RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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On Wednesday, Meta reached an agreement with attorneys general across states, Washington, DC, and US territories that had brought claims the design of the company's apps had harmed children. The company will pay up to $18 billion in penalties and alter its apps to potentially limit the amount of time teens spend on them daily.
The settlement is historic: It's the highest ever paid to states by a Big Tech company, and it could have massive implications for how other social media companies design their platforms for both kids and adult users.
What we don't yet know is whether the specific changes Meta has agreed to implement will alleviate what brought on the lawsuit in the first place: the problems teens face when they log on to social media .
The company will install interruptions to infinite scroll, impose two-hour daily time limits for using its apps, and silence notifications overnight and during the school day. Meta has also agreed to limit the use of beauty filters and hide the tallying of likes on posts by default, while strengthening age verification tools and parental controls. The agreement also allows teens to choose a non-algorithmic feed, harkening back to the early days of social media, and turn off autoplay, meaning they would have to tap or swipe to see specific content.
Meta lost two lawsuits this year regarding safety on its platforms. Now, the company has taken a more proactive stance in revamping their products, says Stavros Gadinis, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. "Their strategy is developing," he says, because they may believe that by embracing these changes, "they're going to convince consumers that their product is credible."
The settlement aims for an issue that lawmakers and parents have sounded alarms on, but it could miss the mark. Giant social media companies get blamed for the state of the modern world, but mere usage is not the root cause of issues teens face. Because social media is a highly visible target, it's drawn ire. People think: "These are the bad guys, we gotta go after them," says Ari Lightman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. "The bad guys are unfortunately everywhere."
Approaches that track and limit kids' time on the internet don't address the deeper issues that draw them online and lead them to have a negative experience. Those fixes may cost more than the whopping $18 billion. "We don't provide really good programs associated with digital citizenship, with cyber hygiene," as an essential part of the K-12 school system, Lightman says.
Cody Venzke, senior staff attorney at the ACLU, has concerns about the settlement's practical implications. He sees it as a way to "sidestep the First Amendment by implementing these requirements through a settlement agreement as opposed to the legislative process." Venzke argues that an age verification mandate for certain content will lead Meta to verify the ages of all its users. These measures can erode privacy online.
The ACLU has opposed laws that could lead to age verification, arguing that blocking teens from accessing social media violates free speech protections. The settlement can lead Meta to block access to content for both teens and those who don't comply with age verification on its platforms, while also collecting more data on all of its users in a way that has "enshrined that surveillance as a measure to protect kids."
Meta said in its statement today that it wants "to get this right for parents and teens, and that's why we partnered with state attorneys general to set a new industry standard," and that the agreement builds "on our longstanding efforts to empower parents and support teens." The company's stock rose by about 1% following news of the settlement.
People think: "These are the bad guys, we gotta go after them. The bad guys are unfortunately everywhere," says Ari Lightman. The dominant refrain in recent years has been that screens and social media have ruined childhood, addicting kids and harming their mental health. But a report from the US Surgeon General's Office in 2023 noted that there are also benefits — such helping teens find community and express their creativity — and "we do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents."
More recent research has pushed back on the destruction of childhood narrative. The University of Manchester tracked 25,000 kids' social media and gaming habits over a three-year period, and found "no evidence" that more frequent social media use or gaming activity led to an increase in anxiety and depression over the next year. Another from the University of Toronto found that LGBTQ teens can benefit from social media for emotional support, education, and research. A study published last year in Scientific Reports found that people often overestimate their "addiction" to social media, which is more often habitual than comparable to an addiction to a substance like nicotine. "Continued overuse of this terminology risks stigmatizing healthy usage, wasting public health resources, and contributing to moral panic around social media use," the researchers wrote.
In its blogpost announcing the settlement, Meta called on its competitors, like YouTube and TikTok, to follow its lead: "While this is an important step, the fact is that teens move fluidly between dozens of apps a day. All platforms should empower parents and support teens by putting the same measures in place, because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another." The agreement says that Meta will pay more money if TikTok and YouTube also agree to similar restrictions for teens, and also pay $5 billion each.
Meta knows it needs eyes. Corralling its competitors to also kick teens off their apps after an hour a day would level the playing f...
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