Experts split on Meta's $18bn teen safety settlement

Meta reached a settlement on Wednesday with numerous states regarding allegations that it designed Instagram and Facebook to be addictive for teenagers, and legal and academic opinions are already divided on whether the company received a lenient outcome.

The agreement made within less than two weeks of the trial contains roughly $18 billion in payments for a decade and additional restrictions on teenagers' accounts: two hours a day of using the app, inability to use it at night, and disabling notifications when at school.

According to Business Insider, Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School said that the agreement allowed Meta to limit their liability and implement changes they were already planning.

According to Jason Kint of Digital Content Next, the number is important since it brings the total consumer protection settlements of Meta to $25 billion, which is the damage done to an entire generation of children.

Professor Uttara Ananthakrishnan at the University of Washington, who has extensively researched how TikTok's design leads to addiction, was supportive of the recent regulations. However, she questions the implementation and compliance due to the previous failures of Meta in implementing its own regulations.

According to her, age restrictions will be ineffective for similar reasons behind the failure of the social media ban for teens in Australia, where an enthusiastic teenage user could just bypass them using a proxy server or a parent's account.

According to Ari Cohn, the lawyer for the First Amendment Center, the settlement is a clever business move wrapped up in the guise of free speech, as Meta’s invitation for TikTok and YouTube to follow suit is an attempt to dictate the terms of the industry.

This interpretation is further supported by the fact that approximately $5.3 billion of the overall sum to be paid is dependent on rival social networks implementing the same measures for teenage users.

The deal includes 48 states, Washington D.C. and some territories, but not all of them. New Mexico refused to participate because it won its own case against Meta earlier this year, while the attorney general of Florida refused the agreement, considering the sum to be too low given the allegations.

Gary Marcus, technology researcher and professor, hopes the settlement will become a starting point rather than a capstone, encouraging X, TikTok, and YouTube to implement the same restrictions and suggesting that even adults might want to opt for similar measures.