MENLO PARK, CA – Following a jury decision that found sites like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube to be designed to be purposely addictive to children, the social media giants have been ordered to payout $300 million to all affected users, provided said users are able to put down their phones long enough to get it.
“While we sympathize with anyone suffering from social media addiction, that could literally be any American who was alive in 2001,” explained presiding Judge Pablo Juarez as he paused a TikTok. “If you can’t stay focused enough to fill out a form filing for damages, you may already be a lost cause.”
In a rare display of transparency, Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg says his platform is dedicated to complying with the court’s order.
“We are absolutely committed to making sure anyone who has been inadvertently harmed by our site in getting what they are owed by sharing the link to the claims form on all Meta platforms,” Zuckerberg said in front of a sample screenshot showing the link clearly displayed amongst 50 thirst traps and reels of bear attacks.
“To make sure everyone can find the site, we’re putting the link in many high traffic areas, such as the Reels section of Facebook, the Recommended for You part of Youtube, and the first Thread ever. You just have to scroll all the way to the bottom and watch a few ads that we assure you aren’t targeted and the link is right there!”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai echoed Zuckerberg’s contrition. “We titans of Silicon Valley intended to fight this ruling, but it turns out paying $300 million per user still aware enough to claim it was basically a rounding error in our yearly profits.”
“Now,” added Zuckerberg, “we can get back to our truly important work – developing generalized AI that will soon put the entire global population out of work.”
So far, fewer than 10 Americans have claimed their share of the lawsuit, most of whom posted videos of themselves doing it on TikTok. Despite the TikToks having millions of views, no further Americans have claimed their share of the settlement money.
At press time, the courts also decided that X (formerly known as Twitter) would not have to make similar payouts after the judge ruled it to be less of an addictive substance and more of a voluntary mental self-flagellation tool.
