Commentary: Meta, under duress, finally does the right thing for teens
The US$18 billion settlement is tangible progress and proof that a well-constructed case can bring accountability to technology companies, says Dave Lee for Bloomberg Opinion.
Morning commute traffic streams past the Meta sign outside the headquarters of Facebook parent company Meta in Mountain View, California, Nov 9, 2022. (Photo: REUTERS/Peter DaSilva)
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NEW YORK: Finally, what some said could never be done has happened: Meta Platforms has been forced to make real changes to protect the millions of young people who use its products.
Make no mistake, while the amount that the company agreed to pay to settle a lawsuit brought by several states – up to US$18 billion – is large, it is dwarfed in significance by the long-tail positive effects this so-called Big Tobacco moment will have on the well-being of teens. Meta’s simultaneous call that other social media apps be compelled to follow its lead may seem opportunistic, but it’s also entirely fair.
My deep scepticism over Meta’s proposed settlement began to lift – though not completely – as I made my way through the details of the alterations it has promised to make to its apps like Facebook and Instagram: daily time limits; no notifications during school hours; autoplay disabling; non-algorithmic feeds; a midnight-to-6am lockout, to pick a few.
Even better are age-gating measures to block underage users and further protect teens. Other promises include an end to toxic “beautifying” filters that should have never seen the light of day, and efforts to limit the dopamine effect of “likes” by hiding them. One thought I had reading these changes was simply: Can I enable them for my account, too?
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DO THE MEASURES GO FAR ENOUGH?
For sure, Meta shouldn’t receive too much credit. After all, it was only after losing bellwether addiction cases, with several more still lingering, that executives suddenly found it within themselves to agree on settings for Meta’s apps that by all accounts should have been the default long ago.
Bigger picture, the settlement will be seen as further indication that the defence tech companies have long used to absolve themselves – that Section 230 protects them from liability for the content that users post – has its limits. While a precedent-setting court order would have been more seismic, the settlement at least demonstrates that Section 230, in the words of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, is not an “impenetrable shield”.
There will be concerns the measures don’t go far enough. Tellingly, the changes will apply only to US teens (though not in New Mexico or Florida because those states were not part of the multistate agreement). If Meta is so committed to its goals on youth safety, why not make these common-sense measures global?
Others will argue that making many of them optional – even as defaults – makes them weaker still. According to Meta, however, the default options can be locked in by parents. Many might feel pressured to loosen the restrictions, though surely this is where Meta’s responsibility ends and that of parents begins.
That Meta uses the phrase “agreement” rather than “settlement” defines its cynical but true-to-form reframing of this moment as it taking the initiative rather than receiving a punishment.
This was the lesser of not just two, but multiple evils. These changes may have a large impact on Meta’s advertising revenue, but they may have fended off the far more drastic outcome of an outright ban for young people on social media – not to mention the US$1.4 trillion risk it had faced from this joint lawsuit, as calculated by Bloomberg Intelligence (BI).
Further, BI analyst Suchi Trivedi noted, removing this existential legal overhang might also make it easier for the company to raise debt to fund its AI efforts.
Whatever the fallout, investors now have some much-desired clarity, and they lifted shares about 1 per cent on Wednesday (Aug 26). From a financial standpoint, the amount isn’t onerous – roughly what Meta reported in operating income in the second quarter alone – and with the payments spread over 10 years, the strain is more than manageable.
A SHREWD SETTLEMENT
So let’s not be too complimentary. Indeed, maybe the defining feature of the settlement is how shrewd it is.
Among its provisions, US$5.3 billion of its payment will be withheld if its biggest competitors for teenage eyeballs – YouTube and TikTok – do not also settle their cases for US$5.3 billion each and put in place the kind of use limits that will now apply to Meta’s products.
If those apps do agree – none had offered comment by midday Wednesday – Meta will make its daily use limit even stricter, cutting it to just one hour (as will those other apps).
Plainly, YouTube and TikTok will have more to lose because teens now use those apps for longer than they do Instagram and, it hardly needs pointing out, Facebook.
It may well be that an hourly limit on YouTube, an app that 76 per cent of US teens use at least once a day, with 17 per cent saying they used it “almost constantly”, might be a growth driver for the stagnant Facebook, where just 20 per cent of US teens say they visit it daily, according to data from Pew Research.
Instagram might experience a similar boost. According to eMarketer data from May 2026, US social media users ages 12 to 17 spent an average of one hour and 36 minutes on TikTok each day but just 34 minutes on Instagram. A teen who might have spent her entire night on TikTok seems very likely to me to turn to Instagram’s Reels feature rather than put her phone down.
Meta is making lemonade from lemons, then, with an undetermined hit to its advertising model. I’m not naive enough to think that the company won’t have found various loopholes – or “innovations”, more generously – along the way that will protect that business.
Industry watchers will recall the company screaming bloody murder over Apple’s move to give users more power to block ad tracking, going as far as to take out full-page newspaper ads calling the move “devastating”. Within months, it had rolled out technical workarounds that left the company’s ad business more lucrative than ever. Perhaps Meta can persuade advertisers to pay more to make sure they reach teens before their daily limits, or night mode, kick in.
This settlement is tangible progress and proof that a well-constructed case can bring accountability to technology companies. It’s progress that many predicted would be, at best, snarled up in endless appeals – progress that might have been stymied by the opposition of wrong-headed privacy campaigners whose role lately seems to be to dismiss any attempt at protecting young people while rarely suggesting productive alternatives.
Meta, for all its faults, and under obvious duress, has produced an impactful and technically feasible list of ways to finally start to put things right. Its executives are well within their rights to call on its competitors to do the same, even if their motives aren’t in the least bit altruistic.
Source: Bloomberg/sk
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