27 August 2026
Prosecutors across 47 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. territories have announced a groundbreaking legal settlement with technology giant Meta over accusations that the social media company deliberately designed addictive products they knew to be harmful to children.
Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, is set to pay at least $12 billion and up to $17.1 billion in financial penalties, in addition to implementing design changes for underage users. "This is the least they can do to prevent harms that have metastasized and have already caused suicides … [but] we cannot be relying on fines, or certainly even on litigation, after harms have already transpired.
What we need are rules of the road. And we need rules that go to the root cause of the business model," says Amba Kak, the co-executive director of AI Now Institute, who joins us for a wide-ranging discussion on tech policy and regulation.
Kak, who advises various governments on AI regulatory guidelines, adds, "The era of looking to tech CEOs or tech luminaries to give us answers for what are fundamentally social and political questions, I think, is gone."
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Meta's $18bn settlement may hasten reckoning for social media on child safety https://t.co/OMLoO6Cf4L
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) August 26, 2026
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