By now you know how I felt about it. When I heard, seven days into the Meta trial, that the company would be allowed to settle with the States, I was astounded. “They did what?” I shouted at my phone first thing that morning.

For one thing, it was clear in even those first few days in court that there was a mountain of evidence showing that executives at Facebook and Instagram had known for years not only that young kids were on the platform when they shouldn’t be, but that terrible things were happening to them as they snuck around what attempts Meta made to filter them out. Witness after witness had described a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy at the company when it came to kids. And the executives were about to take a public beating.

We had just begun to hear from Instagram boss Adam Mosseri. The famously sweaty Mark Zuckerberg was due to take the stand in a couple of days. (He’d have to answer for, among many other things, testimony that suggested he’d personally attended a meeting at which his people told him four million kids under the age of 13 were on Instagram.) This was shaping up to be another very public reckoning for the company.

I spent weeks reassuring people in the comments that no, this wasn’t going to wind up a monetary settlement. This time was clearly going to be different. It was clear to me that the states had this company on the ropes, and it was not at all clear to me what incentive they would have to accept anything short of a verdict against Meta. But I was wrong, and I needed to know why.

So on the Monday after the settlement I interviewed Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who co-led the multi-state effort to hold Meta accountable for violating children’s privacy and violating state laws about deceptive practices — and helped lead the settlement negotiations. He told me that the calculus of accepting a settlement only made sense when it had become clear to Meta that they were likely to lose this case. He also said it made far more sense to him to pursue a settlement that would guarantee Meta made changes to its business now than wait the years it would take to get through various appeals, even if the judge in the case decided in the states’ favor.

It’s a tough business being an Attorney General in a case like this. In our conversation, it became clear to me that A.G. Weiser and his peers are struggling to figure out the best remedies, just as we all are. It’s going to take a lot more legal action like this one to get the change we would want to see in this world. This conversation was, for me, a very helpful first journey into just how complex it all is once the problems we see so clearly in our lives have to be sorted out in court.

In this conversation Weiser explains why he thinks New Mexico's $942 million litigated judgment bought less protection than his settlement did, why he considers messaging — which is excluded from the settlement — "a different kettle of fish" than an algorithmic feed, why requiring age assurance from parents hurts Meta rather than kids, why he put the odds of getting what the states wanted at trial around 30 percent, what he does and doesn't know about whether the discovery evidence can be shared with the thousands of remaining plaintiffs, and whether landing a settlement ten weeks before voters decide whether he’s the next governor of Colorado was a coincidence.

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