Stay up to date with our Up First newsletter, sent every weekday morning. The social media company Meta has agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion in a settlement in a federal lawsuit alleging the company's social media platforms have harmed children and teens. The company denies the allegations, but has agreed to make a suite of changes to its social platforms — Facebook and Instagram — to make them less compelling and potentially dangerous to minors.
This comes at a time when healthcare providers are increasingly seeing symptoms of social media addiction among youth, says psychologist Mitch Prinstein, who is the Co-Director of the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "We know that about 50% of kids are reporting at least one symptom of clinical dependency on social media," he says. "We know that kids who are having a difficult time getting off social media are also reporting more depression, loneliness, anxiety, even suicidality over time." While Meta denies the allegations that it designed its social platforms to be addictive for kids, child safety advocates and researchers have welcomed the settlement as a major development in holding tech companies accountable.
"This settlement isn't perfect, but I do think it's a critical first step in making sure platforms are safer for our children and that our kids can grow up healthy," says Julie Scelfo, founder of the grassroots organization Mothers Against Media Addiction. The changes Meta will have to make are intended to reduce the addictiveness of Facebook and Instagram. For example, it will have to give minors the option of having a non-personalized feed, where it doesn't use an algorithm to tailor content based on individual preferences to keep kids scrolling.
The changes are detailed in a press release from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who led a coalition of 50 states and territories and the District of Columbia that settled with Meta. The other reforms Meta has agreed to for people under 18 include: Meta is also promising to do a better job of verifying users' ages and has agreed to report regularly to an independent auditor. Meta is calling on other social media companies to make the same changes, and has negotiated that $5 billion of the settlement will be paid to states if other companies join the effort.
Texas negotiated an additional $1 billion settlement with Meta. "This framework will only work if all our peers join us," Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement.
"Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution. We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away." "It is very exciting to see that a lot of the changes that are written into the settlement are very similar to what we saw scientifically," says Prinstein, who was scheduled to testify next week in the case brought by the states. For example, he says, studies show why the design elements of Facebook and Instagram are particularly addictive for teens and pre-teens.
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