‘This Is Seismic!’ Jonathan Turley Warns Massive Meta Settlement Will Be ‘Dinner Gong’ for More Lawsuits

Meta’s nearly $17 billion legal settlement is a drop in the bucket for the massive social media company, said Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley — who warned the company’s decision to end the litigation could prompt other lawsuits.

Appearing Wednesday on America’s Newsroom, Turley told anchor Dana Perino the settlement was “seismic” but called it a strategic way for Meta to move on from the issue of child safety as more lawsuits are sure to come:

This is seismic. It will be something of a dinner gong for both states and plaintiff attorneys. Meta knows that. But in many ways for the company, this is still chump change.

This is a company that makes a huge amount of money and when you reach a settlement like this, we’ve seen for example in tobacco settlement, that these companies actually don’t end up losing money because of the benefits in the market in resolving litigation.

Their stock tends to go up and they are able to cover these losses.

So this is a calculated move by Meta, which has been trying to reform these apps to try to create these new barriers for children. And I think that they view this as a better way to go forward.

The deal was made public Wednesday during a federal trial in California, heading off a major legal showdown over allegations that Meta’s platforms contributed to a youth mental health crisis while improperly harvesting children’s personal data.

As a result of the deal, Meta will also introduce new safeguards for teenage Facebook and Instagram users nationwide, including daily usage limits and restrictions blocking access during nighttime hours.

Turley said he does believe Meta has a “commitment” to changing its product:

No, I think in fairness to the 29 states that brought this lawsuit, there is a commitment here to change the app, to change the software to create greater protections. The issue here for Meta was that legally they had some very good arguments to make here.

The line between what’s an addictive and what’s a popular product is hard to define.

They could have litigated this but it would have cost them a lot of money.

I’m not dismissing the importance of the lawsuit but for the company the size of Meta it is like Monopoly money, maybe literally so according to some critics. They made this amount of money like just a minute ago.

The company denied wrongdoing in agreeing to the settlement.

Jason Cohen contributed to this report.

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