Meta has finally fallen over the legal precipice towards which it had been edging for years. This week’s agreement with 52 US attorneys general, under which they will withdraw their lawsuit accusing the company of developing an addictive social network for minors, marks a dramatic retreat. Meta will pay up to $18 billion and introduce significant changes to the design of its platforms.
The agreement is a major concession. But it is also the latest chapter in a much longer story: how Facebook, once celebrated as a simple way to keep friends connected, became a vast advertising machine whose business model depends on collecting data and keeping people engaged for as long as possible.
The account, reported by El País, begins in 2004, when Facebook appeared on computer screens, four years before the iPhone helped usher in the era of smartphones. The platform created by Mark Zuckerberg, the young engineer known for wearing jeans and the same grey T-shirt, rapidly spread around the world.
Facebook was easy to use and appeared relatively uncomplicated. It was a place to talk to distant friends, share holiday photographs and meet people. Users could keep up with the lives of people they knew, while the company concentrated on making the product more attractive and encouraging people to continue placing their lives on it.
Behind that apparently benign service, however, Zuckerberg understood early that users were handing the company something valuable.
In a conversation with a friend in 2004, later revealed by The New Yorker and Business Insider, the 19-year-old Zuckerberg reportedly referred to the personal information being provided by users in deeply dismissive terms. At the time, he had just launched TheFacebook from his room at Kirkland House at Harvard University.
As the platform accumulated users, its priorities changed. The problem was no longer simply how to build a popular social network, but how to turn the enormous amount of information being generated by its users into revenue.
In 2008, Zuckerberg recruited Sheryl Sandberg as chief operating officer. She arrived from Google, where she had helped develop its advertising monetisation system. Facebook soon began placing advertisements across its platform.
The results transformed the company.
Within a few years, Facebook and Google dominated digital advertising. The enormous quantity of data accumulated by Facebook enabled advertisers to target audiences with extraordinary precision. Users could be profiled according to age, income, location, interests, lifestyle and even political affinities.
The case of Cambridge Analytica demonstrated the power of that system. The British consultancy used data from 87 million Facebook users without their permission to support electoral campaigns, including the Brexit campaign and the 2016 presidential election that brought Donald Trump to the White House.
For advertisers, such precision was difficult to resist. Facebook began generating enormous revenues and developed into the technology giant it is today. In 2025, the company generated more than $200 billion in revenue, with 98% coming from advertising.
The model depended on data. And collecting data required something else: attention.
The longer users remained on Facebook, Instagram — acquired by Facebook in 2012 — and the company’s other applications, the more opportunities there were to collect information and serve advertisements. The platforms were therefore redesigned around the objective of extending the time users spent navigating them.
The infinite feed became one of the defining features of that transformation, presenting one piece of content after another without an obvious stopping point. Reward mechanisms created what has been described as a slot-machine effect, with users pulling down to reveal what would appear next. Notifications could accumulate and then be delivered when someone had been away from the application, encouraging them to return.
Over time, artificial intelligence refined these mechanisms.
The feed was no longer simply a stream of posts from accounts users had chosen to follow. Algorithms increasingly determined what each person saw. The objective was not merely to provide information but to identify material most likely to hold attention. Extreme and polarising content, according to the account described by El País, often performed better than other material.
For adults who joined Facebook in 2004, this transformation unfolded gradually. For those born after that year, it represents something fundamentally different: an environment in which likes, endless scrolling and attention-seeking content have been present throughout their lives.
The question that eventually emerged was whether the consequences could be particularly damaging for children.
Anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self-harm and even suicide have increased among young people in recent years. Nearly one-third of American teenage girls reported suicidal thoughts in 2021, 60% more than a decade earlier, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Parents had long suspected that their children’s heavy exposure to social media could be connected to what they were experiencing. But proving that platforms were addictive by design was another matter. The companies involved were among the world’s most powerful, while authorities had not previously taken decisive action.
That began to change in September 2021.
The Wall Street Journal published the Facebook Files, a series of reports based on hundreds of internal documents leaked by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook engineer. The documents indicated that company executives were aware that Facebook and Instagram algorithms were exposing teenagers, particularly girls, to content promoting anorexia and even suicidal thoughts.
The allegations were particularly damaging because the documents suggested that such material remained on the platforms partly because it performed well. Content that kept users engaged for longer could generate more revenue.
An internal investigation by the company, according to the material cited by El País, found that 6% of American teenagers and 13% of British teenagers who said they had considered suicide attributed that thinking to Instagram. Despite possessing that information, company executives were accused of failing to act.
The revelations intensified scrutiny of Facebook. Weeks later, the company was renamed Meta, a move widely interpreted as an attempt to distance the corporate identity from the controversies surrounding social media and focus attention on Zuckerberg’s metaverse project.
Haugen’s disclosures also encouraged families to take legal action. Other former employees subsequently came forward, including Arturo Béjar. In 2022, a year after the Facebook Files, the foundations of a collective lawsuit involving families and educational institutions began to take shape.
In 2023, attorneys general from 41 states filed their own lawsuit, later joined by three more. The unusual coalition brought Democrats and Republicans together around concerns about children and social media.
The legal campaign intensified this year.
In March, a New Mexico jury found Meta guilty of misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and putting minors at risk. In Los Angeles, Meta and YouTube, owned by Google, lost a case in which they were found responsible for generating addiction among minors.
The agreement announced this week with 52 attorneys general represents the largest settlement yet in the campaign against Meta. But it does not close the legal battle.
Beginning in October, a series of trials connected to the collective lawsuit brought by families and educational institutions is due to begin. Lawyers representing those plaintiffs have made clear that they do not regard the agreement as an end to their case.
“The agreement of this week by Meta changes nothing for our clients,” they told El País.
For a company whose extraordinary growth was built on transforming personal information and human attention into advertising revenue, the legal consequences now reach directly into the foundations of its business model.
The original promise of Facebook was connection. Its evolution produced something much larger: a system capable of observing users, predicting what would hold their attention and monetising that attention at unprecedented scale.
Now the company faces the question that has followed it from its earliest years: how far can the pursuit of engagement and profit go before the mechanisms used to create it become a legal liability?
The $18 billion agreement may mark a significant retreat. But with further trials approaching, Meta’s judicial ordeal is far from over.
