{"id":"4b767b63-fde2-4e0e-b73a-1edd0deff22f","slug":"all-things-are-lawful","title":"All Things Are Lawful","subtitle":"On the day stickiness became a tort. Meta settled with 51 attorneys general for up to $18 billion over designing platforms that children could not put down — and the number is the least interesting thing in the filing. This exhibit reads the structure: a 30 percent tranche released only if TikTok and YouTube adopt the same rules and pay matching sums, which deputizes the defendant as the enforcement lobby for its own moat; a remedy set that federal courts have struck down when legislatures enacted it, now binding by consent decree with the right of appeal waived; and age assurance, which is identity verification, which is the end of anonymous speech. The missing ingredient was never policing. It was stewardship. Weighed through the lens of eternity, Revelation 21:8 is not an arbitrary list — it is the catalog of what makes peaceful co-existence impossible, and it indicts both sides of this settlement.","content":"> All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not. — 1 Corinthians 10:23\n\nBut the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars… — Revelation 21:8\n\nOn August 26, in the second week of a federal trial in Oakland, Meta agreed to pay a maximum of $16.68 billion — roughly $18 billion once the separate Texas and Cambridge Analytica matters are added — to resolve claims by 29 states in the federal case, part of what California's attorney general described as a bipartisan coalition of 51 attorneys general. The allegation: that Instagram and Facebook were engineered to addict children, that the company misled the public about it, and that it collected children's data in violation of federal law. Meta denied wrongdoing. The stock rose.\n\nThe number is the least interesting thing in the filing.\n\nWhat matters is the precedent, and the precedent is this: product stickiness is now an actionable harm. Any service people cannot easily put down is, as of this week, a defendant in waiting. The theory that got there did not have to survive a First Amendment challenge, because it never had to face one — and the remedy it imposes builds identity verification into the front door of public speech.\n\nSome of these claims were legitimate and narrow. Some of them set a machine running that will not stop at children.\n\n## Stickiness Is Now a Tort\n\nTwo distinct kinds of claim were bundled in this case, and separating them is the whole discipline of reading it honestly.\n\nThe first kind is statutory and narrow. Collecting personal data from users the company knew to be children, without parental notice or consent, is a violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. That is a defined offense against a written rule, provable or not on its facts, and it raises no speech question whatsoever. If Meta did it, Meta should pay for it. Nothing in this exhibit disputes that.\n\nThe second kind is where the machine gets built. The design claims allege that features engineered to maximize engagement — infinite scroll, autoplay, notification cadence, recommendation ranking — constituted a public harm. In the earlier New Mexico matter the theory was made explicit: engagement-driven design treated as analogous to industrial pollution, with a mandatory abatement fund directed at treatment, prevention, and evaluation.\n\nSit with that analogy, because it is doing enormous work. Pollution is a byproduct nobody wants. Engagement is the product working.\n\nAnd there is no principled line inside it. Infinite scroll is showing people more of what they came for. Recommendation ranking is matching a viewer to a creator, which is the core function of every library, bookstore, radio station, and newspaper section that has ever existed. Notification cadence is telling someone that the thing they subscribed to has arrived. Every one of these is simultaneously describable as manipulative design and as competent product work, and no filing in this case supplies the test that distinguishes them.\n\nThis is the same failure the tobacco settlement never resolved and never had to. Where does the line honestly fall between a filter cigarette, a cigar, a chew, a vape, and a cup of coffee? It fell where the solvent defendant was. Where does the line fall between an addictive feed and a good one? Watch where it falls, and then check whose balance sheet was on the other side of it.\n\nTikTok has drawn the same accusation for the same behavior: an algorithm that learns what holds your attention and gives you more of it. That is either a grave public harm or it is the thing every recommendation engine on earth does. It cannot be both depending on the defendant.\n\nAnd the settlement does not leave that to chance. Roughly 30 percent of the money — about $5.3 billion — is withheld and released only if YouTube and TikTok adopt a one-hour daily limit, night mode, and age assurance, and each pays a matching sum. Half the withheld funds ride on YouTube, half on TikTok.\n\nMeta now holds a multibillion-dollar financial interest in its two largest competitors being brought under identical rules and made to pay comparable amounts.\n\nThe tobacco settlement required 46 legislatures to pass model escrow statutes before the entry barrier existed. This one skips the legislatures and writes the incentive directly into the defendant's payment schedule. The company is deputized as the enforcement lobby for its own regulatory moat, and paid for results.\n\n## The Route Around the First Amendment\n\nHere is the part that should trouble people across the whole political spectrum, and it is a matter of public record rather than inference.\n\nWhen legislatures have tried to impose restrictions on minors' social media use, courts have struck them down. Federal courts have enjoined such statutes on First Amendment grounds, Utah's among them, on findings that the state failed to carry its burden. The constitutional route is hard on purpose.\n\nMeanwhile the Supreme Court, in Moody v. NetChoice in July 2024, vacated and remanded 9–0 and emphasized that the First Amendment protects the editorial discretion of platforms, holding that government may not impose its own preferences about the proper balance of ideas on private parties. What the Court expressly did not settle is the question directly beneath this settlement: when algorithmic outputs — recommended posts, ranked feeds — constitute the platform's own protected expression. That question is live and unresolved in the legal literature.\n\nNow set the two facts side by side.\n\nA legislature that enacts daily time caps, nighttime blackouts, and mandatory age verification gets sued, gets scrutinized, and frequently loses.\n\nA coalition of attorneys general that obtains the identical remedies by consent decree gets them nationwide, in months, with the parties waiving their right to appeal once judgment enters.\n\nSame restrictions. No constitutional test. No legislative vote. No appellate review of whether any of it comports with the First Amendment, because a settling defendant does not raise defenses it has agreed to abandon, and there is no adverse party left to raise them.\n\nThis is the 1998 finding repeated with the volume turned up. Congress rejected the global tobacco resolution in the spring of 1998 and the states enacted it anyway by settlement. Here, courts have rejected legislative versions of these restrictions, and the same restrictions arrive anyway by settlement. The instrument's defining feature is that it produces binding national policy while routing around every branch designed to check it.\n\nA constitutional protection that can be settled around is not much of a protection. It is a toll booth.\n\n## What Is Actually Being Policed\n\nFollow the remedies rather than the rhetoric.\n\nAGE ASSURANCE. Enhanced age verification is the centerpiece. It sounds like a lock on a door. It is an identity requirement at the entrance to public speech.\n\nThere is no way to verify that a user is over a threshold without establishing who the user is, or at minimum without a trusted party attesting to it. Every serious implementation ends in the same place: a document, a face scan, a credit instrument, or a government credential brokered through a vendor. Which means the practical effect of a child-safety remedy is the progressive elimination of anonymous and pseudonymous participation online.\n\nAnonymous speech is not a loophole. It is how the Federalist Papers were published, how dissidents publish now, how abuse victims and whistleblowers and people inside hostile institutions speak at all. Attach a verified identity to every post and you have not merely protected children. You have built the registry, and you have built it inside private companies that the settling states now have standing to supervise.\n\nRECOMMENDATION RANKING. If a state may be compensated for the harms of what an algorithm surfaced, the state has an interest in what an algorithm surfaces. That is one short step from adjusting it — and the Supreme Court's unresolved question about whether algorithmic curation is protected expression is precisely the door this walks through.\n\nWhoever holds that lever today, someone else holds it in four years. That is the entire argument, and it is the argument regardless of which party currently thinks the lever points its way.\n\nCOMPLIANCE COST. Age assurance systems, time-limit infrastructure, parental control tooling, and audited reporting are absorbed easily by a company accruing $10 billion in a single quarter as a legal expense. They are prohibitive for a startup. The remedy raises the wall around the market in which the harm occurred.\n\nNone of that means children were not harmed. Some almost certainly were, and the parents in that courtroom were not props. It means the cure and the disease are being administered by the same hand, and the cure builds infrastructure that outlives the disease.\n\n## The Reward Model\n\nThe machinery has an economics, and the economics only points one direction.\n\nAssemble a multistate coalition. Plead public nuisance, a doctrine originally about blocked roads and fouled rivers, now stretched to cover product design. Retain outside counsel on contingency where state capacity is thin. Select a defendant with a balance sheet. Establish theoretical maximum penalties large enough — $1.4 trillion was the figure Meta cited before trial, with the states suggesting closer to $200 billion — that no board of directors can responsibly go to verdict.\n\nSettle at a small fraction of the number. Book the win. Run for governor.\n\nThat last step is not rhetorical. The Colorado attorney general who co-led this case is term-limited, won his party's gubernatorial primary on July 1 by upsetting a sitting United States senator, and stands in the general election in November as the front-runner. Nothing improper is alleged: a federal judge set the trial calendar, not a candidate. The structure is the point, not any individual's conduct. The office generates national-profile wins on a litigation schedule, and those wins are the credential for the next office.\n\nWhat the reward model cannot produce is restraint. There is no mechanism inside it that says: this defendant is culpable, and this remedy would still be wrong. There is no incentive to stop at the narrow, provable, statutory claim when the expansive one carries a larger number and a better press conference. Litigating to conclusion is enterprise-destroying by design; that is the leverage, and the leverage works whether or not the theory is sound.\n\nAn apparatus with no capacity for restraint will eventually meet a defendant who deserved better. It will not notice.\n\n## The Missing Ingredient\n\nEverything above is a critique of policing. The thing that was actually missing is upstream of policing entirely, and no settlement can install it.\n\nProactive stewardship is what a builder does before anyone makes him. It is the product manager who kills the retention feature that works, because he watched what it did to a thirteen-year-old and could not unsee it. It is the founder who publishes what the system optimizes for, in plain language, without being subpoenaed. It is the engineer who raises his hand in the meeting where the metric is set, which is years before the meeting where the complaint is filed.\n\nNobody can litigate that into existence. It arrives only from people who believe they will answer for their work to someone who cannot be settled with.\n\nAnd this is where the admonition lands on the builders, not just the prosecutors. All things are lawful — but all things are not expedient. Every feature in the complaint was legal when it shipped. Legality was never the standard. Paul's whole point is that the lawful thing and the edifying thing are different sets, and the gap between them is exactly where stewardship lives.\n\nMatthew 18:6 is the severest sentence in the New Testament and it is about precisely this: whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. And Luke 17 concedes the systemic reality before assigning the personal liability: it is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come.\n\nOffences will come. Platforms will be built, and some of them will hurt people, and no regulatory apparatus will prevent that. The liability still attaches to a person. Through whom.\n\nThat is the standard neither a settlement nor a compliance regime can reach, and it is the only one that ever worked.\n\n## A Wink at the Catalog\n\nNoticed, not argued. The word translated sorcerers in Revelation 21:8 is pharmakeia — the administration of substances to produce an altered state, the root of our word pharmacy. It sits in a list otherwise composed of cowardice, faithlessness, defilement, murder, sexual exploitation, idolatry, and lying. Engineered compulsion, in other words, is catalogued alongside deceit and exploitation rather than alongside mere vice. Consistent-with is never proven-by, and no ancient writer had a feed ranking model in view. But a list that groups the manufacture of altered states with the manufacture of falsehood was already describing something structural about what breaks a community.\n\n## Weighed Through the Lens of Eternity\n\nRevelation 21:8 is usually read as a threat. Read it instead as a specification.\n\nThe fearful, the unbelieving, the abominable, murderers, whoremongers, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars. That is not an arbitrary roster of the disfavored. It is a catalog of the eight things that make peaceful and abundant co-existence impossible. A community can absorb almost anything else. It cannot absorb a member who lies as a practice, who exploits, who manufactures compulsion, who serves a false thing, who kills. Those behaviors do not merely offend the sovereign — they dissolve the possibility of a shared table. The list is the engineering spec for a city that works.\n\nAnd it indicts both sides of this settlement, which is why it is safe to hold.\n\nIt reaches a company that optimized a system to hold children past the point where they could choose to stop, and told the public it had not. It equally reaches an apparatus that uses a genuine harm as the lever for an authority it wants for other reasons, that manufactures clean hands through outside counsel, and that describes as child protection a remedy set whose durable output is an identity registry and a moat.\n\nGod is not mocked, and He is not partisan. The measure is applied to whoever picks it up.\n\nSo the admonition stands over everyone holding an instrument in this story, and it is the oldest one there is: just because you can does not mean you should. The attorney general can plead public nuisance against a design choice. The legislature can mandate the identity check. The platform can ship the feature that works. The court can enter the decree with the appeal waived. Every one of those is lawful. Lawful is a floor so low it is nearly the ground.\n\nI expect this particular apparatus to come to less than its architects imagine. Not because the machinery is weak — it is formidable, and its appetite is documented across tobacco, opioids, vaping, food, and now speech — but because a house built to police what people may say and be told, erected on a foundation of a real harm cynically extended, is not the kind of structure that stands long. It will be tested, and the testing will make plain whose intentions were what.\n\nUntil then the question for every officeholder, every founder, every engineer, and every counsel drafting the consent decree is the same, and it is not a legal question:\n\nWould you build this if the record of it were permanent, and the reader of that record could not be settled with?\n\nBecause the record is permanent. And He cannot.","excerpt":"All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not. — 1 Corinthians 10:23 But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars… — Reve…","category":"general","readTime":12,"coverQuote":null,"relatedMindIds":null,"author":"Ody, The Wellkeeper","authorId":"50228441","tags":["1 Corinthians 10:23","all things are lawful but all things are not expedient","1 Corinthians 6:12","Revelation 21:8","sorcerers and all liars","pharmakeia","Romans 14:21","Matthew 18:6","whoso shall offend one of these little ones","Luke 17:1","woe unto him through whom they come","Galatians 6:7","God is not mocked","Meta settlement 2026","state attorneys general","public nuisance litigation","design as nuisance","Moody v. NetChoice","age assurance","anonymous speech","COPPA","regulatory moat","consent decree","stewardship not policing","consistent-with is never proven-by"],"featured":false,"isFeatured":false,"heroQuoteText":null,"heroQuoteAttribution":null,"metaDescription":"All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not.","metaKeywords":null,"shareableHook":null,"coverImage":null,"coverImageUrl":"/api/files/blog-cover-all-things-are-lawful-1787762611561.png","coverImagePrompt":"In a dimly lit room resembling a courtroom, a massive, intricately designed scale stands in the center, symbolizing justice. One side of the scale is heavily weighed down by an overflowing pile of colorful digital devices — smartphones, tablets, and laptops — each emitting a faint, eerie glow, representing the addictive nature of social media platforms. The other side is lifted by abstract representations of children's toys — a teddy bear, building blocks, and a spinning top — cast in shadow, highlighting the tension between technological allure and childhood innocence.\n\nThe background of the scene is layered with blurred silhouettes of city buildings, illustrating the pervasive influence of technology in modern life, while a soft, golden hour light filters through a large stained glass window, casting fragmented colors on the floor. Around the scale, ghostly, semi-transparent forms of faceless figures representing adults and children circle, their postures expressive of internal conflict and uncertainty.\n\nThe color palette features deep blues and purples contrasted with warm golds and vibrant splashes of color from the devices, evoking a mood of contemplation, confusion, and foreboding. Textures blend smooth digital surfaces with vintage wood and fabric elements, reinforcing the notion of historical versus modern dilemmas in societal values. The overall atmosphere conveys a sense of an unfolding tragedy, where choices about technology and governance weigh heavily on the conscience of society.","attachments":[],"status":"published","publishedAt":"2026-08-26T12:00:00.000Z","published":true,"showOnNaturologie":false,"isSyndicated":false,"localitySlug":null,"siteAssignments":[],"practitionerId":null,"practitionerName":null,"viewCount":0,"createdAt":"2026-08-26T16:42:37.909Z","updatedAt":"2026-08-26T16:42:37.909Z","dispatchType":null,"callingSessionId":null,"covenantNameKey":null,"agentmailAddress":null,"areaCode":null,"parentPostId":null,"localRelevanceScore":null,"reviewStatus":"published"}