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Greetings. Welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion. Imagine a company's product violates so many laws that it has received $29 billion in fines since 2019. Imagine that not 100 lawsuits were filed against the same company, but 7,000. This company, of course, is Meta. Mark Zuckerberg, you have been served with a subpoena and a lawsuit. Excuse me, sir. Mark Zuckerberg, you have been served with the documents. Excuse me, sir. You have been handed the documents. Incredibly, the number of lawsuits against Meta is now growing by about 200 every month. These lawsuits cover everything from wrongful death and the mental health of teenagers to covert surveillance
on WhatsApp. But that's not all. On top of all this, the company faces 100,000 other out-of- court litigation in the form of arbitrations. This figure of 100,000 is taken from Meta's own reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission. One of the latest lawsuits ordered Meta to pay up to $18 billion in settlements. It's a landmark Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now answering tough questions in front of angry families. Even worse, the company has spent all of its free cash flow on AI projects, and off-balance sheet liabilities are approaching half a trillion dollars. But the thing is, in this whole situation, money isn't the biggest problem for Meta.
It is important to note and critically understand that earlier this year there was a turning point that changed everything for Meta. In a case against Google and Meta in March 2026, they were found liable for the harm caused to a teenager. It is only because of addictive features that these companies can be held accountable. This is a very powerful signal for these companies. People hugged and cried outside the Los Angeles courthouse after learning that Meta and Google had been found guilty of harming young people. responsible. For the first time in legal practice, juries ruled that the design of apps, not just their content,
was harmful to users. Parents, we need you to join us, because today this will end. Big Tech, your game is over. 6 million, but the decision opened the door to an avalanche of lawsuits that left Meta in deep trouble. They targeted the very features that make Meta so profitable. The plaintiffs want to force the cancellation of like counters, the elimination of endless feed and autoplay, and the change of the recommendation algorithm. This, along with many other changes. All of this is about things that states say have contributed to the mental health crisis among young people. Many analysts called this a " big tobacco" moment for Meta. This is extremely important because these latest cases are forced changes
by the US government. In this issue, we analyze how high the social cost of Meta has become and why the legal response has been so late. I think this is the moment when social media giants start to admit: yes, our products are not designed for the well-being of all our users, and we need to do something about it more actively. Two decades ago, social media was seen as a technological marvel that brought people together in a way we had never seen before. Mark Zuckerberg was once the unexpected architect of these changes. To say that today perception has completely changed
is an understatement. Today, Instagram and Facebook have 3 billion monthly active users on each platform. To put it another way, about 70% of all people on this planet who have an internet connection and are not in Russia or China use one of Meta's products every day. But it wo n't last forever. The company behind Facebook and Instagram has reached a settlement totaling nearly $18 billion to settle a lawsuit over social media's harm to children. The latest case filed against Meta spans 29 US states, and the settlement forces Meta to redesign its apps for teens. This includes a 2-hour daily limit, a restriction on posting and viewing content from midnight to 6:00 am, hiding likes,
and an algorithm-free feed option. Earlier, in August 2026, in a separate decision, New Mexico Judge Brian Basham fined Meta nearly a billion dollars. $942 million- that's how much Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, has to pay for harming children. The court also ordered as removing like counters, which have been found to help teenagers. The judge went further, declaring Meta a public menace, comparing it to a polluting factory that harms the entire population. Meta is appealing this decision. Of course, these changes are a good start, but some say they are not enough. Many people forget
how much destruction this one company has caused in the world. Over the decades, Meta as a company realized that it had built the perfect set of software systems and algorithms that could exploit human behavior. The goal was simple: to allow the algorithm to optimize the maximum number of hours spent on their platforms, and therefore, take the maximum amount of time out of people's lives. More hours on the platform meant more money from targeted advertising. Algorithms are very smart in the sense that they latch on to things that people want to continue interacting with. Back in 2017, the algorithm found a key vulnerability. People stayed longer if they were angry or divided. The reason is that psychologically
our brain cannot help but pay attention to things that are a threat or a social violation. Such content attracts our attention much more than neutral or positive content. This has been well proven in research. For example, this study found that posts about political outgroups were up to 6.7 times more likely to go viral than other top engagement drivers. These types of posts also provoked angrier reactions. We knew to some extent that something bad could happen Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive who was once responsible for the growth of the social network's user base, now says he feels immense guilt for the social network he helped build.
We have created tools that tear apart the social fabric of how society works. The short-term dopamine feedback loops we have created are destroying the way society works. So, Meta had a choice. They could either change the algorithm to show more balanced content, or do nothing. And, of course, they decided to do nothing. As the recommendation algorithm got better at optimizing engagement, users felt psychologically worse, but advertising dollars flowed in. This algorithm still exists today, and we see the consequences. I think almost everyone would agree that there is much less trust in the world now than there was 10 years ago. Not only is the international order collapsing, we are seeing country
after country being torn apart from within. It is clear that there is a connection between technology and the collapse of human trust and dialogue. One thing that almost everyone has realized is the central role of social media algorithms, which are very primitive AI, but have still caused so much chaos around the world. In fact, these primitive AIs were given a simple task by social media platforms. Increase To get more people to spend more time on the platform, and AI went out into the world, experimented on millions of human subjects, and discovered that the easiest way to get a person's attention is to press the hate button, or the
anger button, or the fear button in the mind; This is exactly what they started doing and took over the world. product manager turned whistleblower Frances Haugen testified that engagement-based algorithms intentionally push users towards extreme, divisive, and inflammatory content to keep them scrolling. Facebook's products harm children, inflame hatred in our communities, threaten our democracy, weaken our national security, and much more. It's about families at home and around the world who live in places where hatred, fear, and conflict have reached their peak through online platforms and the Facebook platform knew about it and allowed it to happen anyway.
Facebook knows what's happening on the platform, and they have systematically underinvested in combating this harm. They know they are doing too little for this. In fact, they have incentives to keep things that way. Previous reports indicate that Meta has been studying this phenomenon since at least 2016. In 2017, an internal working group was even created. Her goal was to investigate whether maximizing user engagement on Facebook causes political division. The answer was unequivocally yes, and it turned out that reducing political division made people less engaged. In 2018, potential solutions to the problematic algorithm were recommended, such as showing users a wider range of viewpoints. The only
problem was that it would slow down user growth. So Meta didn't show much interest, and the idea was dropped. Over the years, more and more studies have shown the same thing. Algorithms designed to maximize engagement have figured out that the best way to achieve this is to divide us and draw more and more users into radical views. The worst example of this was the horrific events in Myanmar. In 2017, viral fake news and inflammatory comments against an ethnic minority in the region escalated into a full-scale genocide. This led to over 9,000 deaths in a short period of time and caused forced displacement and refugee status for 700,000 people. And there are serious concerns about, you know, the idea of federation or ethnic unity in Myanmar. The
Facebook platform later admitted its guilt, although it had previously downplayed its role. This was almost 10 years ago, and the practice still continues. In 2026, a former engineer turned whistleblower told the BBC that senior management had ordered him to allow more extreme content in users' feeds simply to compete with TikTok. Quote: "They supposedly told us it was because of the stock price drop." End of quote. A recent internal Meta report admitted that their algorithm has learned to encourage outrage because it maximizes engagement. They claim that this is inconsistent with their mission, but further place the responsibility on content creators to produce less negative content. For Meta, their algorithm is not a problem. But what about X, TikTok, and even
YouTube? They all have algorithms capable of similar things, right? Yes, but Meta affects the largest number of people on this planet, and the company has knowingly harmed the mental health of adults and especially teenagers. Documents from another recent court case reportedly contain Meta's own internal research linking social media comparisons based on "likes" to increased loneliness, poorer body image, and negative mood among teens. And again, they didn't do anything significant about it. Since 2021, internal documents indicate that more than 100,000 children are sexually abused on the platform every day. And again they decided to do almost nothing. It's just sad at this point.
The latest federal lawsuit alleges that Meta made its platforms addictive for children, misled the public about the dangers, and violated children's data privacy, which allegedly led to youth depression, anxiety, and in some cases, suicide. Now, a group from 29 US states has filed a lawsuit, claiming that Meta intentionally designed the platforms to make young people addicted to them, damaging their mental health. Four states are now seeking damages of up to $1.4 trillion. In August 2026, whistleblower and former Meta engineering director Arturo Bejar testified that Zuckerberg prioritized growth and user engagement over child safety.
I think these verdicts will be heard all over the world. When my daughter was 14, she asked if she could start using it. I approached this very carefully. We talked about it constantly, and soon she began receiving unwanted sexual advances from strangers, deep, horrific misogyny over her passion for cars, and attacks on her and her body. And the most important thing for me was that because I was responsible for safety before, I knew: if my daughter was going through this, millions of other children were going through it too. And this was a study I did on Instagram: it showed that one in eight children experience unwanted sexual harassment, and one in five feel worse about themselves because of it. All of these types of harms that we
as parents know and see have been happening at an alarming rate. So I brought these numbers to Mark Zuckerberg, saying, 13-15 year olds, one in five, one in three-all of them are facing these terrible problems that you can prevent. I know how you can prevent this. And he didn't even reply to the message. Wow. At the beginning of this episode, I mentioned 7,000 lawsuits. Over 3,100 of them are being heard by Judge Gonzalez Rogers, and there are approximately 3,300 more in the state of California alone. So, together, that's about 6,400 individual court cases. But there is a certain nuance here. Many of these cases also include Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok as defendants. Although the plaintiffs say that 70% of the blame lies with Meta. As for
Meta specifically, there are many more of them in the US, the EU, and around the world. If you add it all together, by conservative estimates, that number easily exceeds the 7,000 mark. The most recent $18 billion settlement with these 29 states opens the door for even more significant changes to the very design of the Instagram and Facebook platforms. Hopefully, this will bring more attention to the negative aspects of software design and algorithms. Meta also faced a separate lawsuit alleging that the company could access virtually all private messages on WhatsApp. Although a spokesperson told The Guardian that Meta strongly denies this and called the allegations, quote, " categorically false and absurd."
End of quote. Many experts called this a "big tobacco moment" for Meta. But I don't think this is the end of the road. Other peace agreements await us. Hundreds of other lawsuits are still being prepared. But in reality, it may not mean what most people think. Although the 1998 $400 billion lawsuit against tobacco companies did reduce smoking rates, Louis Kyriakidis, director of the Albert Gore Research Center at Middle Tennessee State University, says, quote, "This settlement was in the best interest of the tobacco companies. They bought themselves out of significant litigation and were allowed to continue doing business." End of
quote. Robert Proctor, a Stanford professor who has written about and studied the "big tobacco" moment, adds, and I quote: " Americans still smoke more than 170 billion cigarettes each year." End of quote. So it will actually be more difficult for Meta, and by and large, social networks in general, to continue operating as before, but these legal problems don't mean they're over. Unfortunately, Meta has $200 billion in advertising revenue per year to stay in the market for a long time to come. If they cut AI spending, they will have a lot of financial room to maneuver, but if the number of cases continues to grow and Meta's top management is distracted by all these lawsuits, it could negatively affect the
company's focus in the coming years. It should also be noted that Meta does not admit any fault in any of this. There is a saying: "Watch what they do, not what they say." Even Zuckerberg himself has limited his children's access to phones and screen time on social media. What does this actually say? So, here's a question to ask yourself. What would the world be like without Meta? Obviously, there would be no Facebook, but Instagram would probably still be an independent photo-sharing app. Videos would exist, yes, but it's possible that there wouldn't be an endless stream of short clips like there is today.
WhatsApp would also be an independent company. Of course, Meta's products have brought some real benefits to society. Small business support, diaspora connectivity, But all this costs our society too much. We have repeatedly seen evidence that Meta knew it was contributing to radicalization and polarization. Over the past decade, these phenomena would have existed anyway, but the algorithm has made them spread faster and wider. Teenagers and young adults would have better mental health, and billions of people's data wouldn't be collected for targeted advertising. 7,000 class action lawsuits aim to bring back some of that old world.
Depending on how effectively the law works, we may see real changes in First for teenagers, but hopefully for the rest of us too. And this does n't just apply to Meta. Many lawsuits are directed against negative aspects of TikTok and other apps The deal with Meta could set new industry standards. About 30% of the total payout depends on whether other social networks, such as TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat, implement appropriate security restrictions and financial sanctions. Of course, this won't happen instantly. They have up to 6 months to make these changes. Let's hope that better times are already on the horizon. We have all seen modern social media for what it really is. We agreed that they had some advantages, but the negative aspects affected
billions of people, and we all live in the world that resulted from that. No one is calling for getting rid of social media, we are simply saying: make using it less harmful for the most vulnerable children or adults. How much everything will change, only time will tell. What do you think about these lawsuits and the verdict? Do you think they are too strict, too lenient, or completely appropriate? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. Well, that's all for me. My name is Dagogo, you watched Cold Fusion and I'll see you again in the next episode. Goodbye, friends. All the best. Cold Fusion. This is new thinking.
