Meta Shifts the Blame + Do Data Center Bans Work? + The Final HatGPT

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Kevin Roose** (0:26)
Now, I thought you were gonna bring up another story which happened last night, which is, so you and I last night are having drinks with, let's say, a very fancy technology person.

**Casey Newton** (0:36)
Yeah, a legend, even.

**Kevin Roose** (0:37)
A legend. And we're sitting there at this very small table at the restaurant, very nice restaurant, and all of a sudden, you just do a Mr. Bean spill an entire glass of wine on yourself.
And you revert, you are not a clumsy person, you are tall, which often leads to you just flailing your limbs around. So you are trying to clean up the wine on yourself, while also making a joke about how you just got so excited talking about the future of media that you spilled your wine on yourself.

**Casey Newton** (1:11)
Kevin, it was so horrible. And you have to keep in mind, Kevin and I don't even drink anymore, okay?
But all of a sudden, there's some very good wine being poured in front of us, and our guests are drinking wine. And I just had the feeling of, this is going to be one of those times where I have a glass of wine. And how does my body repay me? By almost immediately spilling half a glass of what I believe was a very nice chardonnay all over my shirt. So I don't know how our guests received what I did, but I was very embarrassed.

**Kevin Roose** (1:42)
I thought it was charming because you're so composed, and it was just a moment where you turned into Mr. Bean for 30 seconds, and I appreciated that.

**Casey Newton** (1:51)
I was flailing, bro.

**Kevin Roose** (1:58)
I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

**Casey Newton** (2:00)
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

**Kevin Roose** (2:01)
And this is Hard Fork.

**Casey Newton** (2:02)
This week, Meta agrees to a $17 billion settlement over child safety, why they caved, and what it means for social media. Then, Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan returns to the show to share his thoughts on why banning data centers won't slow AI progress. And finally, it's all hats on deck for the final at GPT.

**Kevin Roose** (2:29)
Well, Casey, we got some big news just before we started recording today, which is that Meta has settled its big multi-state lawsuit with all of the attorneys generals. Attorneys generals?

**Arvind Narayanan** (2:44)
I always mess that up.

**Kevin Roose** (2:49)
They have agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion and make a series of changes to their platforms. This is a big deal.

**Casey Newton** (2:59)
It is a really big deal. This is a case that I have been following since it was filed in 2023
Initially, you can go back and read the first thing I wrote about it, which is that I didn't think that the case as filed looked all that compelling. But then, Kevin, an unredacted version of the suit came out and I thought, this company is in trouble. And indeed, fast forward to today, and this is the largest settlement that Meta has ever agreed to. And one of the biggest probably in the history of tech.

**Kevin Roose** (3:28)
Yeah, I think so. So let's talk about the actual suit because there have been so many of these kind of lawsuits going around that it can be hard to keep all of them straight.
This is not the New Mexico case from back in March, where Meta was ordered to pay a bunch of money over various child safety violations. This is sort of the big omnibus multi-state lawsuit and investigation.

**Casey Newton** (3:49)
47 states plus DC and US territories. The cases are related in that they're both about child safety. And while that New Mexico case was really important, the jury there only ordered Meta to pay 375 million for child safety violations, although the judge later did tack on an additional 567 million. But this one is just orders of magnitude larger. And there were really two major things at issue here, Kevin.
One was just a straightforward violation of a law that is supposed to prohibit companies like Meta from collecting information about children younger than 13 without their parents' permission. We talk all the time on the show about how we have very few privacy protections in this country. But this is one we do have. You cannot collect data about a 12-year-old without getting their parents' permission. And so what Meta did for a long time was they just said, well, you can't join unless you're 13