Social Media

Haidt's Moment

Plus: The scourge of scromiting, blaming air traffic control, and more...

Liz Wolfe | 8.28.2026 9:30 AM

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Fronteiras do Pensamento/Bumbleedee/Wikimedia Commons/Dreamstime)

Was Jonathan Haidt right all along? Readers of this newsletter—and writers at Reason—are surely divided on this one. On Wednesday of this week, news broke that Meta had reached a humongous $17.1 billion settlement with 47 states and the District of Columbia, forced to pay damages due to child-endangerment claims stemming from its social media algorithms and platforms.

"The owner of Facebook and Instagram agreed to the financial penalties for violating federal child privacy and states' consumer protection laws, the states announced," reports The New York Times. "Meta also agreed to limit how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to bans on features that stoke mental health issues, striking at the heart of the company's business of engagement for advertising."

"The settlement effectively ends a bellwether federal trial in the U.S. Northern District of California in Oakland, where California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey were seeking roughly $200 billion over accusations that Meta harmed children," adds the Times. Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, at times invoked a Section 230 defense, the "First Amendment of the internet" that makes it so companies don't bear liability for the posts of their users—which Reason has repeatedly defended amid a media landscape that doesn't seem to understand the value of Section 230.

The Reason Roundup Newsletter by Liz Wolfe Liz and Reason help you make sense of the day's news every morning.

Δ

Email

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Email(Required)

SUBSCRIBE

"After years of being barred from suing social platforms, state prosecutors have gotten creative," wrote Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown earlier this........

© Reason.com