There's no admission of liability or guilt, and the sum works out to roughly 1% of what was originally being sought. And buried in the settlement terms, there's a clause that makes $5 billion dollars of that penalty contingent on TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat adopting the same restrictions - turning what looked like a punishment into a competitive equaliser. Let's dive into what Meta actually bought with that cheque, and why the big number you see gracing headlines disguises much of what's underneath.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

Around a dozen business owners lock themselves in one room (our office) for 36 hours and build. An AI tool, an automation, whatever you keep putting off. No teacher, no course. Just people building next to people who are also building. September 12–13, Grey Lynn, Auckland. This is your sign.

Dexerto reports that Jimmy Donaldson, the beast man himself, appeared on a remix of Lil Baby's Pharrell-produced track "Dead Fresh", delivering a verse as his alter ego, MrLean. He hit the expected points, rapping about his wealth and philanthropy over a high-fashion music video shot in his hometown of Greenville, North Carolina. "Richest rapper on the scene, call me MrLean / 30 million pounds of trash, we got that ocean clean," he spat, referencing his TeamSeas and TeamTrees initiatives before handing off to Lil Baby, who called him his "newest artist".

MrBeast has since teased a possible full album from the character on Instagram, though nothing's confirmed. The MrLean persona originated from the viral 2025 "hood MrBeast" TikTok trend, so we don't really know whether this is a one-off joke or the start of something even more unhinged.

Speaking of making big bucks, Apple just gave one of its top dogs a serious promotion. 9to5Mac reports that John Ternus officially became CEO of Apple on September 1, succeeding Tim Cook after a 15-year tenure. Ternus, 51, spent 25 years at Apple overseeing hardware engineering across iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods and Apple Watch products before inheriting the helm of the company, now valued at around US$4.7 trillion. Tim Cook sent a farewell memo to employees and moves to executive chairman, so he'll still be hanging around on the board.
Ternus's first major public test arrives just over a week into the job, when he takes the stage at the September 9 "Surprise and Shine" event. No pressure, Johnny boy.

And finally - two of the most beloved oceanic fictional universes in history have collided with the Golden Arches. Today reports that McDonald's has confirmed the SpongeBob x One Piece Happy Meal launches in the US on September 15 and will roll out across 66 countries. The collection includes 13 collectible toys reimagining Bikini Bottom characters as the Straw Hat crew, including SpongeBob as Luffy, Patrick as Zoro, Squidward as Sanji, and Sandy as Nami.

McDonald's teased it with a fully animated teaser loaded with One Piece lore and references. "We've truly entered the great Happy Meal era", as the company put it. Everyone talks about peak crossovers and unexpectedly great collabs, but this... I'd eat a Happy Meal for the first time in 20 years for this.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

Meta, the multi-billion-dollar parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has officially agreed to a landmark eighteen-billion-dollar settlement to resolve a multi-state federal lawsuit accusing the tech giant of deliberately engineering its platforms to hook, ensnare, and addict children and teenagers to the feed.

It’s been hailed by state attorneys general and mainstream media networks as an unprecedented triumph for public health and digital safety: a corporate reckoning that will finally force Silicon Valley to pay for the psychological harms inflicted on a generation of minor users.

But, and there’s always a but, let’s read the fine print of the agreement; Meta didn't just pay a fine; they bought a massive corporate insurance policy.

To put this eighteen-billion-dollar sum into context, you have to understand that the bipartisan coalition of fifty-two states was originally seeking up to 1.4 trillion dollars in damages for systemic consumer protection violations.

By settling mid-trial, Meta successfully managed to clear its legal deck for roughly one per cent of the initial public demand, without admitting a single shred of liability or guilt in the process. They effectively pulled an emergency lever to make the immediate threat of financial ruin disappear, just a manageable line item on a quarterly corporate expense report.

The corporate strategy here lies in the conditions Meta managed to weave into the settlement architecture. Under the terms of the deal, five billion dollars of the penalty is explicitly contingent on Meta's primary market competitors, namely TikTok, YouTube, and Snap, adhering to the exact same “restrictive” teen safety frameworks. This was more than just accepting limits like two-hour daily caps or midnight notification blackouts for under-18 users; Meta used their massive capital to force those same growth-throttling restrictions onto the rest of the tech industry. They successfully transformed a punishment for platform addiction into a way to neutralise their rivals, ensuring that if Meta's teenage engagement metrics drop, everyone else drops right along with them.

Insane stuff, even for Meta.

Like, that’s the ultimate endgame of corporate risk management. The eighteen billion dollars will be channelled into public health programs, crisis intervention, and outdoor teen initiatives, effectively forcing the state to clean up the psychological mess that Facebook and Instagram spent a decade creating. Meanwhile, Meta shifts its focus entirely toward unregulated artificial intelligence investments, leaving the old, toxic social media model behind to build their all-consuming data trap.

They literally house-trained the old monster just enough to satisfy the public regulators, completely oblivious to the fact that the underlying motivation (profit maximisation through the extraction of human attention) remains entirely untouched.

Obviously, a corporate settlement was never going to be enough to protect children and their minds entirely. But I would have expected a little more.

As always, disappointed, but not at all surprised.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The sound comes from TikToker Angelo David, who posted a video he filmed as a kid in 2009 showing off his brand new American Girl Doll with his dad:
"My American Girl Doll Mia! Woo! I just got her like 2 weeks ago."

Creators are lipsyncing with the young, squeaky-voiced David and adding whatever they're currently showing off, obsessing over, or incredibly proud of.
Some of my favourite examples:

How you can jump on this trend:
Film yourself lipsyncing to the sound and add whatever you're showing off or completely obsessed with right now as your on-screen text.

A few ideas to get you started:

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.