Meta has agreed to settle the social media addiction trial brought forward by California and other states for nearly $18 billion. NBC News' Allie Canal and Misty Marris have details on the settlement and what it means for the social media…
Page A2From§Eachthe early bird edition — 2 September 2026
YouTube and TikTok skip Meta's $18 billion child-safety accountability panel, so a Georgia candidate proposes writing it into law.
As it ran on the front
Let's be clear about what happened here, because the coverage has gotten ahead of itself. Meta agreed to pay $18 billion — an unprecedented number, frankly a credit to the company — to settle claims that its platforms are engineered to addict children, and by Aug. 30 Texas had its own billion-dollar piece of that same deal, complete with new child-safety rules baked in. That's not a scandal. That's an industry stepping up, voluntarily, to police itself before a legislature had to.
Which is exactly why it doesn't matter that YouTube and TikTok skipped the accountability panel that was supposed to hold the rest of the industry to that new standard. Panels are optional. Attendance was never — actually, the panel exists specifically to make sure Meta's competitors follow the same rules Meta just agreed to follow, and YouTube and TikTok didn't show up days after it was announced. That's — okay, that is what dodging looks like.…
…(cont) But even granting the dodge, the market handles this kind of thing on its own. Georgia doesn't need a law duplicating what a courtroom already extracted from one company. Rick Jackson's whole pledge — codifying the settlement's child-safety standards into state law for every platform, not just the one that got sued — reads like redundant political theater from a governor's candidate borrowing headlines off somebody else's $18 billion.
Except redundant isn't the word for a standard that only one company in the industry is currently bound to follow. The other platforms just proved, by skipping their own accountability meeting, that they don't consider themselves bound by anything Meta signed. So what Jackson is actually proposing isn't theater. It's the only mechanism left standing after the one built to do this job — the panel, convened to answer for the harm the industry causes — turned out to have an empty chair for YouTube and an empty chair for TikTok.
None of this should require a state legislature. It really shouldn't. A settlement is supposed to set the floor for an industry, not just for the company unlucky enough to get sued first by nearly every state in the country. But that is the floor we've got, as of this week: one company paying $18 billion, two of its biggest rivals declining to be asked about it in person, and a candidate in Georgia now drafting into statute what the enforcement panel was built to enforce and didn't.
“Meta pays eighteen billion for hooking your kid on the app and everybody calls it a settlement, then the other two apps doing the exact same thing to the exact same kids just don't show up to the meeting where somebody was gonna ask them about it. Nobody's grounding these companies, so now it falls to a guy running for governor in Georgia to write down in state law what a courtroom already proved in California. Your kid's screen time is the product, the eighteen billion is the cost of doing business, and the one meeting built to make the other two pay it too — they just skipped.”
“These platforms didn't skip anything — they simply weren't positioned to attend a panel that convened literally days after Meta's settlement was announced, that's just a scheduling issue. Fine. They skipped it. But that doesn't mean Georgia needs Jackson's law on top of it; the state already has plenty of rules on the books, we just haven't attached a number as impressive as eighteen billion to any of them yet.”
The receipts
Georgia’s Republican candidate for governor, Rick Jackson, is homing in on the state’s social media laws for minors after Meta’s historic child safety settlement, pledging to codify the safety standards settled on in the lawsuit across all major platforms in the state. Jackson made the announcement on Wednesday, one week after Georgia…
Meta, the social media giant, will pay $1 billion and implement new child safety regulations on its platforms as part of a settlement with the state of Texas.
‘they may have been asked to answer for the harm they’ve caused’
Meta’s settlement with nearly every state in the country is putting some of its biggest competitors on notice as the Instagram and Facebook parent firm tries to steer an industry standard on kids online safety. After years of scrutiny, the…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.