On Wednesday, Meta reached an unprecedented settlement of $17 billion with almost all US states over allegations that its social media platforms were deliberately engineered to captivate children and teens. While the sheer size of the settlement grabs headlines, the significant aspect of this agreement is that Meta is now required for the first time to create substantial barriers between young users and the digital environments that have long been crafted to keep them engaged on their platforms.
The required changes are notably substantial. For accounts belonging to those under 18, Meta will introduce “productive pauses” that break up long periods of scrolling, impose restrictions during nighttime and school hours, and enhance parental controls. These measures will also include limitations on social comparison features like beauty filters and visible like counts, features that have historically made it hard for young users to detach from these platforms.
This intervention doesn’t come a moment too soon.
For years, discussions around children’s exposure to social media have stagnated. Tech corporations have often shirked responsibility by advocating for improved parenting, while parents have contributed to the issue by allowing their young teens to use advanced smartphones and access platforms like Instagram, later expressing helplessness at the significant time their children spend engrossed in these apps.
The reality, as always, is somewhere in between.
Parents remain responsible for what they put into their children’s hands. Meta did not sneak into anyone’s house and leave an iPhone on a child’s nightstand, nor does Instagram require parents to permit their 13-year-olds to open accounts.
But once parents do allow their children and teenagers onto these platforms — and millions have and will — there is no reason the product itself should be engineered to make their job harder.
Writing for The Free Press in December, Maya Sulkin and Frannie Block compared the lawsuits against social-media companies to the litigation that eventually transformed Big Tobacco. The states’ argument, they explained, was not merely that children used Meta and YouTube too much, but that the companies knew their products were addictive, sought to maximize that addiction and possessed internal research demonstrating potential harms.
The tobacco analogy is useful, but only up to a point. Parents are still responsible for keeping cigarettes away from their children, just as they are responsible for deciding if, when and how their children own a smartphone. But we also decided decades ago that parental responsibility did not give cigarette companies carte blanche to market addictive products to minors and then shrug when children became addicted; the same principle should apply here.
A parent should not expect Meta to parent their child, but they should be able to expect that Meta isn’t employing armies of engineers to figure out how to defeat the limits they are trying to impose.
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Robby Starbuck, a frequent critic of Big Tech, was right to give Meta credit after the settlement, writing that, while the industry deserves criticism when it gets things wrong, “It’s equally important to point out when they’re getting it right.” He called the changes an attempt at “meaningful, industry wide change” and urged TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube to follow.
They should.
John Cusey, executive director of the Institute of Families and Technology, was more cautious, telling The Post that the agreement was “a huge step in the right direction” after years in which parents have been “at an impossible disadvantage” against addictive technology. But he also pointed to the settlement’s substantial limitations: Meta admits no wrongdoing, the agreement lasts only 10 years, and it does not reach messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Messenger or the rapidly expanding worlds of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and gaming.
Instagram is far from the only — or even necessarily the greatest — digital threat children encounter.
Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, who helped spearhead the litigation, told The Post that his office is already looking beyond traditional social media. Having spent his career in law enforcement, Coleman said the job is to “go to where the threats are,” calling the fight to make Big Tech safer for children “the opioid battle of my time in office.”
That includes platforms that look nothing like Instagram. Coleman pointed specifically to Roblox, where the concern is not primarily an algorithm serving a teenager an endless stream of damaging content but predators using a gaming platform to gain access to children. Different technology presents different dangers, but the principle is the same: Companies that make enormous sums from children’s attention should bear some responsibility for protecting the kids they are monetizing.
None of this gives parents permission to throw up their hands, but these new protections make it easier for parents to do what they should have been doing all along. A night-time lockout from Meta doesn’t prevent a parent from collecting the phone before bed. A two-hour limit doesn’t mean a 13-year-old is entitled to two hours of Instagram.
The settlement doesn’t replace parental judgment, but it does give parents reinforcements and acts as another layer of protection.
For too long, families have been fighting on enemy territory against companies with extraordinary expertise and financial incentives to design products that keep their children watching, clicking and scrolling.
Parents should be expected to parent, but now at least one company making billions from their children have finally agreed to stop making that job harder.