Early last month, a judge in New Mexico ordered Meta — the owner of Facebook and Instagram — to pay a $567 million penalty over the addiction and mental health harms its platforms have caused teens. Of that sum, roughly $420 million is earmarked for what the ruling calls 'treatment services' for young users deemed harmed by the platforms. Meta is appealing.
Three weeks later, the company reached a far larger settlement, this time with 47 states and the District of Columbia, agreeing to pay up to $18 billion to resolve similar claims. The attorneys general who brought the case are calling it historic relief for what they describe as a generation in crisis.
The settlement does more than write a check. It requires Meta to build new safeguards for teen users and to give parents greater control over how their children use Facebook and Instagram. But like the New Mexico judgment, it also channels large sums of the settlement money toward counseling — therapy, in plain terms — as the primary remedy for the harm alleged.
Not everyone thinks that's the right call. Mike Goldstein, co-founder of the Center for Teen Flourishing, and Jenny Anderson, a journalist and senior fellow at the same organization, argue directly that therapy is not the best use of the money. Asked whether it is, their answer, in their own words, is blunt: no.
The record here is worth sitting with plainly. Two separate legal processes — a state court judgment and a 47-state attorneys general settlement — arrived independently at the same prescription: institutional counseling, funded at scale, as the fix for a problem attorneys general themselves frame as generational and urgent. Neither disclosed source lays out the evidentiary basis for that specific allocation, only that it was made.
That is the trade-off worth naming. Once a penalty of this size is negotiated, the money does not return to shareholders, to users, or to the market to be redeployed by anyone closer to the actual harm. It is routed by state officials into a single, government-favored channel — in this case, therapy providers — on the AGs' own authority, with no public accounting yet of whether that channel is the one most likely to help the teens in question.
Follow the incentive, not the press release. Attorneys general have a plain interest in framing an $18 billion number as 'historic relief'; the size of the settlement becomes the headline, and the mechanics of where the money actually lands become a footnote. Critics inside the field being funded — people who work directly with teens, not press offices — are the ones now saying publicly that the mechanics deserve scrutiny before the money moves.
What is true does not need an adjective. Meta was found liable, or agreed to settle as if it were, for real harm to teenagers. That fact stands on its own. Whether the specific remedy attached to that liability — mass-funded therapy, chosen by state officials rather than tested against alternatives — actually serves the teenagers it is meant to help is a separate question, and it is one the settlements themselves do not yet answer.
