Meta’s $17 Billion Settlement Won’t Stop Zuckerberg’s Addiction Machine

Meta, oops, we're sorry, kind of, sort of. Will $17 billion make you kind of forget this so we can go back to doing what we do best, which is reaching into the brain cells of little children and adults and the whole world and garbling them and destroying them and ruining them so we can suck out all the money by selling their eyeballs? That's essentially what happened Earlier this week when Meta didn't admit they did anything wrong, but said, okay, we're gonna pay fines of up to $17 billion. All sorts of states were going after Meta. The accused Meta of deliberately designing Facebook and Instagram to addict children, concealing the dangers, and illegally collecting data from some children under the age of 13. Meta, of course, denies all wrongdoing. No, we couldn't possibly have done anything wrong, but we're going to pay $12.1 billion and ultimately potentially $17.1 billion and redesign the platform for minors, even though we don't really think minors use it. And even though we don't think it's doing anything bad, okay, we're going to throw you a bone, attorneys general. Now, this is a proposed settlement. It's requiring court approval. So let's not get carried away. It's not like a judge said, guilty, guilty, guilty, handcuff Mark Zuckerberg, take him off to prison, put him in solitary confinement, put him on an island, lock him up and throw away the key. That's not what happened. Some people are portraying it that way. But this was still a big deal. This is the largest big tech settlement in history. It's the largest consumer protection settlement since the 1990s tobacco settlements. The previous second-largest big tech settlement was roughly 1/12 of the sum. But let's put it in perspective. Yeah, $17.1 billion sounds like a lot of money. If you and I had to scramble to pay that parking fine, we'd have a tough time doing it. But let's put it in perspective. Meta is today worth $1.48 trillion. So $17.1 billion is just a little above 1% of the entire market cap value of Meta. In other words, it's that much goes up and down in a 4-hour swing on the trading floor each day in the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ stock, whatever exchange they're on, they go up and down that much every day. It's like a cough. Now, the average American, or most Americans, have a net worth of, you know, $80,000 or less. So that would be like you having to pay a parking fine, let's say a collection of parking fines for $800. It would hurt, but would that prevent you from driving a car or occasionally parking wherever you want? No, it wouldn't. And let's just put this into further context. Mark Zuckerberg is worth $197.9 billion according to Forbes, which frankly isn't that reputable, but that makes him the 6th richest person in the world. So if he had to pay the whole fine personally, which he's not going to do and he won't do, how would that have an impact on his life? I just imagine Zuckerberg talking to his wife, Priscilla, this is bad news. A $17 billion fine? I got to pay it personally? And he doesn't. But imagine if he did. What would the impact be on our lives? And Priscilla, the doctor, might say, I don't think it's going to change much of anything. You'll still be able to buy as many e-foils as you want. We'll still be able to buy all of the islands of Hawaii. It's not going to change much. He's like, Mark— Mark says to his wife, you're not thinking this through. Clearly, Priscilla. Now, I want our kids, our grandkids, and our great-grandkids to all grow up to be successful medical doctors, engineers, founders, philanthropists, people of renown who really make their mark in this world. But what if after about the 12th generation, they all become heroin addicts because they got so much money and no incentive to work whatsoever? According to my calculations, that by the 16th generation, our 16th generation grandkids, they won't be able to be heroin addicts anymore. They will have run out of all of our money through profligacy. That $17 billion invested today in an S&P 500 index fund should, according to my calculations, 16 generations from now result in another trillion dollars. How in the world will our future generations, our 16th generation of grandchildren, not have at least the option of becoming heroin addicts? And make no mistake about it, wealthy people want their kids to use their minds and be smart and hardworking, but they also want a plan B. And every billionaire wants a Plan B for their kids, which is if they totally screw up everything, life is still going to be really, really cushy. So that's where they— that's why they fight for every last crumb on the ground. That's why they fight every single legal action, every single regulation, because, hey, we all want to perpetuate our bloodline. I get it. And it's just an absolute matter of fact. These billionaires see it already with their own kids. They can only imagine how bad it's going to be 5, 6, 7 generations away. And when you get down there, no one has an incentive. Would you work if every single penny you ever made had no impact on the size of house you had, on the type of car you drive, the type of vacation you have? You can say you will, but it's a very extraordinarily rare person who means it when it actually happens. So that's why Mark Zuckerberg is, is doing this. Yeah, let's look at again what Meta was accused of doing: deliberately creating a compulsive use among kids. Infinite scrolling, autoplays, constant notifications, algorithms Emotional algorithmic emotional manipulation, steering vulnerable children toward eating disorders and self-harm. Knowing about dangers through internal research, publicly claiming its platforms were safe. Collecting information from children under 13, knowing it without parental consent, and making parents responsible for defeating systems engineered by thousands of technology experts. Let's go back a little bit in history. Frances Haugen, the whistleblower, the famous— I guess inside the headquarters of Facebook, the infamous whistleblower— her point, and I don't know any sane person who disagrees with it, is that you can still have freedom of speech, but what Facebook does is far different. They are deliberately spreading hate. They are not even asking someone to read a post. And they just spread it. So, for example, let's say I'm an absolute Trump-loving savage and I see a headline that says Biden is convicted of pedophilia. It was covered up by the elite, and it's because they are involved with pedophilic orgies with him when they're not smoking cigars with Fidel Castro. Imagine that's the headline. If I'm a Trump-loving savage, I look at that, I don't bother reading it. I don't bother to see if it's satire or comedy or written by an insane fool with one follower from his jail cell. I just see the headline, boom, I share it to every followers. What Frances Haugen has recommended is why don't we ask people to actually read the thing before they share it? That's not censorship. Why don't we let them sit with it for, say, 10 seconds rather than 1 second seeing the headline, share it? Because that's how hatred spreads. That's how hysteria spreads. That's how anger spreads. That's how a whole society is torn apart. Now, this is not This case yesterday was not about how Facebook is destroying all of our society, even though they are. It's about specifically how they're harming children. Look at what's going on on Instagram. You see little kids there, all of a sudden they look like a thrice-divorced Beverly Hills 50-year-old woman who's had 10 plastic surgeries, and they're saying, that's what I want my face to look like. That causes some real scars psychologically. But Zuckerberg says, it's the price. If that's the price to pay to keep my stock price up, okay, worth it. Now, Mark Zuckerberg, 20 years ago, he's with his friends and family. Hey, I've got this great idea to bring the world together, to connect the world, make us all one. Sounds great. And I'm not saying he was an angel back in his Harvard days. We know that's not quite true. However, I do believe that there was some genuine attempt at the beginnings of Facebook by a lot of the top people there to bring the world together, connect the world, connect with family and friends. That's how I use Facebook. Oh no, not anymore. Now it is a massive, massive machine to print money And it makes every TV station, every TV network, every greedy TV executive, every greedy Hollywood mogul look like Mother Teresa in comparison. It is far and away the most successful media company in the history of the world, unless you want to compare it to things like Google. Okay, it is an absolute juggernaut. And people don't like to stop that. If your whole self-image is, I'm the mogul who generates outsized profits every quarter and is called a genius and makes everyone around me richer and richer and richer, I don't want to stop that. It's addictive. But it's not addictive in a way that completely rots your brain cells. That's the big problem. What Mark Zuckerberg is putting out there does in fact rot brain cells, essentially. 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 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. So here's what they've agreed to. A default of 2-hour daily minimum across Facebook and Instagram. Why in the world we want teenagers in America to basically have a 14-hour-a-week part-time job jiggling their brain. That's bizarre to me why any parent would even want that. Parents must approve disabling the limit. Okay, I can only imagine about how many eighths or tenths of a second it will take before kids figure out how to act like the parent doing that. The apps are going to be blocked from teenagers from midnight to 6 AM. Wow, isn't that sweet? Allowing children who need, say, 9 hours of sleep, which most health experts recommend— that's what children get, 9, even 10 hours of sleep— how nice of Mark Zuckerberg to make it so that kids can only be mildly or severely sleep deprived instead of extremely sleep deprived, setting it up so they can only have 6 hours of sleep, and that's supposed to be a concession. And the notifications are silenced overnight and during school, which means, oh, I didn't get a notification, let me hack into it and see who sent me something or who liked one of my posts at 3 AM. 15-minute continuous use warnings. Click delete. That's going to have a big impact. Autoplay can be disabled. You know what else can be disabled? Americans at the grocery store thinking about buying soft drinks, candy, pop, sugary treats. They could just disable their shopping cart not to buy that. But they don't. No one's going to disable that. And if they do, their kids will able it. Stronger age verification. How old are you? Are you 18? Wink wink, nudge nudge. Yeah, I'm 18, says the 10-year-old. Cosmetic surgery filters restricted. Okay, what does that mean? Instead of looking like Joan Rivers, you'll, you know, you'll look like one of the Housewives of Beverly Hills. How is that going to be restricted? Likes and reaction totals hidden by default. Okay, so now you're going to have to spend even more time texting, messaging all your Facebook friends saying, hey, did you like that? I can't see if you did or not. I'm not sure if that is really going to, to help. So what is this really like? This is like a cigarette company coming to every elementary school in America Saying, here, here's some cigarettes for before school, here's cigarettes for class break, here's cigarettes for lunch break, but oh, we're gonna say no smoking between 3 PM and 3:15 PM each day because we want to help you. Would you buy that? Would you, would you say that's nice? It's— imagine if Jack Daniel's came to your house and said, Hey, we're setting up a bar in your kids' bedroom. We're gonna stock it with all their favorite drinks. We're gonna add every kind of Kool-Aid and sugar and Slurpee into it. And then we're gonna announce it's happy hour, but it's not gonna be from 5 to 6 PM each day. It's gonna be 20 hours a day. And we're gonna have this cocktail bar in their bedroom and it's gonna have lights and flashy things and free presents. And pretty glasses and pretty pictures, and they can drink all the Jack Daniel's they want every day. But oh, we'll now close the bar from midnight to 6 AM. Would that make you feel better about Jack Daniel's if they did that? Oh, that's ridiculous. No one would stand for that. That is what you're standing for if your kid is on Facebook. Now, I'll go ahead and say I don't let my teenager use Facebook. To my knowledge, she does not have Facebook on her phone when I check it, when I check on the parental control. So, what does that actually mean? It means she's probably on Facebook and there's nothing seemingly I can do it. I've hired consultants. I've hired people who, compared to me, have PhDs from MIT in computer software to try to get social media in general. And phone use in general down on my daughter's phone. Can't do it. She laughs in my face every time I do it. She cracks it in about half a second. And that is by design. Maybe she's the most genius kid in the world. Like to think that, but maybe not. Maybe Facebook and all the other social media platforms design their phones or design their applications, design their websites in such a way that you do have to have not one but 3 PhDs from MIT to actually install correct parental controls. Otherwise, any kid with a room temperature IQ or above is going to be able to crack that code, that parental limit, in about 10 seconds. And if you say, oh no, not my kid, You may want to check your kid's phone a little more. Now, here's the other interesting thing about what Zuckerberg does. He said, "Okay, I didn't do anything wrong. We're not admitting to anything any doing anything wrong. However, you got to stop all the other social media companies from doing these bad things to kids too." Huh? That's his argument because you know he doesn't want to be the only drug dealer. Kicked out of the ghetto or Beverly Hills. He says, if you're kicking me out, if you're restricting my access to sell my drugs, you got to go after all the other drug dealers too. That is essentially his argument, and it kind of makes him look a little guilty. So what would actually slow Facebook down? How about this? How about saying you're going to sacrifice all profits so that you can never see your stock price go up more than 5% a year? That's a punishment that would really hit home. How about 20% of your market cap? Next time you're caught doing this, Boom! 20% of your market cap is taken over by the federal government. That would be a punishment. How about a wealth tax on Zuckerberg himself? Say, look, this is your baby. We're now going to cap your net worth at half a billion dollars. Now, most people could live on half a billion dollars. I could live on half a billion dollars. Could you? But if we told Mark Zuckerberg, you keep this up, you keep polluting the brains of our kids, you keep trying to addict them, tantalize them, tease them, get them to spend more and more and more time on this rather than doing what kids historically did— go out and play. Now, some of you will think I'm insane for suggesting this because you've never heard it or see it. There, believe it or not, there was a time when after-school kids would come home They would have a quick snack and they'd say, see you later, Mom or Dad, I'll see you at dinnertime. And from about 3:15 until 6:30, they would walk or get on a bicycle and go to little Jimmy's house 3 blocks away and play outside. Go to the park. Maybe ride across town, maybe build a fort somewhere. They don't do that anymore because of things like Facebook and Instagram. And yeah, TikTok is no saint in this. Their day is coming too. But we could actually figure out a way of giving children their childhood back. I fought the fight in my own family and I'm losing. It's hard to win. When it's 2-to-1 odds. But it doesn't mean that our policymakers and you and I can't try to create some change here. Because make no mistake about it, we're headed towards a world where there is Mark Zuckerberg and the children— at that point, maybe the 100 children of Elon Musk— And the children of these tech titans, none of whom are even allowed to have social media— most cases, they're not even allowed to have cell phones or iPads— they're going to be running everything in the world. And everyone else is going to have this phone surgically attached to their hand. Maybe the hand will just be removed, and we'll be walking around with these nubs staring at our cell phone every second of the day. That's not quite right. I just made a boo-boo. I said we'd be walking around. Nobody's going to be walking in the future. We are going to be sitting in a chair, a couch, or an electric wheelchair moving by then, probably through telepathy, telling our phone to tell us to have the wheels move. And that way, and it'll have sensors so we won't have to worry about bumping into anything. And that way, we don't ever have to look up because we can look at the next ridiculous, absurd 30-second video of what our favorite sitcom star growing up looks like today at age 72 in a bathing suit because it's amazing. I'm TJ Walker. This is Filtered. Thanks for joining me today.