Good morning. It was supposed to be Meta’s big tobacco moment, but the tech company’s share price barely flinched on Wednesday – and fluttered upwards, even – after it settled a landmark lawsuit. The case was brought by 29 US states who accused the company of harming children with addictive and dangerous products.
Against a rising tide of popular backlash, this legal action in the American courts pushed Meta to self-impose a level of regulation that Congress had repeatedly failed to, with a series of reforms now incoming to better protect children on Meta platforms. Some critics have argued the changes don’t go far enough .
Around the globe, and sometimes out of the media glare, Meta is facing a tranche of lawsuits. For today’s First Edition, we look to some of these others battles to hold the tech leviathan to account, with the Guardian’s global technology reporter Aisha Down. But first the headlines.
Nepal | The international community was scrambling to get aid into flood-stricken parts of Nepal and Tibet on Thursday as authorities warned that a lake formed at the site where the deadly torrents occurred was rising and at risk of bursting.
Russia | Russia has said it could retaliate against the UK for its support of Kyiv by striking military targets inside and outside Ukraine, amid reports that the director of the CIA warned the Kremlin against attacking Nato during a secretive visit this week.
UK news | Seven people charged with vandalising Donald Trump’s Turnberry golf course in Scotland have been accused of malicious damage “having a terrorist connection”.
Europe news | Ratko Mladić, the infamous Serbian general who was serving a life sentence for genocide committed during the Bosnian war, has died in prison in The Hague, a UN official and his lawyer confirmed.
Climate crisis | The only climate scientist teaching at West Point, the US army’s military academy, was fired after he resisted an order to stop teaching about the human causes of the climate emergency.
In depth: ‘Our lives do not matter to them’
It looks to be a monumental moment. On Wednesday, Meta agreed to pay up to $18bn (£13.3bn) to a coalition of US states suing it over the harm Facebook and Instagram has caused young people. But more significantly, given the company’s trillion-dollar-plus valuation, Meta agreed to make changes to its platforms. The company is now framing this as a precedent for other social media companies to follow, calling on competitors like TikTok and YouTube to fall in line.
The changes largely apply to under 18s and crucially will be turned on by default, marking a major shift from the previous opt-in system for parental controls and teen safety features. These include a two hour use limit per day, no access between midnight and 6am and no push notifications overnight or during school hours. Only parents will be able to disable these features. Adults will also be able to change their children’s feeds to a non-personalised one (which should better protect them from potentially harmful content) and switch off autoplay on videos.
But none of these changes are worth the candle if Meta doesn’t also institute rigorous age verification – and the experience thus far of Australia’s social media ban has found platforms falling short with kids bypassing checks.
While these new standards only apply in the US, optimists believe they could set new global minimum guardrails for social media safety. They mirror many of the limits the UK and Australian governments are already imposing, and on Thursday the UK government called on Meta to roll out the court-agreed protections to British children, as did the European Commission.
But across the globe, Aisha tells me, “there are plenty of other suits waiting in the wings”. Here’s a rundown of a few of them.
Abrham Meareg is four years into a case against Meta which has still not been heard. He claims Facebook failed to act on posts inciting violence and civil unrest. His father, Meareg Amare Abrha, a respected chemistry professor in Northern Ethiopia, was murdered after his address and threatening posts were published on Facebook in 2021 during civil war in the country.
“It’s a matter of numbers to them, a matter of statistics,” Meareg said of Meta. “It has been proven multiple times that our lives do not matter to them.”
Meareg is bringing the $2.4bn lawsuit in the Kenyan courts, accusing the Facebook owner of inflaming violence in Ethiopia.
“Their position is that the algorithm actively promoted these inflammatory posts for weeks,” says Aisha, “displaying Meareg Amare Abrha’s name and personal details while calling for his death. These posts went viral and Facebook didn’t have moderators in these languages. People died.”
This is not the first case of its kind. In 2021, a US court dismissed a class action brought by Rohingya refugees claiming that Facebook’s negligence facilitated the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar after algorithms amplified hate speech and the platform failed to remove inflammatory posts.
“As a global tech reporter, I should underscore this is not confined to Myanmar or Ethiopia,” Aisha tells me. “This spread of misinformation is everywhere.”
“ We know what we’re up against”. That’s what Ros and Mark Dowey told me as they launched a wrongful death suit against Meta. Their 16-year-old son Murray took his own life after he fell victim to an Instagram sextortion gang.
Since Murray’s death in 2023, the couple have repeatedly called out social media companies – and Meta in particular – for their inaction in the face of overwhelming evidence of harm. “It’s time [they] took accountability for what they’ve done to our young people.”
The lawsuit was filed in Delaware, where Meta is incorporated, by the US-based Social Media Victims Law Center acting on behalf of the Doweys, as well as the family of Levi Maciejewski, a 13-year-old from Pennsylvania who was also a victim of sextortion before taking his own life.
Their case argues that both deaths were “the foreseeable result of Meta’s design decisions and repeated refusals to implement affordable, available and identified safety features due to Meta’s prioritisation of engagement over user safety.”
Meta said at the time that “we support law enforcement to prosecute the [sextortion] criminals … and we continue to fight them on our apps on multiple fronts.”
Repro Uncensored, an NGO tracking digital censorship, has initiated formal legal action against Meta in the Netherlands. Together with other affected organisations, it is arguing the company’s moderation systems have unfairly targeted LGBTQ+ accounts and violated European digital rights laws.
“They’ve highlighted over one hundred cases worldwide of accounts belonging to queer groups and abortion access providers being removed or restricted,” says Aisha.
Repro Uncensored is also aiming to pursue regulatory action in Latin America, where Meta has “shadow banned” (quietly restricted the visibility of) content from accounts offering women’s health services.
Earlier this year, the European Commission accused Meta of breaching the EU’s Digital Services Act, citing what it described as “addictive design” on the company’s platforms. If the ruling is confirmed, the company could be fined up to 6% of its total annual turnover.
Last month, the EU also accused Meta of disregarding available data on the amount of time children spend on Instagram and Facebook at night, and how features like reels and stories could lead to compulsive use.
Many of the design changes EU officials want Meta to make – scrapping autoplay and infinite scroll as default settings, for example – have just been agreed in this week’s US settlement. We might well see Meta change tack on this European front, given the EU is actively considering a social media ban for under 16s.
At stake in the US case was the possibility that Meta might be forced to change its algorithm. This would have entirely upended their business and the content we all see. Although the US settlement will lead to some changes for minors in this regard, “it’s hard to see this concession changing the equation in war zones or creaking democracies,” Aisha says. “At base level, the algorithm is what has poisoned our information ecosystem.”
Without a transformation of the algorithm itself, Aisha says, cases like those listed here will keep coming. “Meta promised the digital commons and they continue to let those commons be filled with misinformation and calls to murder people.”
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The Guardian’s reader interviews are always well worth your time, and this week’s iteration, with Full Monty actor Robert Carlyle , is no exception. Michael
I like to browse the Heritage Crafts’ red list from time to time (silk ribbon making, Highland thatching) so was delighted to read Lauren Almeida’s interviews with young workers turning to these “ AI-proof ” trades. Libby
Frances Ryan is unflinching in her column on politicians and their perks: MPs criticising Farage’s finances must also alight from the gravy train. Michael
I always enjoy the Glasgow Bell’s deep dives into the cultural eccentricities of my city, and this lightly-drawn piece on the closure of one of our most infamous pubs does not disappoint. Libby
All you need to know is how this story begins: “I was naked in our tent at Burning Man last year when all hell broke loose …” Michael
Football | Danny Welbeck scored his first goal for Chelsea in their 2-0 win over Luton in the Carabao Cup second round, but Enzo Fernández was left out.
Cricket | Seamer Mohammad Abbas claimed four wickets for the tourists while Jordan Cox and Jamie Smith led England’s resistance in the second Test at Lord’s.
Football | Arsenal face mouthwatering assignments against Real Madrid and Bayern Munich as they bid to go one better than last season’s agonising near miss and win a first Champions League title.
Our critics’ roundup of the best things to watch, read, play and listen to right now
The wonderful Dalliance is an Australian six-parter beautifully written by Pip Karmel and directed with requisite subtlety by Emma Jackson. It stars Hugo Weaving as bonhomous retired cameraman Billy, who is the catalyst for the reunion of enough old friends – all in their 60s – to provide viewers with a feast of storylines, hilarious and heartbreaking by turns, and all suffused with the kind of irreverence and honesty that makes you instantly devoted to the whole endeavour. Dalliance is not about plot. There are no murders nor mysteries to be investigated or suspects to be harangued. It’s a mood piece and an array of portraits of characters who have actually lived some life, been formed by meaningful experiences and come out the other side. Lucy Mangan
Billy Strings: So Much for Goodbyes | ★★★★★
Billy Strings has been feted by everyone from Bob Dylan to Post Malone to Willie Nelson, the latter describing him as “the John Coltrane of bluegrass”. His guitar picking is every bit as astonishingly dextrous as his devotees claim; his equally impressive backing quartet are particularly talented at working up a ferociously propulsive head of steam, given that their ranks don’t include a drummer. Strings is equally capable of writing songs so perfectly rooted in tradition that you might be forgiven for assuming Light the Way or Lay Me Down were covers dating back to the 1940s or 50s, and of throwing his listeners a curveball that indicates the breadth of his musical tastes. His penchant for jam band improv is only lightly sketched here, his love of heavy metal is underlined on Burn the Other End, while a devotion to heartlands rock is reflected in the Springsteen-ish narrative of Mill Town Flood. What cuts through is the lingering thought of how rich and powerful the album you’ve just heard is. Alexis Petridis
Perhaps because it is based on a biography by an Englishman – Julian Jackson’s A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle – this very enjoyable and gallopingly eventful biopic has an element of amused detachment. The first of two parts, it offers a good-humoured, though naturally sympathetic, perspective on France’s great wartime hero, played with martyred and faintly preposterous hauteur by Franco-Armenian actor Simon Abkarian. De Gaulle is the lofty exile in London, refusing to accept the dishonour of the Vichy government and its capitulation to the Nazis. For reasons that will later become clear, De Gaulle’s own story is mysteriously intertwined with that of a hothead young patriot. A tiny touch of comedy is part of what makes this resemble an old-fashioned 60s war film, although it has evidently taken until 2026 for French cinema to come to terms with its contentious national icon. Peter Bradshaw
Vholume’s an on-foot racing game in which you hoof it through spectacularly odd environments, moving from one beam of concrete to the next. You’re clipping your wall-runs and power-slides together to bridge seemingly impossible gaps between buildings, forever in search of the next stretch of track, the next turn, the next jump that gets you to the level’s exit and the worldwide leaderboards. And once that’s done, you have a choice: onwards to another gauntlet, or back to the start of this one again to slice a few microseconds off your score? Or maybe you’d rather head over to multiplayer to race against the ghosts of others? This quickly becomes utterly compelling, and at the heart of it all is the realisation that Vholume is surprisingly accommodating to players of all abilities. Christian Donlan
“Race to get aid to Nepal and Tibet amid warnings of further floods”, is the Guardian ’s front page today. The Times leads with “Nepal death toll climbs amid fears of new flood” and the Mail says “Faces of Britons missing in Nepal”.
The Telegraph ’s headline is “Police surge to tackle Northern gang wars”, the Mirror ’s take is “Under siege”, and the Sun asks “How did UK town become a war zone?”.
The i Paper ’s splash is “Caught on camera in the UK: China Embassy guards using their electroshock weapons to threaten protesters”. Metro leads on “Hotel migrant numbers halved”, the Express has “21,294 criminal who should be deported still on streets”, and the FT says “Uefa primes criminal lawsuit against Infantino Fifa stake sale debacle”.
‘Tsunami from the sky:’ floods leave trail of devastation in Nepal and Tibet
Hundreds of people are missing or have been killed after a catastrophic flash flood hit Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday. Entire villages have been destroyed, many of which are popular pilgrimage and trekking destinations for tourists. Lucy Hough talks to global editor Devika Bhat about how the devastating event unfolded .
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Music festival lineups have always suffered from gender imbalance – a 2025 report found that women accounted for just 21.6% of headliners across nine major festivals.
Thankfully, a long line of women-led music festivals have tried to redress the balance while raising money for good causes, and this Saturday , singer Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields joins that lineage. Featuring chart-toppers such as Chappell Roan, newer acts such as Eli, and artists who have influenced Rodrigo, such as Stevie Nicks, 100% of its net proceeds will go to Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights and similar organisations.
“Olivia gives me hope that we can lead our generation and generations to come to a harmonious earth filled with strange girls and happy hearts,” says Eli.
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And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
Against a rising tide of popular backlash, this legal action in the American courts pushed Meta to self-impose a level of regulation that Congress had repeatedly failed to, with a series of reforms now incoming to better protect children on Meta platforms. Some critics have argued the changes don’t go far enough .
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Libby Brooks. Published 28 Aug 2026, 05:44 am.
