Abrham Meareg’s father, a chemistry professor in Ethiopia’s northern city of Bahir Dar, was shot and killed outside the family home in October 2021, in the middle of the country’s civil war. According to Meareg and Foxglove, the nonprofit supporting his lawsuit against Meta in Kenya, Facebook’s algorithm had for weeks promoted posts calling for the academic to be murdered, including images of him and his home address. Meareg filed his case in 2022 and says he repeatedly asked Facebook to remove the posts, but nothing was done. Nearly four years later, the case has still not been heard, with Foxglove accusing Meta of fighting to avoid accountability. Meareg has said the company treats people as numbers and that it has been shown repeatedly that their lives do not matter to it.
The settlement Meta reached on Wednesday with 29 US states, which argued the company had created addictive products that hooked young people, may seem far removed from Meareg’s struggle. Meta agreed to pay $18 billion and to change certain features of its platforms in the US. California’s attorney general described the deal as a victory that would make a world of difference for children and families. Yet in other parts of the world, from Nairobi to Amsterdam, similar claims remain unresolved, and broader questions about the power of a single US technology company to shape politics and democracy globally are still unanswered.
For American officials, the deal is a rare enforcement win, essentially doing what Congress could not. For Meta, it is also a victory: its share price rose after the announcement, its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was not forced to testify, and the $18 billion payout is far less than the $200 billion the states had sought or the $1.4 trillion Meta itself had suggested it might face in a worst-case scenario.
Outside the US, however, the picture is more mixed. The limits Meta has accepted in the US, such as time limits for minors and blocking overnight use, resemble restrictions that Britain and Australia have already achieved through regulation. The settlement could give other governments leverage: Britain, which plans to ban under-16s from social media, may ask Meta to apply a default daily limit of two hours for under-18s, matching what the company agreed to in the US. But for Meareg and others, none of this changes the core problem: a vast US company, unaccountable to voters and untethered by transparency requirements, controls a global digital commons that shapes reality for billions of people.
The central issue in Meareg’s case is Meta’s algorithm, the system that decides what content appears in users’ feeds. The same system that learns you like videos about knitting and suggests spider plant care has also been accused of pushing teenage girls toward anorexia-related content and young men toward figures like Andrew Tate. It is alleged to have amplified content that fueled violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar and to have contributed to Donald Trump’s election victory. Meareg’s lawsuit rests on the claim that this algorithm promoted posts calling for his father’s death, while Facebook’s sparse moderation in East Africa did little to stop it.
At the start of the US trial, it seemed plausible that the states would force Meta to make fundamental changes to this algorithm, which is designed to keep users scrolling so they can be shown ads. But the settlement only slightly changes what minors see, and it is hard to see how removing personalized feeds for young users will alter dynamics in conflict zones or fragile democracies. Former Facebook engineer and whistleblower Arturo Béjar compared the limits to allowing someone to smoke cigarettes for two hours a day, saying it does not make the cigarettes any safer.
Progress may therefore depend on plaintiffs and advocacy groups outside the US. In Kenya, a high court recently ruled that Meareg’s case against Meta could proceed, after years of legal maneuvers by the company to block it, and it could now be heard in the coming year. Rosa Curling, Foxglove’s co-executive director, said Meta’s lawyers had spent years trying to prevent the case from being heard and expressed hope that the US news signaled Zuckerberg’s time was finally up. In the Netherlands, the nonprofit Repro Uncensored, which has its own legal case against Meta alleging discrimination against queer accounts, hailed the US settlement as a major victory and said further action was planned in other European countries. Its executive director, Martha Dimitratou, argued that the next phase of accountability must address addictive design, algorithms, discriminatory moderation and automated decision-making, because these systems shape civic participation and democracy and the companies controlling them must be held accountable globally.