Meta has agreed to a settlement worth $16.7 billion to 47 states, the District of Columbia, and multiple U.S. territories, and it could change social media as we know it.  The settlement agreement, which was filed on August 26 in the U.S. Northern District of California in Oakland, comes days into a landmark social media trial that put Meta head-to-head with a coalition of state attorneys general who alleged that the tech giant was purposefully designing its social media sites to result in compulsive use among young users.  Meta’s capitulation means that the company will have to pay significant damages to the parties who brought the suit, and, even more consequentially, it will be responsible for implementing a flurry of design changes to Instagram and Facebook.  It’s a bellwether moment for social media regulation that, ultimately, could use new UX design parameters to put some power back into users’ hands.  How we got here The Meta settlement represents the first major regulatory outcome of a series of trials starring the world’s biggest social media companies that have played out over the course of this summer.  Earlier this year, a court in California found that both Meta and YouTube were negligent for using “addictive” features like autoplay, infinite scroll, and ephemeral content to cause compulsive social media usage in one young. In a New Mexico trial, Meta was found culpable for failing to protect young users from child predators on Instagram and Facebook.  In both of these cases, Meta was only ordered to pay damages to the plaintiffs—but those decisions helped set the scene for this most recent case.  Meta’s trial this August dates back to October 2023, when multiple states sued the company for allegedly designing Facebook and Instagram to be addictive. The suit was led by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey.   In a statement leading into the trial, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser laid out the states’ key complaint

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