Metas $17B settlement and new restrictions are vital but the company didnt put $1,000 phones in kids hands
On Wednesday, Meta agreed to a record $17 billion settlement with nearly every US state over claims that its social-media platforms were deliberately designed to addict children and teenagers.But the enormous financial payout is surprisingly less consequential than another part of the agreement: For the first time, Meta is being forced to build meaningful barriers between children and the products it has spent years carefully designing to keep them online.The changes are significant.
Accounts belonging to users under 18 will face “productive pauses” that interrupt prolonged scrolling, restrictions at night and during school hours, stronger parental controls and limits on social-comparison features such as beauty filters and visible like counts.These changes undercut these companies’ built-in features designed to make these platforms so difficult for children to put down in the first place.It’s about time.For years, the debate over children and social media has been in a standoff.
Tech companies have pretended the entire solution is better parenting, while many parents bought a $1,000 smartphone for their 12-year-olds, let them download Instagram and then threw up their hands, acting like the fact that kids spend six hours a day scrolling is an act of God.As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.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, wa...