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.

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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