Meta’s $18 Billion Settlement Feels Like a Win for Its Critics — But the Reality Might be Much Murkier

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TOP STORY

META PAYS UP — BUT IS IT ENOUGH?

Meta reached an $18 billion settlement with 47 states, Washington D.C., and U.S. territories Wednesday to address claims the company’s platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, have endangered children. That’s a lot of money, but as some in today’s stack pointed out, it’s nothing close to the $200 billion the company earned in revenue in 2025.

The money is one thing, but the company is also supposed to be more responsible in terms of how it markets itself and its products to those same children. Our newsletter authors seem conflicted on whether that will actually happen.

THREE TAKES

POLITICO Playbook, Adam Wren, Will Steakin, and Dasha Burns — Playbook (which is sponsored by Meta) oh-so-briefly examined the settlement from a political angle Thursday. “Meta’s multibillion-dollar court settlements with multiple U.S. states marks one of the biggest consumer protection steps in history — the kind Congress has tried and failed to implement against social media,” wrote POLITICO’s Tyler Katzenberger. Playbook pointed out that though “state AGs and Meta are calling it a win,” there are plenty of people “in the tech industry [that] think it’s a sham.”

The Poynter Report, Tom Jones — Jones is a believer that the settlement will have a meaningful, lasting impact. To Jones, it could “reshape social media for young people.” While $18 billion may not break the bank for the tech giant, Jones made clear that it’s hardly a pittance, writing, “Make no mistake, that is a lot of money.” And more importantly, it should mean that “Meta will make major changes to minimize the negative effects of its platforms on children and teenagers.” Of course, implementing that will be up to parents, who can opt for their kids to have chronological feeds instead of algorithmic, and prevent them from seeing the number of likes their posts get. “Ultimately, the changes are meant to curb endless scrolling, which can interrupt sleep and have other negative effects on young people’s health and well-being,” he added.

The Free Press, Emily Cherkin — Some, like Jones, might be impressed by the settlement, but for Cherkin, it’s “not enough.” That’s because social media is “is a business model that is fundamentally incompatible with healthy child development,” and this settlement won’t change that. The settlement also “marks the beginning, not the end, of long-sought changes from companies like Meta,” Cherkin added, and is the culmination of work by “activists, parents, whistleblowers, and lawmakers” who have “been fighting for regulations on the ability of social-media platforms to prey on the vulnerabilities of children’s underdeveloped brains” for over a decade.

TAKEAWAY: The win may feel good for Meta critics, but it’s clearly far from a death blow for the social media behemoth. Jones took an optimistic stance on what this could mean for the future of how children and teens interact with social media, but Cherkin is clearly less sure. She’s spent “years researching and writing” on the topic, and is clearly passionate about it. It’s a little tough to believe a mega corporation like Meta is going to suddenly do the right thing, and the fact that at least some of the stack is sponsored by Meta and also couldn’t seem to muster up a significant take on the settlement is illuminating.

📰 TOP SCOOPS & ANALYSIS 📰

SCOOP 🍨 Status, Natalie Korach— The Washington Post still “has not addressed” the potential reinstatement of founder of the paper’s global opinions section, Karen Attiah — but Attiah told Korach she feels good about her odds. “First of all, two out of the three men who convened that little military tribunal for my professional execution are gone. My emotional posture is still savoring this win, and that two of them are gone, and I’m still here,” she said, a reference to Will Lewis and Adam O’Neal. She also noted that “evidence that The Post’s objections to her social media use were a convenient excuse for pushing her out.” As Attiah put it, “The Post really wasn’t interested in giving me any sort of fair shot at continuing to write.”

SCOOP 🍨 POLITICO Playbook, Adam Wren, Will Steakin, and Dasha Burns— “Republicans have a white and married women problem,” wrote Playbook this morning. This is per “a pollster at Bellwether Research and Consulting” that surveyed “1,604 women 18 and over — including 1,291 registered voters” and is now “raising alarm bells among Republicans fretting the loss of a reliable bloc of midterm voters.” This also isn’t news to Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL), who told Playbook, “I’ve been raising this inside our party for months. Women are telling us their top concern is affordability, and they’re going to back whoever actually delivers on it. We passed no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and we doubled the child tax credit for families. Now I’m fighting for my NEST Act: no tax on saving for your first home. Nobody owes us their vote. We earn it with results or we don’t earn it at all.”

SCOOP 🍨 Page Six Hollywood, Ian Mohr — UTA and Variety kicked off a “good old-fashioned media maelstrom” yesterday after the latter published an article “documenting a string of high-profile client defections from UTA.” Matt Donnelly’s article has since “become a thorn in the side of the third largest agency in the industry, one that has had some high-profile client defections lately.” UTA also didn’t help things and offered a “scorched-earth reaction to the piece that really got the town chattering yesterday.” It’s clear Donnelly’s piece “hit a major nerve inside UTA” — and the company’s CEO David Kramer even fired off a memo “not only refuting the Variety report but putting its author on blast — including alleging the scribe was unfairly hellbent on damaging UTA’s business.” Kramer even “came just short of accusing Donnelly of harassing women.”

ANALYSIS 👀 CNN’s Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter — The Massachusetts trial of Lindsay Clancy, the mother who admitted to killing her three young children before attempting suicide, was “made for the algorithm,” wrote Stelter Thursday morning. Closing arguments in the case are taking place today, and the jury is set to begin deliberations. “Sympathy for Clancy has spawned thinkpiece after thinkpiece,” Stelter also wrote, and there has been “wild conjecture” about Lindsay’s ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, who was not home when the children were killed. “It’s gotten so bad that Patrick’s attorney has warned against the ‘false, defamatory statements’ being made about his client,” he added. Stelter is “hesitant” to blame the flurry of attention on just algorithms, because “some of this is about human nature,” but, he adds, “the algos have a lot to do with it.”

ANALYSIS 👀 The Bulwark’s Morning Shots, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger— The Trump administration and the GOP “seem to be developing a similar playbook this year” to that of the Soviet Union before invading a “Warsaw Pact country that sought to escape Soviet control,” wrote Kristol. Bobby Charles, who is running for governor of Maine, told “supporters recently that he would ask Tom Homan, the White House border czar, to send U.S. Marshals and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling places in the state in the weeks before this fall’s midterm elections.” That’s music to the president’s ears, and “the obvious effect would be to intimidate Latino citizens—and other non-white or foreign-born citizens, as well—from showing up at the polls.” It could also mean “federal forces would presumably be available for other mischief as well, on Election Day and right after,” he continued. “So the Trump administration wouldn’t be intervening on its own to tilt the electoral playing field. It’s just responding to requests by alarmed local citizens and candidates!’

ANALYSIS 👀  The Poynter Report, Tom Jones — Yet another college sports program has banned “a news outlet because someone in leadership doesn’t like something that was reported,” Jones noted today. The football program at Texas Christian University “revoked the media credentials for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram” due to “a story about a locker room fight that resulted in one of the players, Jacob Fields, being kicked off the team.” The school claimed “a TCU athletics spokesman said the Star-Telegram’s credentials were being pulled because the coverage resulted in threats to the victim,” but the paper “did not identify the player, junior wide receiver Dozie Ezukanma, until three days after the initial report, when he identified himself in a now-deleted Instagram video.” As Jones said, “Unless I’m missing something, I’m not sure the Star-Telegram did anything wrong, particularly because it did not identify Ezukanma before he identified himself in a social media post.”

📈BUSINESS OF MEDIA 🎥

Status, Natalie Korach — Digital media startup Puck (with which One Sheet readers should be intimately familiar) is dealing with investment firm RedBird Capital Partners, considering an investment that would value the newsletter biz at a cool $250 million. A resulting deal would involve RedBird buying out Puck’s current institutional investors, but leaving employees’ equity stakes alone. One issue Korach points out, though, is that RedBird just so happens to be a big backer of David Ellison’s Paramount and its pending acquisition of WBD, so that raises a few questions about whether Puck could objectively cover Ellison’s expanding empire. QUOTE 📣 “At the very least, the optics for Puck are not so good. But it is certainly fair to wonder how the outlet can objectively cover Ellison’s media empire when its biggest investor may soon be the Oracle scion’s top business partner.”

The Ankler’s Like & Subscribe, Natalie Jarvey — YouTube executives are growing a bit stressed as Netflix strategically targets their platform’s top creator talent, signing major deals with stars like Rhett & Link, the Stokes Twins, and Kevin Langue. To fight back, YouTube is preparing seven-figure offers up to $10 million to keep 15 select creators posting exclusively on the site. However, these deals also come with thinly-veiled threats: creators who reject YouTube’s terms risk being barred from preferred ad programs or losing promotion on billboards and at the spring Brandcast pitch-fest. QUOTE 📣 “YouTube executives are ‘scared shitless,’ a top dealmaker tells me. That’s a remarkable posture for the company that already dominates streaming: YouTube is now paying millions to keep the talent it helped create from becoming someone else’s programming.”

The Ankler’s Series Business, Lesley Goldberg — To assuage antitrust worries from 12 state attorneys general and secure his $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery merger, Ellison may have to offer structural remedies by divesting several of the 50 cable networks he is set to eventually oversee. California AG Rob Bonta clarified that while CNN is not the primary focus of the antitrust lawsuit, the concentration of massive cable channel licensing under one roof is. This forces Ellison into a brutal spot because though many of the channels are declining, he still needs their cash flow for Paramount’s projected $80 billion debt load. QUOTE 📣 “That creates a surprisingly painful problem for Ellison: Which networks does he sell, which does he preserve as brands for the streaming era — and which does he simply allow to die?”

Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter, Simon Owens — From its almost-decade-old origins as a humble Yankees fan Twitter account, Jomboy Media has scaled into a diversified sports company with 20 channels, 60 employees, and its own original sports franchise, Warehouse Games. According to CEO Courtney Hirsch, the company grew national appeal by building “creator first” networks rather than launching static shows and hiring hosts afterward. Jomboy is now actively working to reduce its 90% dependence on advertising by transitioning its merchandise business into a lifestyle apparel brand, boosted by a historic 2025 minority investment from Major League Baseball that grants Jomboy lucrative footage and logo IP rights. QUOTE 📣 “Along the way, it has developed a playbook for how creator-led companies can scale without abandoning the personalities that made them successful in the first place.”

Digiday Daily, Jim Cooper and Sara Jerde — USA Today Co. is testing different ways to reformat its website content for an audience of AI bots. The goal is to adapt to a new reality and secure lucrative AI licensing agreements. According to Kara Chiles, USA Today Co.’s senior vice president of product management, restructuring content formats and templates is a core part of the publisher’s larger “generative engine optimization” (GEO) strategy, designed to make its reporting easily discoverable, accessible, and citable by AI answer engines.

CJR’s The Media Today, Jem Bartholomew — A major industry debate has been happening over whether newsrooms should aggressively incorporate artificial intelligence or resist its hasty implementation—but time is running out to reach a consensus, so right now, everyone is kind of doing their own thing. In his new book The Next Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel argues that journalists must enthusiastically embrace AI to enhance the reach of human reporting rather than cheapen it, such as using models to identify political lies, monitor geographic representation, or assemble civic datasets into a searchable hub. Still, media watchdogs and researchers raise serious ethical concerns, warning that state-sponsored information warfare can easily target these models, and that human-made, original reporting is what truly differentiates trusted journalism in an automated landscape. Besides, it would be great if everyone were using it ethically, but you can’t forget that most execs care about producing cheaper journalism, not always better journalism, and AI can pretty easily do the former while failing to do the latter. QUOTE 📣 “We should be using AI in journalism to make our journalism better, not primarily to make it cheaper.”

Feed Me, Emily Sundberg — Lauren Kassan, a co-founder at the now-dead, formerly-elite female co-working startup The Wing, has announced her new venture called “STAND.” Operating as a physical business school in West Los Angeles, STAND is designed for children ages eight to 12 to learn brand strategy, business planning, and pitch delivery.  QUOTE 📣 “Think of it as the modern day lemonade stand… As a mother of two, I think a lot about what our kids need. While schools do so many important things, the reality is that the world is changing so quickly and they aren’t built to adapt at that speed.”

OTHER COOL STUFF

Morning Brew — Yesterday in Buñol, Spain, thousands of people (visitors and locals alike) got together to fling 165 tons of squashed tomatoes at one another. What’s more, this is an annual event. Book your tickets for a 2027 trip now.

Feed Me — Newsletter on newsletter news! You know how we like that! Morning Brew workers will be performing a live, parody production of Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network on Sept. 3.

User Mag — The silly, almost-Shakespearean English phrasing used by Claude has a name now. It’s, of course, Claudish. As you may know if you’ve used any LLMs, they all have different writing styles, so don’t confuse this with the now-infamous cadence of ChatGPT.

👀 WHAT GOT MISSED? 👀

POLITICO Playbook, Adam Wren, Will Steakin, and Dasha Burns — Playbook included a note about upcoming changes to Social Security payments that seem dire: “sudden cuts to Social Security checks are looming” and “millions of Americans could see their monthly payments shrink by over 20 percent.” Those in D.C. are “anxious this summer to start on a solution” but have been unable to come up with one. Voters can expect “Democrats to hammer that point through November,” and the next president will likely have to contend with this issue. The cuts may be a few years off, but for as big of an impact as this could have on so many people, it seems like it’s not getting enough attention.

🏆 NEWSLETTER OF THE DAY 🏆

CNN’s Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter — The Lindsay Clancy trial has dominated some portions of social media, and proceedings have been covered by news media since it began, but apart from The Free Press, the stack’s been a little hesitant to go all in themselves. Today’s offering from Stelter gave a much-needed look at how algorithms are driving so much of that social media interest, which in turn is likely to feed the daily and evening news programs.

Elsewhere, Stelter covered it all: Meta, Puck’s potential RedBird investment, UTA and Variety, and even a Louisiana defamation case filed by an elected official, which is rare for such proceedings. It’s a solid offering in a week that’s been hectic and scattered.

This newsletter was produced by Lindsey Ellefson.