New Mexico Court Orders Meta to Pay $567 Million Over Youth Harms
Why Fining Meta for Harming Children Is Not an Attack on Markets
When a business treats young minds as raw material for engagement, the law does not subvert the market; it restores the rules under which any decent market must operate.
A court in New Mexico has ordered the owner of Facebook and Instagram to pay $567 million for harms its platforms have inflicted upon young people, placing $420 million in a fund for treatment and the reduction of future damage. The judge has likened the firm’s conduct to a public nuisance, as with air befouled by smoke; the company, for its part, denies wrongdoing, professes confidence in its record of protecting teenagers, and intends to appeal. We have, then, the familiar modern drama: a lucrative new trade, a body of injured persons too young to have bargained knowingly, and a public authority that finally stirs when the harm can no longer be politely ignored.
In my Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, I urged that we follow every regulation through to its effects upon prices, and to the unseen bearer of the cost. Here the benefit of the platforms, measured in engagement and profit, is sharp, concentrated, and easily counted; the cost, measured in anxiety, compulsion, and broken attention among children, is diffuse, quiet, and long delayed. When the state obliges the company to finance clinical and other health services, it does not create a cost; it merely calls the hidden payer by his name and presents the bill to those who profited.
I have never thought self‑interest a vice, provided it moves under the strict rules of justice. We expect the butcher and the brewer to consult their own advantage, but we do not therefore permit them to adulterate food or to poison wells. If a platform’s revenues rise with every extra minute a child’s eye is detained upon the screen, its designers will naturally pursue attention rather than tranquillity, engagement rather than self-command. When the incentives thus set reward what harms the weak, the fault lies not in human nature, but in the laxity of the rules that should have curbed it. To complain of “misrepresented facts” is idle if the facts, once fully seen, appal the impartial spectator.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments I described that impartial spectator as a well-informed, disinterested observer lodged, as it were, within the breast. Let that spectator consider a company that, according to the attorney general of a state, knowingly frames its product so as to put children at risk, and then fails even to warn the public of the danger. Would he applaud the ingenuity of the design, or feel shame and indignation at the conversion of youthful frailty into a revenue stream? Praise without praise-worthiness is, I argued, of little value; profit without probity is its commercial analogue, and the blush of deserved blame is the only honour such conduct merits.
When people of the same trade meet, I once observed, the conversation ends too often in a conspiracy against the public. The modern merchant’s club-room is no longer a tavern back-room but the engineering meeting where devices are contrived to lock users in, foreclose rivals, and shift the cost of injury onto families and public treasuries. A business that becomes, in the judge’s phrase, a nuisance to the whole community resembles a factory that vents smoke without paying for the loss of crops. In the one case lungs, in the other minds, are the unpriced fuel of profit; in both, the natural progress of opulence is perverted into the growth of unaccountable power.
The duties of the sovereign, as I set them out in Wealth of Nations, include defence, the exact administration of justice, and certain public works and institutions which repay society, though not a private undertaker. Here all three touch. To protect children, who cannot prudently contract for themselves; to adjudge whether a nuisance exists and to compel redress; and to fund the treatment of harms that no private family could adequately bear—these are no usurpations. They are the proper labours of a state that remembers it governs not only merchants, but also the labouring poor and their children, who are the future annual produce of the land and labour.
Yet if the judgment is just in principle, danger still lurks in execution. The man of system, enchanted with his own design, may hope to reorder the whole great chess-board of human society by detailed rules for every new contrivance. Were courts and legislators to prescribe in minute detail how every platform must be built, they would load themselves with an attention not merely unnecessary, but impossible to discharge wisely. Better that the law mark clear boundaries—no deception, no concealed hazard, no exploitation of children—and then enforce them with steadiness and severity. Within those limits, self-interest may again serve, sometimes by an invisible hand, ends no one mind intended, and children may grow up more nearly free than captive.
From the works cited
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — Trace every policy to its effect on the price system and ask who bears the unseen cost: benefits are visible and concentrated, costs are diffuse and quiet.
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The state has real duties — defence, exact administration of justice, and public works and institutions that profit society but could never repay a private undertaker — and they must be paid for.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Judge conduct by the impartial spectator: what would a well-informed, disinterested observer feel about this action? Praise-worthiness matters more than praise; to be loved without being lovely is worth nothing, and to be blamed unjustly stings less than to deserve blame.