Meta shuts down the trial to save the business

Last week, a trial began in Oakland that could mark a before and after for the technology industry. In just four days, Meta has agreed to introduce substantial changes to Instagram and Facebook and pay 17 billion. The agreement avoids a sentence, but above all, it avoids weeks of testimonies, internal documents, and headlines that would have allowed the company's business decisions to be publicly reconstructed. Accepting the agreement on the fourth day can therefore be read as an extraordinary concession, but also as a reputational risk mitigation strategy. Meta pays, redesigns part of the product, and raises a firewall before the trial reaches Zuckerberg. The markets seem to have interpreted it this way: the stock price rose by 1.3% after the agreement became known.

At the same time, the company is trying to present itself as the scapegoat for a problem that affects the entire sector. Its defense is that adolescents move between dozens of applications and that the measures will only be effective if TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube adopt the same framework. There is some truth to the argument: the attention-grabbing model is not exclusive to Meta and a sectoral response is needed. But shared responsibility cannot become diluted responsibility. That other platforms exploit similar mechanisms does not exempt Meta from responding for its own decisions.

The economic structure of the agreement materializes this battle for the narrative. Meta will pay 12 billion dollars in any case, but the remaining 5 billion will depend on whether the other major platforms accept comparable conditions. It is a huge sum, but it must be put into context: the company is valued at 1.47 trillion dollars and in the last quarter alone it earned 60.8 billion. Furthermore, the payment will be distributed over ten years. Thus, the company partially transforms its defeat into a sector leadership operation: it stops presenting itself as the company obliged to rectify and tries to appear as the first to establish the new standard. It is a smart move. The same agreement that evidences the inadequacy of its policies allows it to proclaim that now it is the others who must follow its example.

For years we have debated the toxicity of social networks, especially during adolescence. Now the agreement confirms something essential: the harm cannot be attributed exclusively to the lack of self-control of adolescents or the supervision of families. The product architecture must also be intervened upon. Internal reports show, however, that the measures are not sufficient. Arturo Béjar, former head of integrity at Facebook, has been one of the protagonists of the start of the trial and one of the main whistleblowers. When Instagram presented its teen accounts as a major security improvement, Béjar put the promises to the test again. The report Teen accounts, broken promises,, prepared with various child protection organizations and independent researchers, contrasted Meta's announcements with the actual functioning of the product using test accounts, screenshots, and recordings. Protections against adult contact could be neutralized by the recommendation system itself; minors under thirteen years of age continued to appear easily identifiable, and apparently innocuous content about weight loss, self-harm, or body dissatisfaction could become, through algorithmic accumulation, an overwhelming stream. The conclusion is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a new configuration is not a safeguard if the company does not demonstrate what harm it reduces, in what proportion, and for how long. This creates a

Here the precedent of the big tobacco companies is revealing. The tobacco industry did not lose the major lawsuits when it was proven that smoking was harmful. This was already known, and companies could appeal to "free choice." The turning point came when internal documents showed what they knew, what evidence they had hidden, how they had intensified addiction, and with what strategies they had captured adolescents.

The manual is not new. In 2020, Tim Kendall – the first monetization director of Facebook – admitted before the North American Congress that they had "copied a page from the big tobacco companies' manual."

The lesson from tobacco is clear, but the agreement with Meta adds a new certainty: when legal pressure is great enough, what for years seemed technically unfeasible can be implemented in a matter of months. However, the experience with adolescent accounts forces us to distrust advertising as a unit of measurement. Now, new protections will have to be subjected to independent supervision and data on the results will have to be demanded.

Here is the final irony. In Europe, we have the tools. The guidelines linked to the Digital Services Act provide for privacy by default, changes to recommendation systems, and the deactivation of features that encourage excessive use. Some of the measures Meta will now apply in the United States align with what we have long known needs to be done. Therefore, it is not ignorance, but an asymmetry of power. Measures that would best protect minors limit the ability to capture attention, data, and revenue. This is why lobbying is an extension of the business model.

But no firewall will resolve the fundamental contradiction. Meta can change the design, limit features, and multiply safeguards; as long as the business continues to depend on capturing us, retaining us, and extracting data from us, the incentives will push in the opposite direction. Digital platforms will be responsible and positive the day our attention ceases to be an exploitable resource. In the meantime, they will only enlarge the graveyard of promises.