Meta’s ($17b) Cost of Doing Business

Dear Citizens,

$17.1 billion! That’s how much Meta has agreed to pay in a landmark settlement with 51 U.S. attorneys general over allegations that Facebook and Instagram endangered children. It is the largest-ever settlement with a Big Tech company. It sounds enormous. It is enormous. Right?

Not really, when you do the Meta math.

In 2025 alone, Meta reported $200.97 billion in revenue and $60.46 billion in net income. Its revenue was nearly twelve times the entire settlement. And $17.1 billion amounts to about 28% of just one year’s profit, to account for nearly two decades of warnings, evidence and alleged harm to children.

There are what could be real wins here. Meta must impose a two-hour daily cap for children, block overnight access, silence school-hour notifications, strengthen age checks and parental controls, restrict beauty filters and visible like counts, and submit to independent auditing. Those changes could make Instagram and Facebook safer for young people.

But a settlement is not structural reform. Meta denies wrongdoing. The core surveillance capitalism model remains intact. The systems built to maximize attention, collect data and convert engagement into profit are still the systems underneath the product. And when the penalty for years of alleged child endangerment is a fraction of one year’s earnings, it risks becoming a cost of doing business, not a reason to change the business.

So yes: celebrate the protections. Then keep fighting—for enforceable rules across the industry, real transparency, meaningful liability and technology designed around children’s well-being instead of corporate growth.

Here’s what else to read, watch and do this week.

☎️ ONE READ: WHO KILLED THE BURNER PHONE? ☎️

Burner phones have a Hollywood reputation: drug dealers, spies, phones snapped in half and tossed into the nearest trash can. But anonymous prepaid phones also protect domestic-violence survivors, journalists and their sources, whistleblowers, activists, unhoused people and anyone who needs a private line without creating another permanent identity trail.

Now, under the banner of fighting robocalls, the FCC is considering “know your customer” rules that could require phone providers to collect sensitive information As CNET explains in this essential privacy read, the people most harmed may be the very people who most need anonymity—and the sophisticated scammers supposedly being targeted are likely to find a way around it.

👉 Read the whole piece here.

🦁 ONE WATCH: WANTED, MORE COURAGE 🦁

Jessica González is a close friend of The Citizens, co-CEO of Free Press and an OG member of our Real Facebook Oversight Board. So when she sits down with Democracy Now! to connect the dots between Meta, media consolidation and government retaliation, we listen.

In this wide-ranging interview, Jessica breaks down the case against Meta for designing addictive products for young people; ABC’s decision to sue the FCC over the Trump administration’s pressure campaign; the proposed Paramount–Warner Bros. megamerger; and why a news organization partnering with Palantir is a very bad idea.

As always, Jessica is fierce but hopeful: bending the knee only invites more pressure, while public resistance can give institutions the courage, and the business incentive, to stand up. “The actions we take as regular people make a difference,” she says.

👉 Watch Jessica’s full Democracy Now! interview here.

⚡ ONE ACTION: DISARM THE KILL SWITCH ⚡

What happens when a country’s government, hospitals, banks and communications systems depend on a handful of foreign technology companies, and a foreign leader decides to pull the plug?

That’s the question behind a UK petition from Open Rights Group and 38 Degrees calling on the government to secure Britain’s digital sovereignty: use open-source systems the UK can control, diversify suppliers and make sure essential public infrastructure cannot be switched off from somewhere else.

If you’re in the UK, sign the petition. Elsewhere? Share it. Digital sovereignty is not isolationism; it is resilience, competition and democratic control over the systems we all rely on.

That’s all for this week!
Team Citizens

*PS - Join our Signal Chat if you haven’t already! 400+ people share practical advice on protecting your data, organising against Big Tech and staying ahead of what you need to know.