Smoking used to be everywhere, the way Facebook, TikTok, Snap, YouTube and Instagram are now. Society decided to break the habit, but it took a long time.
David Streitfeld has written about Silicon Valley since the late 1990s.
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, went on federal trial a few weeks ago. Some 47 states had accused it of marketing addictive and harmful products to young people.
It was an all-encompassing courtroom assault on the social media powerhouse. Meta, valued at $1.47 trillion, warned it might be on the hook for $1.4 trillion.
That is real money, even in Silicon Valley. Since Meta had already lost or settled several social media cases this year, critics and commentators started to wonder: Was this social media’s Big Tobacco moment, a historic occasion when a once-popular pastime gets kicked to the curb by the combined judgments of regulators, courts and activists?
On Wednesday, Meta settled with the states. It will pay up to $17.1 billion over a decade and change its social media properties to make them less compulsive for young people.
The sum of $17.1 billion is rather less than $1 trillion. Those hoping for the end of social media as we know it and the downfall of Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, were vocal in their disappointment. “This penalty is minuscule when you consider the wealth & power behind Meta,” Public Citizen, a consumer rights group, complained on Bluesky.
If social media critics did not get their Big Tobacco moment, historians said, that might be because they were chasing a myth. The Big Tobacco moment was never very big.
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