26 Aug 2026
the silence of the Meta advertisers
In the news: Meta settles for $18 billion in lawsuit brought by 29 states over social media harms to children.
Not in the news: any comment from anyone who spends their ad money, on their client’s, on Meta ads.
This settlement will result in a lot fewer ads being delivered. So where are any marketers speaking up to defend them? Or express concerns about the impact of the settlement?
I’m not even seeing anything on LinkedIn.
The whole marketing profession knows this company is creepy and crooked. But—because group cohesion, dealing with the problem is going to mean that the whole herd has to move at once.
Bonus links
Half a Million Californians Have Signed up for DROP to Delete their Personal Information from Data Brokers (Good protection from legacy data brokers—states are catching up to the new Meta/Google stuff, too.)
Ninth Circuit Rules That Tech Companies Can’t Prematurely Appeal Section 230 Losses from EPIC. (A slippery slope toward removing Section 230 protection from the kinds of services it was originally intended to cover? Or would a future Usenet-like service continue to be covered?)
Automate Chrome HAR capture with Docker (This works well, but a lot of the time now you just get a HAR file of a Cloudflare rejection.)