The Hound | Aug. 27

Hi there,

It’s Thursday. Meta has agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to settle claims from 48 states, the District of Columbia, and four U.S. territories over how it intentionally designed Instagram and Facebook to addict children. This is not a fine for a minor infraction. It is the largest child safety settlement in American history — an implicit admission that a company worth nearly $2 trillion knowingly engineered its products to psychologically harm minors for profit.

🖊️ Sign the petition to call on the media to cover this settlement not as a business story, but as a public health reckoning — one that demands to know what Meta knew, when it knew it, and why it took billions of dollars in legal pressure to produce changes that should have been made years ago

The public deserves reporting that treats the deliberate addiction of children as the crisis it is — and that keeps scrutinizing these companies long after the headlines fade.

In addition, costly blunders caused the Pentagon to waste more than half a billion in taxpayer dollars. And Trump’s outstanding Executive Order to restrict mail-in voting could disenfranchise millions.

Read about these, and more, with today’s stories:

Meta Caves With $17 Billion Settlement in Social Media Addiction Case (The New Republic)

The Costly Blunders in the Army’s $533 Million Fiasco (ProPublica)

Trump's Contested Order to Restrict Mail-In Voting Could Disenfranchise Millions: Ari Berman (Democracy Now!)

How Trump Declared Economic War on His Own People (The American Prospect)

FDA approves landmark pancreatic cancer drug that’s shown to improve survival (AP News)

New York’s Power Grid Struggles to Handle the Heat (Inside Climate News)

Until next time,

Harry from The Hound

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