Intro
Internet law professor Eric Goldman takes apart the Meta social media addiction settlement for June Grosso, arguing the money is affordable, the design changes are unproven, and the deal turns the state attorneys general into Meta's enforcement arm against TikTok, Snap and YouTube. The hour also has Northwestern's James Pfander on Trump building the White House ballroom faster than the courts can rule on it, and Joshua Kastenberg on the rarely used military charge facing an Air Force major who called for the president's impeachment.
Guest: Eric Goldman, professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute
Host: June Grosso
Also on: James Pfander, professor at Northwestern Law School; Joshua Kastenberg, professor at the University of New Mexico Law School and a former judge and lawyer in the U.S. Air Force
Published: 28 August 2026 on Bloomberg Law
Listen on Omny | 38 min
Key Takeaways
A landmark number that changes nothing about how Meta operates
"I don't want to say it's pocket change for them, but it's a quarter of their 2025 net income. They can afford this." — Eric Goldman
Scaled against the New Mexico judgment, the headline figure looks small rather than large
"actually the $17 billion number looks smaller than we might expect" — Goldman
The state AGs extracted design changes global regulators could not force
Goldman credits them with accomplishing "something that regulators around the globe have had difficulty forcing Meta to do"
The changes are a bet placed without evidence
"the state attorneys general are gambling that these changes are beneficial to users without having the science to back it up" — Goldman
Age authentication is written into the deal with a permitted error rate
Goldman: some minors will not be protected, and regulators conceding that in writing is significant
Meta is paying the AGs to go after its competitors
"Meta has now deputized the state AGs as its police against its competitors, and is paying them to do its dirty work" — Goldman
Meta's record with independent auditors is the reason to doubt this one
The settlement resolves none of the thousands of private, school district and tribal suits
The deal has Meta agreeing to speech restrictions a court might never have been able to impose
Trump's first-mover advantage is the whole strategy, not a side effect
"President Trump would rather fire now and litigate later." — James Pfander
Appropriations is where Pfander thinks the Supreme Court might actually push back
Article 88 is an ancient charge used selectively, and the defense will argue the president moved the line
Kastenberg on the major's pretrial confinement: "very unusual for an officer"
The Settlement Is a Huge Number That Doesn't Change Meta's Business
Grosso opened with the terms: "Meta will pay up to 18 billion dollars and put stronger child safety guardrails on its platforms" to end a California social media addiction trial and resolve the claims of 48 states that Meta deliberately designed features to hook teenagers
The design changes for under-18 users include limiting time on Instagram and Facebook to two hours a day, blocking the apps from midnight to 6 a.m., and disabling features such as like counts
Grosso put the California AG's framing to Goldman, that the states got as much and perhaps more than they could have won in litigation
Goldman's answer split the number from its effect: "The settlement amount is a huge, absolute number. There's no doubt that this is a major financial landmark. At the same time, this number is not a number that materially changes Meta's business."
"I don't want to say it's pocket change for them, but it's a quarter of their 2025 net income. They can afford this."
On the yardstick he actually uses: Goldman scaled an earlier verdict up to the country. "Meta was subject to a judgment in New Mexico that ordered cumulatively roughly a billion dollars of damages against Meta. And New Mexico's roughly 0.6% of the U.S. population."
Run that multiplication out and, in his words, "actually the $17 billion number looks smaller than we might expect"
The Design Changes Are Real, and the Evidence Behind Them Isn't
Grosso noted the California AG had said the money was secondary and the changes were what mattered
"The changes are important in part because Meta has resisted them for quite some time." Goldman reads the agreement as Meta flipping internally and deciding it could live with these particular restrictions
What the AGs achieved is jurisdictional, not scientific: they were "able to accomplish something that regulators around the globe have had difficulty forcing Meta to do"
Goldman's central objection is that nobody knows whether any of it works. "We don't know if any of these changes solve the, quote, mental health crisis. We don't know if any of these changes materially benefit any population of users."
He also raised the reverse risk, that restrictions create new harms for users who lose access to something they were relying on
"In other words, the state attorneys general are gambling that these changes are beneficial to users without having the science to back it up."
"But if they're wrong, then we're going to have a lot of people who actually have been harmed by this agreement."
Segregate and Suppress, With an Error Rate Built In
Grosso asked how the restrictions can work in practice when everything hinges on knowing how old a user really is
Goldman's frame for the whole category: "I describe these categories of restrictions as segregate and suppress." Step one splits the user base into adults and minors; step two withholds resources from the minors
The agreement codifies that approach and commits Meta to deploying age authentication across its user base, with detailed provisions on how it will work
The provision Goldman found most interesting is the admission of failure: "the agreement contemplates that age authentication will never be perfect." It sets out error rates within which Meta can make mistakes and still be in compliance
The consequence is written into the deal: "there will be some minors who will not be protected by this agreement because of those error rates"
"And I don't see that as a flaw, but it's actually a big concession by regulators to even admit that that could happen."
Why Meta Flipped in the Second Week of Trial
Grosso pointed out the deal landed in the second week of a California jury trial that carried enormous risk for Meta, after juries had already ruled against it in New Mexico and in California
Goldman doesn't buy the trial as the trigger, because the document is too long and too detailed to have been assembled in days: it "required the agreement of 51 different state AGs"
"So this agreement didn't just happen because this trial has been going poorly. This conversation is much longer-standing than that."
On the pattern he says Meta always follows: "this is a standard practice for Meta that they will push and fight against restrictions until they decided somehow in their interest, and then they're all in"
Once Meta converts, it evangelizes. Goldman's version of the company's posture: "We'll be the first, but make sure everyone else goes on the program as well."
He was explicit that he does not know what made Meta reach that point, only that it wasn't new
The Independent Auditor Meta Expects to Manage
The settlement appoints an independent auditor to oversee compliance, able to issue its own recommendations and report findings to the states
Grosso pressed on whether that is enough, recalling that when Meta was still Facebook "it didn't comply with agreements with the FTC over users' data privacy"
Goldman's read on the track record is blunt: "Meta has a history of having independent auditors that have had no real impact on its business."
On the mismatch in expectations: he expects "the state AGs are going to think this independent auditor is going to dictate things to Meta, and I'm guessing Meta is thinking it will dictate to the independent auditor"
Why Meta Made the Deal Contingent on Its Competitors Joining
Grosso quoted Meta's own line, that the framework will only work if all its peers join, because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps and the problem needs an industry-wide solution
Goldman treats that as self-interest rather than public spirit: "Meta really, really does not like being obligated to comply with laws that its competitors don't also have to comply with."
The company will accept regulators telling it how to run its business, he says, but only on what it considers a level playing field
The competitive fear is that a teen shut out of Meta will simply "go to the competitor down the information superhighway, and get a better deal there"
Two mechanisms in the agreement show how much it mattered. Meta agreed to restrict minors' usage of its own products even further if competitors sign up to the same restrictions, giving the AGs a carrot to go recruit
The second is financial: Meta "conditioned a large chunk of the payments on the state AGs going out and getting the competitors under the same program"
"In other words, essentially, Meta has now deputized the state AGs as its police against its competitors, and is paying them to do its dirty work."
Goldman's summary of how each side sees it: the AGs think they won, and Meta thinks it got the AGs to harass its rivals and is happy to pay for it
TikTok, Snap and YouTube Are Reading This Agreement Line by Line
Grosso noted the California AG has already said the states will go after Meta's competitors next, naming TikTok and Snap, and added that YouTube will probably face the same pressure
"So I can assure you that YouTube and Snap and TikTok are reading this agreement."
On what they are feeling while they read it: Goldman said that at each line "you could just see the anger bar rising in their heads" because the agreement runs against their interests and they had no say in it
"And now Meta is throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at this problem to try to get the state AGs to bind them."
The Thousands of Cases the Settlement Doesn't Touch
Grosso noted Meta still faces thousands of other lawsuits, and the settlement does not close the book on social media addiction litigation
Goldman confirmed it applies to none of the pending litigation brought by school districts, Native American tribes and individual victims, of whom there are already thousands who have sued
"And that's why there's a large overhang of additional legal risk that it still needs to resolve. This settlement doesn't have any bearing on that."
The First Amendment Problem Sitting Underneath the Deal
Asked whether he had First Amendment concerns, Goldman said the agreement is Meta conceding editorial decisions it has traditionally had the prerogative to make
Part of the price, in his reading, was remedies the states might not have been able to win in court because of free speech limits
"Essentially, the state AGs are controlling how Meta talks with its users."
"So there's something disquieting about the idea that Meta and the state AGs have agreed to what are fundamentally restrictions on Meta's freedom to publish, especially when we don't even know if that's constitutionally permitted."
The scenario that would make the deal look strange in hindsight: the Supreme Court answering the open question by holding "that states have no power to dictate how online publishers present content to users"
In that case, Goldman said, "it might very well be that that agreement is based on an unconstitutional premise"
Grosso closed the segment on the note the whole answer earned: "It's more complicated than it initially seems."
Trump Is Building the Ballroom Faster Than the Courts Can Rule
Grosso's setup carried the show's own reporting: Trump is "racing to construct the 90,000-square-foot ballroom with a 250-person crew working 20 hours a day, seven days a week to keep the project ahead of schedule"
The project has moved ahead with no input from Congress or the public and despite two courts ruling that Trump was flouting the law, and Chief Justice John Roberts has let the building continue while the justices take more time
On what the chief justice's interim order signals, Pfander's answer was that it signals very little: "I don't think we learned much from the order that the chief issued."
"It seems to me like just a request for some additional time, suggesting the court's taking the issue seriously, but hasn't yet found its way to a resolution."
Why Two Courts Let Illegal Work Carry On
Grosso asked the obvious question: two lower courts found the project probably illegal, so why was the work allowed to continue
Pfander's answer is that the government split the project in two. It told both the district court and the appellate court that the below-ground construction was separable from the ballroom, and carried its own security rationale
The below-ground work, on the government's account, "had all sorts of security implications, bunkers and emergency medical care facilities and that sort of thing"
"Very difficult for a court to second-guess those kinds of concerns" — especially when the government itself was conceding, at least in the lower courts, that the ballroom was separable
The courts allowed the below-ground work believing they kept control of what got built above it. The government now argues the ballroom is integral to the same security concerns
The East Wing Is Gone and There's No Unringing the Bell
Grosso described the demolition as done before anyone could react: "It was there one day. It seemed like it was down the next day." Three days, in the end
Pfander agreed the East Wing itself is beyond recovery: "There's no way to unring the bell or restore the East Wing."
On what the remedy actually is, he does not think anyone wants a reconstruction or recreation. The live question is the legality of ongoing construction
The lower courts have some justification, in his view, for treating the ongoing project as unlawful because Congress never lawfully approved it, and therefore subject to limitation, control and injunction
What happens after an injunction takes hold is the real issue — whether Trump has to go back and secure the approvals and authorizations he said he would get and never got
First-Mover Advantage: Fire Now, Litigate Later
Grosso put the pattern to him directly, that illegal behavior is being rewarded because the courts always arrive too late: "This is a pattern and it happens in immigration cases. It happens in grant cases. It happens over and over again."
Pfander agreed, and gave it a name. "And what I call the first-mover advantage that the president enjoys as an executive or commander in chief means that he can take action and proceed on the assumption that it's lawful until somebody tells him otherwise."
On what changed from earlier presidencies: past presidents showed a great deal more restraint in what he calls the shadow of uncertain law. "I think this president prefers to move in the shadow of uncertain law."
Where there is no uncertainty at all, Pfander said, the president acts anyway if he believes the Constitution or some other grant of authority permits it, and turns the rest over to the lawyers
He listed the precedents: removals under the Alien Enemies Act, the dismantling of USAID, and the discharge of executive branch employees without due process
"But instead, President Trump would rather fire now and litigate later. And that has been, I think, quite the pattern of his presidency."
Where Pfander Thinks the Supreme Court Might Push Back
Grosso noted the Supreme Court has kept expanding presidential power and asked whether there is any reason to expect a limit here
Pfander's answer turns on appropriations rather than on Article II: "I'm not sure that his role as the unitary executive under Article II will be understood to override appropriations restrictions."
Congress has previously appropriated money for White House construction and understood itself to be the responsible party for those decisions, which he thinks gives the court a traditional allocation of responsibility to protect
A ruling on that could have what he called a radiating effect on other projects the president has in mind
On the history of White House alterations, Pfander walked through what he called presidential vanity projects: FDR installing an indoor swimming pool, JFK using it, Nixon closing it and putting in a one-lane bowling alley, and Gerald Ford building an outdoor pool
All modest changes that did not alter the footprint or appearance of the building. "Nothing to compare, obviously, to a $400 million ballroom project of the kind that's currently underway."
Donated Money the Government Says Was Appropriated
Grosso raised the funding question with the show's own reporting attached: Trump says private donations are paying for the ballroom, although "some reporting shows that public funds are covering more than half the cost"
Pfander said the argument puzzled him too. The relevant statute characterizes funds donated to the National Park Service for its projects as appropriated
The government's construction, as he described it, is a stitching job: "Once the money has been collected and placed in the vault of the National Park Service, it's now appropriated funds." Authorization to spend appropriated funds found elsewhere in federal law is then joined to the donations
"I think that's a very difficult argument to make in the end, given the jealousy with which the Congress of the United States guards its appropriation powers."
Nothing on this scale has been attempted before with donated funds, and Pfander said it is very hard for him to see it as the kind of congressional control normally associated with the appropriations process
The Best Outcome Available: A Hold Above Ground
Asked what the best-case scenario looks like for anyone wanting real oversight, Pfander said it requires a remand to the district court so that court can keep supervising the project
The one thing actually on the table is "a hold on above-ground construction" while the assessments, authorizations and approvals are run through as expeditiously as possible
He assumes the president would want that finished before the November election cycle, but said it is up to Trump to decide how he secures the approval
Pfander does not expect a hole in the ground. He thinks everyone ends up agreeing to build something, possibly scaled back, possibly referring to the East Wing in a way that reminds people it was there
"But without consultation, you're not going to get anything but Trump's vision, obviously."
Article 88 and a Charge That's Barely Been Used
Grosso set up the third segment: Air Force Major Jason Watson, in uniform at a Capitol protest on July 1st, called for Trump's impeachment over military action against foreign countries, repeated the criticism on CNN, and was charged under three articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice
The show's own research on how rare this is: Grosso said Article 88 contemptuous remarks charges are so rare that "there have only been a few instances since the modern code of military justice was enacted 75 years ago"
Kastenberg traced the charge back to the founding: "Well, those charges, first of all, they're quite ancient." They go back to Thomas Jefferson and the rewriting of the first articles of war from the British
The American change was to narrow it. Unlike the British version, "the U.S. limited it to the chain of command in the military"
"It's a charge that has been used in a very selective manner over the years." He offered a Vietnam-era lieutenant who called Lyndon Johnson a war criminal, and now this major
"But there have been hundreds of others who've done it and haven't been charged."
What Makes Remarks Contemptuous Rather Than Just Critical
Kastenberg's statement of the standard: remarks "tend to be considered contemptuous if they're made in a manner that would undermine confidence and the reliability of the chain of command"
The controlling precedent came out of Vietnam. Captain Levy, an Army dermatologist training corpsmen, advised enlisted medical corps students not to go to Vietnam, arguing it was an imperialistic white man's war that was making the rich richer and was immoral and unconstitutional
He had authority over them, was convicted at court-martial, and "the Supreme Court upheld the conviction in a case we know as Parker v. Levy"
On the defense he expects: that it is unprovable this major would undermine the chain of command and military discipline, and the burden of proving it sits with the government
Grosso asked where the line falls between contemptuous and merely critical. "The prosecution has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the words were contemptuous."
What may separate this major from Lieutenant Howe, who stood outside Fort Bliss in 1967 with a sandwich board calling Lyndon Johnson a war criminal, is that "it's unclear to me whether the major engaged in any superfluous or mean-spirited name-calling" rather than exercising what he believed was his prerogative to warn Congress
Kastenberg's own prediction cuts against his analysis: "That might not clear the hurdle of contempt, but I suspect it will."
Military Speech Rights and a Chain of Command That Got Politicized
Grosso noted people in the military do not have the same First Amendment rights as everyone else, and Kastenberg agreed without qualification
"One of the things that you learned is that you are surrendering to the federal government some of your free speech rights, and that includes the right to be politically engaged in a military status."
His argument is that the administration itself has moved the boundary: "But this administration has done more to water down the political military barrier, and they've instead politicized the military to an unusual degree, that they've set an example that it's okay to cross the line."
He pointed to the defense secretary's speeches to uniformed personnel, the president's speeches at academy graduations, and what he called the overuse of the military to promote the president's ideology
"There's no equal to that in my lifetime."
The defense argument he expects follows from it: that "it's the president himself who's moved the definitions of what political activity and contemptuous language are", so that is the standard the client must be judged by, and contempt cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt
The Other Charges: Article 92 and Conduct Unbecoming
Grosso noted there are 10 charges in all across the three articles
Article 92 is failure to obey lawful orders or regulations, and on the uniform point Kastenberg was categorical: demonstrating in uniform for any cause without permission crosses the line, whether the cause is wildlife preservation, children's rights or a partisan political rally
"If you don't have permission to be in uniform and you're part of it, you've crossed the line."
On the selective prosecution the defense will raise: "the president has used the military at his partisan rallies. No one there has been prosecuted, so we'll see what happens"
Article 133, conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, is "the easiest of all the charges to prove" because it hands the question straight to the court-martial
The prosecution does not have to prove a threat to good order and discipline, only "whether or not this major has crossed the line against the norms and become something of a criminal embarrassment to the military"
His classic example is an officer who does something legal, like gambling, then falls into debt and cannot pay it back
Pretrial Confinement, and the Long Road to a Court-Martial
Grosso noted it has not yet been decided whether Watson will face trial at all
Kastenberg flagged the confinement as the anomaly: "he's held in pretrial confinement, which is very unusual for an officer"
"Even officers who are accused of violent crimes like rape generally don't end up being placed in pretrial confinement."
The first fight is over release, before a military judge or possibly a U.S. district judge, on the argument that he is not a threat to good order and discipline, has committed no violent crime and is not charged with espionage
"This is just something that normal human beings can do in the United States."
The process then runs through the military's equivalent of a grand jury — a pretrial investigation conducted by one individual — before a general court-martial convening authority, usually a major general or rear admiral upper half or higher, can convene a court-martial
Kastenberg thinks the government has created an opening: that the defense may be able to stop the process in its tracks through an appeal to a U.S. district court
How a Military Case Gets Into Federal District Court
Grosso asked how a service member subject to military jurisdiction gets into federal court at all
The bar Kastenberg described is proving the government is incompetent, has violated the client's rights to a constitutional degree, or has committed a major infraction of the law. "It's a very high bar."
His example is Lieutenant Aaron Watada, who refused orders to deploy and was facing court-martial for failure to go, when a problem arose in the handling of evidence and the discovery obligation to hand over the government's evidence
"The defense counsel shrewdly went to U.S. District Court, and the U.S. District Court shut that case down" — and the military was never able to prosecute him for conduct he had, at least facially, engaged in
The exception proves the rule: for every Watada there are hundreds of people for whom the military functions as it is supposed to and who cannot get into district court
"What makes this case different is its uniqueness."
Whether the Charges Overlap Enough to Raise Double Jeopardy
Grosso observed that the government seems to be charging Watson many different ways for the same act
Kastenberg called it an area where the system can misfire. A military trial judge, like a state or federal trial judge, has to keep charges from overlapping enough to violate the constitutional prohibition on double jeopardy
He has read the charge sheet and thinks it is a live issue: "there is enough of an overlap to create a constitutional issue in this case"
Two ways a judge could handle it: tell the government to pick which charges it is going forward on, or hand that decision to the court-martial
The other option is consolidation — merging a group of the charges into a single charge for sentencing purposes if he is convicted
Grosso closed on the stakes: Watson is about three years from retirement and "could be dismissed from the service and lose his pay and benefits if he's convicted", with jail time also possible
Goldman's bottom line is that the biggest child-safety settlement ever struck is best understood as a competitive maneuver: Meta bought design rules it had already decided it could live with, and paid the state attorneys general to impose them on TikTok, Snap and YouTube next.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Meta, with Instagram and Facebook (The settlement's subject: a payment Goldman puts at a quarter of one year's net income, age authentication across the user base, two-hour daily limits for under-18s, apps blocked from midnight to 6 a.m., and like counts disabled)
TikTok, Snap and YouTube (Goldman says they had no say in an agreement written against their interests and are reading it line by line; the California AG has said they are next)
The FTC (Grosso raised Meta's failure to comply with FTC agreements over user data privacy, back when it was still Facebook, as the reason to doubt the new independent auditor)
The National Park Service (Pfander: the government's argument converts donations sitting in the Service's vault into appropriated funds, which he thinks is very difficult to sustain)
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