META ORDERED TO HIDE LIKE BUTTON FROM TEENS, A FEATURE IT SPENT $567 MILLION INVENTING
A New Mexico judge orders the company to protect kids from a metric it built specifically to make them stay.
A New Mexico court this week ordered Meta Platforms to pay $567 million into a youth safety fund and to hide like counts from underage users, prompting the company to announce it will now hide likes from teenagers with the same sincerity it once used to invent them. Internal engineers reportedly spent the morning trying to remember how the feature works so they can figure out how to turn it off.
The $567 million penalty, while historic, is projected by analysts to cover roughly eleven days of Instagram's ad revenue generated by users aged 13 to 17, meaning the fund will be fully replenished by the time this sentence is read aloud in a boardroom. Meta's stock ticked upward the same week on strong engagement numbers from that exact age group, a coincidence the company described as 'reassuring proof that the platform remains extremely safe to advertise on.'
'We remain committed to youth safety and to the engagement metrics that make youth safety funds possible,' a Meta spokesperson said in a statement legal had apparently stopped trying to unsay. Parents, meanwhile, are celebrating the ruling as a decisive victory, right up until their kids quietly move the group chat, the drama, and the sleepover planning to whichever app hasn't been sued yet this quarter.
