positive rate no higher than 3% for users aged 13‑15 and 10% for those 16‑17; new accounts whose age remains unverified after 14 days are automatically treated as teen accounts regardless of the age stated. The company must also incorporate “Age Signals from Google and Apple Operating Systems and App Stores” into its framework (Section II.A.5). An independent auditor, selected jointly by Meta and a committee of states, will monitor compliance for a full decade.
Digital rights groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, issued a same-day critique of the Meta settlement. EFF said the deal “enshrines Meta’s harmful surveillance into law,” harming anonymity and increasing breach and government-request risk. That is the usual EFF result on the fights that matter, nothing more than a post or an amicus brief shot off into the digital ether.
Not that the EFF is particularly eager to defend those who fall outside its donors’ or members’ ideological comfort zone. Consider 2021: the White House, CDC, Surgeon General, and FBI pressured Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to suppress or remove vaccine-skeptical content. Users lost reach, with some having their accounts banned entirely. That January, Apple and Google booted Parler from their app stores, and AWS pulled its hosting, effectively killing the platform.
The EFF wasn’t silent in the abstract; it posted that Amazon’s move “should be of concern” as an escalation of speech control down the infrastructure stack. Years later, in its Murthy brief, it pondered how to distinguish government advice from coercion, leaving room for official “persuasion.” But what it did not do was represent Parler—nor did it attempt to restore the site to a host. The accounts stayed down. Parler went dark.
Another instance came in 2021 with the #DropKiwiFarms campaign. Whatever one thinks of Kiwi Farms’ content, it was arguably the only space where prospective gender-transitioners could find unfiltered, firsthand accounts of experimental treatments (archived in the “Stinkditch” category under the thread “SRS and GRS Surgeons and Associated Horrors – The Medical Community of Experimental Surgeons, the Secret Community of Home Butchers,” an active forum thread still updated daily with fresh accounts of complications and botched procedures) and the complications doctors often downplayed. Several detransitioners have since cited Kiwi Farms as a crucial source of information in their personal journeys. The site also played a role in documenting and exposing members of niche animal-abuse fetish communities to law enforcement across multiple countries, including Baby Monkey Torture networks such as Baby Monkey Hate, 0chan.life, Million Tears, EvilUnveiled, VidLii and a cluster of so-called “popufurs” within the furry community who were found participating in Telegram channels depicting systematic abuse of animals, from German Shepherds to roadside deer carcasses. Yet when the #DropKiwiFarms campaign gained steam, the EFF took the accusations at face value and declined to comment or defend the platform. The reason appears straightforward: too many of its members and donors identified as transexuals, and defending the site would have been ideologically inconvenient.
The pattern is consistent: selective engagement, thin results. The EFF will shit out a quotable blog post or an amicus brief, but it will never put an attorney on the docket for the right-wing influencers and platform administrators who lost accounts, app-store listings, or networking infrastructure between 2020 and 2022. To this day, Kiwi Farms struggles to remain online, while the animal-welfare work its users have done receives almost no acknowledgment from the very organizations that claim to defend free expression.
A Mother’s Choice
But set the legal arguments aside for a moment, and consider the archetype at the heart of this lawsuit: the single mother who buys her fourteen-year-old daughter an iPhone for her birthday or Christmas. At first, she is overjoyed to see her daughter enjoy the new device but a year or two passes, and the mother notices a change. Her daughter grows quiet, reclusive, detached from the physical world. She stops eating dinner with the family. She stops seeing her friends. Any attempt to reach out is met with apathy or hostility. The mother watches in silence as her child implodes in real time with no one to blame but the glowing rectangle in her daughter’s hands.
Now, the mother has a choice. The hard choice is to intervene physically. It involves confiscating the device, downgrading to a “dumb phone” (an alternative for adults looking to unplug as well is the Light Phone), setting up parental controls (using the myriad of services offered to them by their carrier plans, on the Google App Store via Google Family Link, and through Meta’s Family Center) and enduring the tantrums and social backlash that come with being the “bad guy.” You know, the uncomfortable aspects of parenting that you agree to when you choose to shit out a kid?
Instead, the easier path is chosen and the problem is outsourced. The mother gets a referral to some mediocre virtual therapist through her middle-of-the-road employer-provided healthcare plan. This also includes appointments to see a psychiatrist, who eagerly sprinkles a handful of psychiatric medications into her daughter’s daily routine. Before she knows it, the problem is no longer behavioral, but clinical; a disease that must be treated with medical intervention, not a habit that must be broken with parental assistance.
And when that daughter finally takes it upon herself to paint the walls in a fresh coat of brain matter, her mother is left with a guilt too heavy to bear. But rather than sit with that guilt, she looks for a scapegoat. She finds Instagram, the algorithm, and the “evil” tech company at the heart of it all.
The Luxury Yacht of Institutional Absolution
A lawsuit is a life raft for parents drowning in a sea of their own guilt, and when a state attorney general joins the fray, that raft becomes a luxury yacht. Institutional backing validates the grievance, recasting a personal failure as a systemic injustice. Suddenly the narrative is no longer about a mother who failed to monitor the Wi-Fi she paid for, the phone plan she controlled, or the app store filled with free parental controls. Instead, a coalition of states argues that Meta “intentionally hooked kids on its platforms” and the story becomes corporate greed versus the public good.
But let us be brutally honest:
Instagram did not buy the phone.
The algorithm did not hand the phone to the child.
Neither was it Meta’s nor the Zuck himself’s responsibility to the monthly bill.
The parent did.
The most tragic part of this saga is the simplicity of the solution. One word could have prevented all the grief, lawsuits, and billion-dollar payouts: “No.”
“No, you cannot have an iPhone at 14.”
“No, you cannot have the Wi-Fi password.”
“No, you cannot be on Instagram until you prove you can handle it.”
These are not radical parenting techniques; they are ancient. My mother never hesitated to confiscate a laptop or a Game Boy when the situation called for it. Then again, she possessed more backbone than most parents today, not merely because she happens to be a bit of a hard-ass, but because she understood that being a good mother sometimes required playing the villain in her child’s eyes, all for the sake of long-term well-being. Raised by such a mother, I find it difficult to comprehend why, in the year of our Lord 2026, uttering a simple “no” to a child has become too heavy a cross to bear. I may not be a parent myself, but with all due respect: some of you really need to grow a spine already, for fuck sake!
Rather than bear that cross, these parents turned to lawyers. Wielding the guilt of thousands of other negligent parents as leverage, they are helping California extract billions from Silicon Valley before the state’s own hostile legislature drives the companies out first. California stands to take $1.5 billion to $2.1 billion from the Meta settlement over the next ten years, if (when) the court approves the deal. The governor and the legislature will divvy it up. Whether that money ultimately funds mental health services or digital literacy programs remains an open question; more likely, it will dissolve into the salaries and pensions of the state workers who keep the bureaucratic machinery turning. What it will not do is undo the years of isolation, nor buy back the time a parent spent watching a child deteriorate while failing to intervene at the most basic level.
The settlement itself reveals the logic of the arrangement. Under its terms, Meta must put minors on a two-hour daily cap across Facebook and Instagram, lock them out from midnight to 6 a.m., and mute notifications during school hours. These are digital training wheels, and they come off the moment a parent allows it. The caps are defaults, not mandates, and easily overridden. Rather than removing the parent from the equation, the settlement simply automates the very “no” that a parent could have issued from the start.
Meta has already advertised the remaining hole. In an open letter announcing the deal, the company urged TikTok and YouTube to adopt the same rules, “because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another.”
So, congratulations, California. Gavin Newsom, you shit-eating mongoloid, you did it! You won billions. Nobody is calling it justice, though.
The settlement requires Meta to equip their apps with parental controls that are both optional, and removable at a parent’s discretion. On the surface, the introduction of age checks and default curfews reads as decisive intervention from the system, a clear signal that platforms are taking child safety seriously. But these measures are less a solution than a gift left at the doorstep, wrapped in rhetoric and labeled “for the children.” Inside the package lies a far more intrusive apparatus: layered age-assurance protocols, identity verification systems, and a thickening dossier on who belongs online.
Once accepted, however, this gift cannot be returned; the checkpoint does not leave with the cameras or the closing statements. It lingers, outlasting the press cycle, and embedding itself into the infrastructure of access. For all its sophistication, this technological raft remains a poor substitute for the older, cheaper, and far more effective tool: a present adult in the household with the balls to endure a few years of teenage resentment.