Meta lost $16.7 billion. You just lost your digital privacy

It’s easy to feel a certain schadenfreude over news of Meta’s $16.7 billion settlement with almost every state attorney general. Sometimes bad things happen to bad corporations. It’s hard not to cheer.For years, Meta has largely gone unchecked as it employed a business model that basically amounted to psychologically manipulating people through Skinnerian principles to spend as much time on its platforms as possible, in order to harvest their data and deliver personalized ads.Again, it’s easy to understand why anyone who ever felt Facebook violated their privacy or just wanted to give Mark Zuckerberg a swirly is ready to light some fireworks and crack open a bottle of champagne. However, it’s also important to understand that Meta’s settlement wasn’t about surveillance capitalism. Furthermore, it’s equally important to note that the settlement isn’t going to benefit most users of Meta’s platforms in any meaningful way. No, instead, the settlement is going to make the internet less free.To offer some background, the lawsuits Meta is settling concern the alleged harms caused by its social media platforms to minors. Not only are Facebook and Instagram said to expose young people to potential predators and age-inappropriate content, but the platforms are widely believed to be addictive and detrimental to mental health.The legal theories in which these lawsuits were based, according to the free speech advocacy organization FIRE, were “untested” and “faced serious First Amendment challenges.” The claims that Meta’s platforms are addictive in a clinical sense or that they pose a serious mental health risk are not well-supported in the scientific literature and likely amount to little more than a moral panic akin to post-Columbine concerns over violent video games or fears about ’80s rock music.Nevertheless, rather than fight 52 attorneys general, Meta agreed to pay a settlement and start doing more to create distinct user experiences for teens versus adults. As the settlement takes effect, those placed in teen accounts will be subject to content restrictions, time limits, “productive pauses,” and various curfews and blackouts after bedtime and during school.These new features might sound like a boon to any parent who has ever had to argue with a screaming child over screentime. However, as the settlement makes clear and as I have written before, this kind of age-based segregation in the digital world requires even greater amounts of data collection and analysis by Big Tech and ultimately translates to less privacy, anonymity, security, and free speech for everyone as age-verification procedures generally are not far removed from identity-verification measures and would have to be imposed on all of a platform’s users to be effective. Although the age-verification measures Meta will eventually use are not specified in the settlement, the document’s language strongly suggests Meta will be surveilling user activity with greater scrutiny, while also employing biometric tools and possibly requesting IDs. Teens who cannot circumnavigate these age-gating measures, as well as adults who refuse to submit to them, will subsequently be locked into teen accounts.HOOKING CHILDREN ISN’T FREE SPEECH. META IS RUNNING A CASINO IN YOUR CHILD’S POCKETNow, of course, no one has to use Meta’s platforms. But Facebook and Instagram have become two of the few remaining town squares in the digital era. Furthermore, given that states don’t get the full payout from Meta unless its competitors agree to similar age-gating policies, this creates an incentive to ensure that happens.Consequently, it may not be long before we all have to show our papers to be treated like adults in any of our digital town squares. Moreover, there is no guarantee this will stop with social media and not go viral across the web.Daniel Nuccio is an independent journalist and a spring 2026 College Fix fellow. He is a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute. He earned his doctorate in biology in 2025.