In August 2026, Meta agreed to introduce stricter protections for users under 18 on Facebook and Instagram and to make payments that could reach approximately $18 billion over ten years. The agreement followed litigation in which US states alleged that the company had designed features that encouraged compulsive use among children and teenagers and contributed to problems including depression, disordered eating and suicide. Meta denied the allegations and admitted no wrongdoing. The new measures include default daily time limits, restrictions on overnight use and greater control over personalised feeds.
In early September 2026, Meta was valued by financial markets at approximately $1.6 trillion. Yet the settlement draws attention to the effects of Meta’s platforms on people, beyond the financial value investors assign to the business. Social media can help young people maintain relationships, find support and pursue creative interests; some forms of use and platform design are also associated with harmful comparisons, disrupted sleep and harassment. These benefits and costs form part of the value created or destroyed through Meta’s activities, even when they are not fully reflected in the company’s accounts or market valuation.
The Meta case therefore raises the question at the heart of this article: what is a company worth when the value it creates for investors and users coexists with consequences borne elsewhere? Integrated value broadens the assessment by placing estimates of those social and environmental benefits and costs alongside financial value. Doing so requires judgements about which consequences count, how they can be measured and priced, and how responsibility is allocated.
From financial value to integrated value
Financial accounts record the revenue a company earns, the costs it incurs and its assets and liabilities. Investors use this information, alongside expectations about future cash flows, to value the company. Because these measures influence how companies are compared and where capital is allocated, they do more than describe performance: they also help define what counts as corporate success.
The distinction raised by Meta extends well beyond social media: companies routinely create costs and benefits that are borne or enjoyed by others. When these effects are not fully reflected in market transactions or financial accounts, economists call them externalities. A factory may pay for its labour, energy and materials while surrounding communities bear the health costs of its pollution. Research undertaken by a company may, by contrast, generate knowledge that benefits other businesses and society without producing additional income for the company.
Integrated value is an assessment of a company that combines its conventional financial value with estimates of the social and environmental value created or destroyed through its activities:
Integrated value = financial value + social value + environmental value
Financial value (FV) is the conventional financial assessment of a company, representing its value to its providers of capital. Social value (SV) captures the positive and negative effects of a company's activities on people’s wellbeing and society, including employees, consumers, supply-chain workers and communities. Positive effects may include employment and consumer wellbeing, improved health, and training and knowledge spillovers. Negative effects may include underpayment, unsafe working conditions, data breaches and health harms linked to products. Environmental value (EV) captures effects on natural systems across the company's operations and value chain. Positive effects may include land restoration or avoided emissions. Negative effects may include greenhouse-gas emissions, air and water pollution, soil degradation, waste and biodiversity loss.
These three forms of value do not necessarily move together. Meta expects to recognise a legal expense related to the settlement, but that accounting charge does not measure the benefits its platforms provide or the harms alleged by the states. An integrated value perspective asks how those wider consequences should be considered alongside financial performance, including who experiences them and how responsibility should be shared.
Turning wider effects into monetary estimates
Many social and environmental effects are not traded in markets and therefore have no observable price. To include them alongside financial value, an assessment would have to assign a monetary estimate known as a shadow price. It is not a price someone has paid; it represents a cost or benefit that the market transaction leaves out.
Turning a social or environmental effect into a monetary estimate can be summarised in three steps. First, the assessment defines its scope by determining which effects are material because of their scale, severity or relevance to the company’s activities. Second, it establishes a baseline: what would likely have occurred without the company’s activity. The change relative to that baseline is then quantified in an appropriate unit, such as tonnes of CO₂ equivalent emitted or years of healthy life gained or lost. Third, a shadow price is assigned to each unit, for example, euros per tonne of CO₂ equivalent. Multiplying the number of units by this price produces the total monetary value assigned to the effect.
Once an effect has been measured, its shadow price can be estimated in several ways. A damage-based approach values consequences such as treatment costs, lost working days, increased health risks or the loss of ecosystem services. An abatement price looks instead at what it would cost to prevent or reduce the harm, or to meet an agreed target; for carbon, this might be the cost of avoiding one additional tonne of emissions. Restoration-based prices estimate the cost of repairing damage or replacing lost services, while compensation-based prices estimate what would be required to compensate those who bear losses that cannot be prevented or repaired.
These approaches answer different questions, which is why they can produce substantially different prices without necessarily contradicting one another. A shadow price is therefore not the single ‘true’ price of an externality, but an estimate whose meaning depends on the purpose, evidence and assumptions behind it.
A price is not the same as value
The idea of assigning a price to nature or human wellbeing understandably creates resistance. Can the loss of a tree, a species or a healthy year of life really be reduced to a monetary figure?
Consider one square kilometre of forest. An assessment might quantify the carbon it captures, its contribution to water storage and purification, its recreational or aesthetic value, and the habitat it provides for other species. For Indigenous Peoples and local communities who live with and depend on the land, the same forest may sustain livelihoods and the transmission of knowledge between generations, while also forming part of cultural identity and spiritual and social relationships to place. The significance of these relationships extends beyond the benefits the forest provides and cannot be fully represented by a monetary estimate.
A shadow price can nevertheless estimate some of the monetary consequences of a defined change, such as income lost when forest-based livelihoods are disrupted or the cost of replacing water storage and purification. This allows those consequences to enter the calculation without treating the resulting figure as the forest’s complete worth. An assessment should therefore distinguish between values that have been monetised and those considered in other ways, while making clear whose perspectives shaped those choices.
What would it take to value Meta’s social effects?
Returning to the recent Meta case, a further challenge emerges when attempting to estimate its social value: the effects of Facebook and Instagram are distributed unevenly across users. Some may benefit from connection, self-expression and access to information, while others may be more exposed to harmful content, disrupted sleep or damaging social comparisons. These outcomes vary with users’ circumstances, vulnerabilities and patterns of use. An aggregate estimate could therefore allow benefits experienced by one group to numerically offset severe harms experienced by another, concealing who gained and who ultimately bore the cost.
Bringing these outcomes into an integrated value assessment requires more than identifying them. The assessment would first have to establish how much can be attributed to Meta. Social media use and mental health may influence one another: young people already experiencing difficulties may use platforms differently, while certain forms of use may compound those difficulties. The relevant comparison would also have to consider what would probably have happened if the users had not used Facebook or Instagram, including whether they would instead have used another platform. A company-level assessment would therefore require evidence showing which users encounter particular features, how their outcomes change and what would probably have happened otherwise. Much of the data needed to answer those questions is held by Meta itself.
Only after estimating the effects associated with Meta could the assessment assign monetary values and determine the company’s share of responsibility. Until then, a single estimate of Meta’s social value would depend heavily on assumptions about distribution, causation and attribution. This does not make the effects irrelevant to an assessment of the company. It shows the distance that remains between recognising these consequences and pricing them defensibly at company level.
The Heineken case
A final number does not necessarily remove the uncertainty encountered in the Meta case; it records how a methodology has dealt with it. The DAX–AEX Futureproof Index gives Heineken a financial value of €53.5 billion but an integrated value of negative €64.7 billion. Within the assessment, the company receives €64.5 billion in positive social value for consumer wellbeing, while its largest deduction is €170.9 billion for alcohol-related social costs. The same commercial activity therefore creates benefits for consumers while generating costs elsewhere in society.
The €170.9 billion figure begins with an estimate of the harm associated with the alcohol Heineken sells, rather than the amount for which the company is considered responsible. Because no comparable global estimate was available, the methodology drew on studies from the United States and the Netherlands covering healthcare, lost productivity, accidents and crime. It converted these findings into regional costs per litre of beer and applied them to Heineken’s global beer production in each region, producing an initial annual social cost of €61.7 billion.
The methodology then narrows that figure. Drawing on research that attributes roughly three-quarters of alcohol-related societal costs to binge drinking, it excludes this share on the basis of Heineken’s efforts to promote responsible consumption. It makes a further reduction for alcohol-free products and assigns half of the remaining cost to Heineken as the producer. The annual amount attributed to the company consequently falls to €7.32 billion. Projecting the cost into the future and discounting it to its value today produces the €170.9 billion included in Heineken’s integrated value.
The main calculation retains 25% of the initial estimate after excluding costs associated with binge drinking. If it retained 12.5% instead, the present-value cost attributed to Heineken would fall to approximately €85.5 billion and its integrated value would shift from negative €64.7 billion to positive €20.8 billion. Nothing about the estimated harm to society has changed; only the share allocated to Heineken is different. Whether the company's integrated value is positive or negative therefore depends as much on how responsibility is allocated as on the estimate of the harm itself.
What changes when value is measured differently?
The Heineken case shows the importance of broadening how value is measured. Crediting the company for consumer wellbeing while deducting environmental impacts and a share of alcohol-related social costs does more than produce a final number. It shows where value is actually being created and destroyed across the business, and who is bearing the cost. Conventional financial accounts capture only part of that picture. That gap is exactly what integrated value is designed to close.
The importance of measuring these effects lies in how this information can influence investment decisions and company performance. When social and environmental costs and benefits are not fully reflected in financial accounts or market valuations, managers, investors and lenders are working with an incomplete picture of company performance. Making those effects visible could support managers to identify where current profits rely on costs borne by others and compare existing activities with alternatives that reduce harm or create wider benefits. Investors and lenders can examine how returns are generated, whether external costs could later become financial liabilities through litigation or regulation, and which companies are better positioned to manage them.
If these measures become more widely used, they could also change which companies and activities are rewarded. Companies that reduce emissions, improve working conditions or design safer products could become more attractive to investors and lenders, even when some of those benefits do not immediately appear in profits. Companies that continue to shift substantial costs onto others would be harder to assess as successful on the basis of financial performance alone. Measurement alone cannot guarantee better outcomes, but it can strengthen the incentives for companies to take responsibility for the consequences of their activities, reduce harm and invest in improvements to social and environmental wellbeing.
Conclusion
What, then, is a company really worth? The cases examined here show why no valuation answers that question from a neutral standpoint. For Meta, the available evidence identifies possible benefits and harms but does not yet support a robust company-level estimate of social value. For Heineken, a final number has been produced, yet its sign changes when one assumption about responsibility is altered. Integrated value brings a wider range of consequences into view, but it cannot remove the choices involved in deciding what counts, how it is measured and whose perspective is represented.
The articles that follow examine three ways these wider consequences connect back to the company: when social or environmental harm becomes legal or financial exposure; why investments that create benefits over decades may appear unattractive when judged against short-term returns; and how a company’s wider impact shapes its ability to attract and retain people. That is the shift integrated value asks for: the next time a strategy, an investment or a company appears profitable, ask what it costs elsewhere, and who is paying for it. Asking the question earlier means those costs can be reduced, shared more fairly, or avoided altogether. It's how the same activity that creates a return for shareholders can also create a better outcome for everyone else impacted by it. Shall we?
This article is part of The Outside World, ftrprf’s very own research center.
As changemakers, we believe that what happens in the outside world is the most powerful force shaping organizational strategy – and also the most underestimated. To do well, organizations need to understand what’s happening in the outside world. To do significantly better, they need to be aware of what it means for their future, their relations, their strategy, and their impact. We serve as a bridge between society and tailored strategy by analysing societal dynamics, global trends, and shifting public expectations with a multidisciplinary team of international analysts, excellent tooling, sophisticated AI, and a systems approach. This article is part of our third trimester research focus, which centers on value.
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