The landmark settlement marks the end of a major federal lawsuit filed by a bipartisan coalition of dozens of state attorneys general, which alleged it got teens hooked on social media while jeopardizing their mental health and safety.
“My first thought was vindication,” said Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, which has filed thousands of lawsuits against tech companies over youth safety issues. “Meta has been steadfastly arguing that its platforms are not addictive. That it didn’t do anything wrong. That anything that's occurred for children is their fault or the fault of their parents.”
State attorneys general, school districts, and parents have argued that Meta and other social-media companies made deliberate design choices to keep young people glued to their products, including “autoplay,” in which the platform automatically surfaces another video after a user has watched one; “like” counts on social-media posts; and “infinite scrolls” that give users an endless stream of posts on their feeds.
“Ensuring teens have a safe and productive experience on our platforms is an absolute imperative for Meta,” the company said in a statement on the settlement. “We want to get this right for parents and teens, and that’s why we partnered with state attorneys general to set a new industry standard.”
While the settlement is expected to end the trial, experts tell TIME it leaves three key questions still to be resolved:
The new default settings may help address criticism that the company took extreme measures to hook kids on its platforms, especially at times when they should have been focused on school or sleeping. But Meta’s settlement allows teens far more wiggle room to sidestep other safety features.
But research shows people rarely change their settings from companies’ default offerings, and parents may not understand what those options mean, says Zvika Krieger, a former director of Meta’s responsible innovation team who is now a consultant for technology companies. Additionally, “if young users are just using adult accounts, all this is worthless,” says Krieger, who added that Meta offered little information about how it would improve its age-assurance techniques to spot teens who might be lying about their age. There should be “some concrete level of accountability rather than just saying we're working on improving our age assurance.”
How will other tech companies respond?
At a time when Meta faces fierce competition in the teen market from those competitors, the company is planning to run full-page print ads on Thursday in the The Washington Post, New York Times and the Los Angeles Times calling to make those settings the “new industry standard.” Neither TikTok nor Google, which owns YouTube, have commented.
What happens to similar cases focused on youth safety?
In addition to the action brought by state attorneys general, school districts and families have filed thousands of lawsuits against tech platforms including Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok, alleging that the design of their products caused harmful consequences for teens. In March, a jury found Meta and YouTube’s product design led to the mental distress of a young woman, and ordered the companies to pay $4.2 million and $1.8 million in damages respectively.
Meanwhile, U.S. states and other countries have proposed regulations to restrict teen access to social media, or force tech companies to take bolder actions to safeguard their experience online. Meta has often been the focus of these proposals. It’s possible that regulators could focus their attention on AI companies that haven’t yet faced the same level of legal scrutiny.
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