Social media and the myth of the big tobacco moment

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, went to federal court a few weeks ago. Some 47 states have accused her of marketing addictive and harmful products to young people.

It was an all-out courtroom attack on the power of social media. The meta, valued at $1.47 trillion, warned it could be on the hook for $1.4 trillion.

That’s real money, even in Silicon Valley. As Meta has already lost or settled several social media cases this year, critics and commentators have begun to ask: Was this Big Tobacco’s social media moment, a historic event where a once-beloved pastime is brought down to the brink of joint rulings by regulators, courts and activists?

On Wednesday, Meta took on the states. It will pay up to $17.1 billion over ten years to change its social media properties to make them less coercive for young people.

The sum of $17.1 billion is rather less than $1 trillion. Those hoping for the end of social media as we know it and the downfall of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been vocal in their disappointment. “This penalty is minuscule when you consider the wealth and power behind Meta,” Public Citizen, a consumer rights group, he complained about Bluesky.

If social media critics didn’t get their Big Tobacco moment, historians said it might be because they were chasing a myth. Big Tobacco’s moment has never been too great.

In 1998, state regulators came together in a deal with the big four tobacco companies. In the so-called Master Settlement Agreement, the companies pledged to pay more than $200 billion (more than $400 billion in today’s dollars) over the next quarter century, stop marketing to youth and make other changes.

It was the largest consumer settlement ever. Smoking was on the retreat since. Thirty years ago, teen smoking was routine, sometimes even cool. More than a third of young people had this habit. Now, smoking zones in secondary schools have gone the way of blackboards and audiovisual carts.

In 1999, a major Hollywood film was made to secure the legacy of the settlement. Starring Russell Crowe as a beleaguered cigarette company whistleblower, “The Insider” cast the fight against tobacco in highly dramatic terms. The film was widely acclaimed and is still celebrated.

But the fight against cigarettes was generally less cinematic, tobacco historians said.

“The Master Settlement Agreement was in the interest of the tobacco companies,” said Louis Kyriakoudes, director of the Albert Gore Research Center at Middle Tennessee State University. “They bought themselves out of significant litigation and were allowed to move on and do business.”

Robert Proctor, a Stanford professor and author of “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition,” was more scathing.

“Today is not the beginning of the end for social media, any more than 1998 was the beginning of the end for Big Tobacco,” he said. “Americans still smoke more than 170 billion cigarettes a year and inhale tons more nicotine from ‘electronic’ varieties. How easily we forget!”

Dr. Proctor was questioned while sitting on a plane waiting to depart for the Big Tobacco trial in which he was to serve as an expert witness. The cases never stopped, he said.

The extent to which Big Tobacco had a fall was decades, said Sarah Milov, author of “Cigarettes: A Political History.”

“Meta in 2026 is doing better than Big Tobacco in 1998,” she wrote in an email. “By 1998, tobacco—and more specifically, smoking in public—had been under social and legal attack for more than a quarter century. The major settlement agreement was not their wake-up call. Activists had been mobilizing for decades to make smoking, and to some extent smokers, socially unacceptable.”

At the urging of activists, municipalities first limited, then banned smoking in public places, she noted. Corporate America has come on board. Smokers were increasingly seen as bad employees: they got sick, destroyed equipment, took too many breaks.

The campaign against social media is nowhere near as widespread or as successful.

However, Dr. Milov wrote, “at a time when Americans can’t agree on basic facts, I find it significant that they can agree on the regulation of Meth.”

“Perhaps it shows a common agreement about the utter failure of Congress to address the harms of social media,” she added.

Mr Kyriakoudes, who works on the history of cigarettes, said the states’ deal with Meta this week may be a largely symbolic victory, but symbols matter.

“One thing that recurs regularly in American history is a deep hostility toward large, concentrated centers of power that seem unresponsive or out of control,” he said. “That’s what happened to cigarette companies and it seems to be happening to social media companies.”

All told, the social media’s recent string of setbacks in court is one of Big Tech’s biggest legal defeats since a federal judge ordered Microsoft broken up for antitrust violations in 2000. In the end, the breakup didn’t happen, but the near-death experience scarred the company for years.

Meta backed the Big Tobacco comparison in a legal filing last month that said the tech giant could be liable for $1.4 trillion, the value of the entire company. The meta arrived at this number by multiplying the millions of users by the violations for each use.

“A penalty of this magnitude is unprecedented in the history of consumer protection enforcement,” the company protested.

While it’s certainly one of the largest single-company settlements of all time, $17.1 billion is a huge blow to a company that made $60 billion in net income last year. “The meta always chooses to pay rather than fight because then it doesn’t have to change,” wrote Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur and critic, on Bluesky. Investors immediately boosted Meta’s stock price, suggesting they saw few long-term consequences.

However, the effects are hard to see. The tobacco settlement required the release of industry documents that implicated the companies, further reducing their political support and inspiring new claims against them.

There is no equivalent claim in Meta’s 2026 settlement, but the lawsuits have already produced incriminating documents. One of the reasons social media may end up being as ostracized as cigarettes, at least for teenagers, is that Meta employees have explicitly equated the two products internally.

“Alright, now we’re going after the <13 year olds?" one Meta employee wrote in a document cited in at least one suit. The employee added that "targeting 11-year-olds feels like tobacco companies did a few decades ago (and today). Like, seriously, we're saying, 'We've got to get them young.'"

Social media companies change quickly, even without a lawsuit. Meta wanted to be a virtual reality company for several years. Now it wants to be an artificial intelligence company. Even Meta doesn’t know what exactly that will entail. But it is happening at an alarming rate.

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, an expert on project management and focused organizations, said he fears the lesson social networking companies will learn from all these lawsuits: that their product works exactly as they hoped. They want it to be so compelling that it’s compelling. Introducing a new product is every marketer’s dream.

The problem is that it has now become a liability. With AI, the same risks are multiplied. No one even pretends to know what the long-term effects of technology are.

“AI is being deployed in products, decisions and people’s lives faster than any technology in history. The same playbook: optimize for speed, ship first, drive later, measure what’s easy,” Mr Nieto-Rodriguez wrote in a LinkedIn post this week with the caption “Social media just had its tobacco moment. AI won’t wait 15 years.”

He added: “Right now we are writing internal documents that will be read out loud in a courtroom one day.”