Meta To Pay $18 Billion & Flash Flood Devastates Nepal | 8.27.26

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**Georgia Howe** (0:50)
Meta agrees to pay out $18 billion to states in the biggest tech settlement in history. What does this mean for the social media landscape?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:59)
You have the documents coming from the inside in which they were training their AI to groom children, just the widespread effect that it's clearly had on children's socialization.

**Georgia Howe** (1:09)
I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley. It's Thursday, August 27th, and this is Morning Wire.

**John Bickley** (1:23)
Sudden catastrophic flooding in Nepal sweeps away hundreds of people, including dozens of American tourists.

**Georgia Howe** (1:30)
And the Trump administration takes sweeping action on immigration visas amid a crackdown on fraud.

**Jennie Taer** (1:36)
The Trump administration is looking to conduct the largest mass visa revocation effort since Trump returned to the White House.

**John Bickley** (1:45)
Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.

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**John Bickley** (3:10)
Meta has agreed to an $18 billion settlement in a landmark case that accused the company of deliberately designing its platform to addict children. The sweeping deal arrived just days into a federal trial involving 47 states and could open the door to a new wave of litigation against Big Tech.

**Georgia Howe** (3:28)
Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham is here now with the details. So Megan, before we get into the impact of the settlement, can you just walk us through how it was reached?

**Megan Basham** (3:37)
So this case accused Meta of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features on the platform that get kids addicted to the platform and also of hiding internal research that showed some of these harms. Now it also accused Meta of violating federal law by collecting data on minors under 13 without parental consent. And as John said, you know, eventually 47 states joined this coalition in this lawsuit, but it was being led by California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. So California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who was co-arguing this case, encapsulated what the coalition's argument was just last week.

**Rob Bonta** (4:20)
The company had a legal, not to mention a moral obligation to consider the safety of young users when designing their products.
The data is clear. More time on social media tends to be correlated with depression and anxiety, body image issues, susceptibility to addiction and interference with daily life, including learning.

**Megan Basham** (4:42)
So then on Tuesday this week, Instagram head Adam Masseri testified and denied that kids can become quote-unquote clinically addicted to social media. And he compared it to them just binge-watching Netflix, where Netflix will suggest the next thing to watch. He also denied that he had directed anyone on his team to hide any internal research. Now, Mark Zuckerberg was expected to take the stand on Wednesday morning, but instead we got news that he would not be taking the stand because of this settlement deal. Now, what the coalition reached was as much as 18 billion, but initially they were seeking 200 billion. And it's also important to note that this isn't just financial. Meta also agreed to set up a default daily time limit of two hours for users under 18, also defaults limiting overnight use and use during school hours. And then it also agreed to institute a ban on displaying likes and reaction counts for kids under 18