Meta's major losses over child safety are just the start
Spare a thought for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has been having a very tough week. Meta has suffered two unprecedented court losses over child safety and addictive design – potentially opening the floodgates for many more such cases. Its massive AI expenditure continues to be a problem, and its takeover of Chinese AI agent company Manus may be in trouble. Tech Gets Real is a show about staying in control in a time of rapid technological change. I'm veteran tech journalist David Meyer, and I've been covering topics like online privacy and freedom for two decades. If you like this, please hit like and subscribe, and share it with others who might find it useful. To contact me, please email david@techgetsreal.com or connect on: Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/superglaze.bsky.social Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@superglaze Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/davidmeyerwrites REFERENCES: Guardian on Meta’s New Mexico loss https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/24/meta-new-mexico-jury Crikey on Australian experience with age verification https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/13/teens-social-media-ban-kids-still-using-platforms/ Reuters on Meta and Google’s LA loss https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/jury-reaches-verdict-meta-google-trial-social-media-addiction-2026-03-25/ Andy Stone’s tweet on Meta’s $325 million fine https://x.com/andymstone/status/2036555284521558355 CNBC on Meta’s layoffs https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/25/meta-layoffs-reality-labs-facebook.html European Commission statement on TikTok preliminary findings https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_312 Business Insider on OpenAI shuttering Sora and surprising Disney https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-kills-sora-app-ai-compute-crunch-forces-hard-choices-2026-3 JDSupra on Meta’s AI agent incident https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/when-the-agent-goes-off-script-meta-s-1141491/ Financial Times on Manus trouble https://www.ft.com/content/d9123d9d-c807-41d6-8a17-80ff1111834a