Meta Hit With Massive Ruling Over Harm to Kids, Zuckerberg’s Attention Machine Exposed

Ultimáis. A New Mexico judge just ordered Meta to pay $567 million for harming children, on top of the $375 million a jury already hit them with in March. That's nearly a billion dollars. One state. And Meta's official response? They work hard to keep people safe. Right. Trusting Meta with your kids' safety is like hiring a babysitter who asks your kids, would you like Frosted Flakes for breakfast or a giant bag of M&M's? And when your kid picks the giant bag of M&M's, the babysitter says, great choice. Now how about we dive into a tub of Nutella and guzzle some Red Bull? And then this babysitter charges you by the hour. The judge found Meta's platforms are helping drive a youth mental health crisis. Meta's plan: appeal the ruling, deny everything, and keep pinging your 10-year-old's phone at 2 in the morning. Now, the full story. Judge Brian Bycheld in Santa Fe issued the ruling Thursday night. The $567 million goes into a fund for the damage, including treatment for harmed kids. Add the March verdict where jurors found Meta misled users about safety and enabled sexual exploitation of minors. Meta now owes New Mexico $942 million. That's enough to buy every kid in New Mexico a bicycle, a therapist, and a flip phone from 2004, which might be the best mental health plan on the market. The judge wrote that Meta's platforms are a significant contributing factor to the youth mental health crisis among New Mexico's young people, and Attorney General Raul Torres said Meta knew knew for years its platforms were harming kids, connecting predators with children, and it, quote, "chose engagement and profit over their safety." That's not a blogger in a basement. That's the top law enforcement officer of an American state. When the Attorney General and the guidance counselors agree, you have accomplished something special. And New Mexico is just the opening act. Meta faces thousands of lawsuits from teenagers, school districts, and attorneys general, and this month it goes to trial in Oakland against the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. Meta says it disagrees, plans to appeal, and remains confident in its record of protecting teens. Meta being confident in the record of protecting teens is like BP being confident in its record of protecting pelicans. Godzilla being confident in his record of protecting Tokyo. The judge also ordered changes to the product. In New Mexico, Meta can no longer push notifications to underage users between 10 at night and 7 in the morning. Think about that sentence. Until this week ago, part of the business model of one of the richest companies on Earth was buzzing a 12-year-old's nightstand at 3 AM. That wasn't a bug. That was the product working exactly as designed. Somewhere in Menlo Park, an engineer got a bonus, and his performance review literally said, "Exceeds expectations at keeping fourth graders awake." Here's my favorite detail in the ruling: children in New Mexico are now legally limited to 90 hours a month on Meta's apps. 90 hours. That's 3 hours a day every day, and that's the court-ordered improvement. 3 hours a day is not a hobby. It's a part-time job with no paycheck where the entire benefits package is anxiety. If your kids spent 3 hours a day practicing violin, you'd be booking Carnegie Hall. 3 hours a day on Instagram and you're booking a therapist. When a court has to cap your product for children the way we cap nicotine and gambling, You're not a social network anymore. You're a vice. Congratulations, Mark, you're in the same regulatory category as cigarettes, but with worse customer service. And let's talk about this company. Even setting the kids aside, Facebook has been getting worse and worse and worse for everybody. Try using Facebook groups lately. Groups used to be the one good thing left. Your running club, your school parents, your guitar nerds. Now it's like holding a neighborhood meeting in the middle of a casino while a guy in sunglasses keeps interrupting to sell you crypto and miracle gummies and your feed— wall-to-wall pop culture landfill. I have no idea what any of my friends are up to anymore. I haven't seen an actual post from a real friend since the first Trump administration. As far as Facebook is concerned, everyone I know vanished in 2019. And was replaced by AI-generated Shrimp Jesus and strangers screaming about celebrities I've never heard of. And God help you if your account gets hacked or deleted. You're simply out of luck. Meta has 3.5 billion users and roughly the customer service operation of an abandoned lemonade stand, which is unfair to lemonade stands. At least there's a kid you can talk to. Your photos, your business page gone. No phone number, no human being, no appeal. 15 years of your family history held hostage by a chatbot that keeps asking if you've tried logging out and logging back in. A company fined nearly $1 billion for failing to protect children can't even protect your login. And how's morale inside Meta? Every employee I've talked to hates it there, and I finally understand why. The boss keeps going on podcasts explaining how excited he is to use artificial intelligence to eliminate their jobs. All their jobs. Mark Zuckerberg may be the first CEO in history whose employee retention strategy is a countdown clock. The official team building exercise is updating your resume. Would you like to be the sort of successful person who is dominating news, at least in your industry? Well, if so, it's time to up your your skills. At ultimize.com, I've created online courses to help you do that. Now, here's the thing, no obligation. You can get a free course on communication skills, a free course on how to build better habits. All you have to do is go to ultimize.com. That's ultimize.com. No obligation. Go there now. Now, let me be fair because fairness makes the criticism land harder. Zuckerberg deserves real credit for one thing. He took what MySpace and Friendster and all the early social sites were fumbling, and he actually made it work. Early Facebook was a glorious thing. Old classmates reconnecting, far-flung families sharing photos, lost friends finding each other. For that, sure, he deserves to be a billionaire, I guess. Maybe not $200 billion, but one Absolutely. But for the last 10 years, this man has been locked in a personal competition with Elon Musk to see who can be the biggest jerk in the history of the world. And folks, it is a photo finish. He burned $80 million with a B on the metaverse, an idiotic digital ghost town nobody ever asked for, where legless cartoon executives held meetings in an empty virtual conference room. $80 million and the avatars didn't have legs. A kindergartner's refrigerator drawing has legs, and those are free. Then he pivoted to sucking up to Donald Trump, tossing out the fact-checkers and every last shred of decency standards like they were expired condiments. And underneath all of it sits the basic algorithm. If somebody wants to spread a lie, Meta will build them a giant audience. It used to be that Nazis and flat earthers had a distribution problem. A mimeograph in a basement, shouting at strangers at a bus stop. Now somebody posts that Hillary Clinton is a transsexual who secretly murdered JFK while poisoning your local water system, and they've got 200,000 new followers by lunchtime and a $5 million brand deal by dinner. And by breakfast the next morning, they're on a podcast being introduced as a free speech warrior. The lie doesn't need to be true. It just needs to be engaging. Truth doesn't trend. Decency doesn't scale. Outrage does both. And outrage is the only god this company has ever worshiped. And here's the deeper truth: Mark Zuckerberg is not an evil genius twirling his mustache. It's worse than that. It's indifference at industrial scale. The algorithm doesn't hate your children. The algorithm doesn't even see your children. It sees inventory. To that machine, your daughter is a billboard with a heartbeat. Whatever you measure is what you maximize, and Meta measures exactly one thing: minutes of human attention. It will harvest them from a lonely 12-year-old at 3 in the morning just as happily as from anyone else, because the machine can't tell the difference between connection and addiction. And the man who owns the machine stopped caring about the difference somewhere around his second $100 billion in net worth. So here's where I'll land. Whether you have kids or not, a court can fine Meta $1 billion, but no judge on earth can order Meta to care about you. The only person who controls your attention is you, and your attention is the most valuable asset you will ever own. Every hour you hand to the feed is an hour you didn't give to your health. Your skills, your family, or your actual friends. So tonight, do something radical. Pick up your phone, skip the apps, and call one friend Facebook has been hiding from you since 2019. It's free, and Zuckerberg can't sell an ad in the middle of it. Yet because this man built a machine that promised to connect the world, and instead he built the loneliness business, stop being his best customer. I'm TJ Walker, and this is Filtered. Ultimize.