What Meta's Settlement Means, and What It Doesn’t, According to Georgia Tech Experts

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, will pay $17.1 billion and implement new protections to reduce the harmful effects of social media on young people, settling a lawsuit alleging that the social media giant violated consumer protection laws and targeted teenagers through its addictive features.

The resolution to the 2023 lawsuit imposes daily time limits on platform use for users under 18, silences notifications during school hours, restricts image filters, and adds safety measures, including removing users under 13 and stricter enforcement of teenager-specific settings for users under 18, among other measures.

More Work To Be Done

The settlement has been celebrated by the 47 attorneys general of the represented states as a transformative moment in the oversight of social media. While she believes it is a step in the right direction, Munmun De Choudhury, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing, says the work cannot stop with the changes proposed in the settlement.

De Choudhury's research has pioneered the computational use of social media data for mental health. In 2023, she co-authored a consensus report for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the connection between social media and adolescent health. Several of the recommendations in the report are reflected in the Meta settlement, but De Choudhury sees areas that still need to be addressed at the root of social media's effects on mental health.

"I think it's a reasonable start. It was necessary, but if you look at the research literature, whether restricting screen time actually improves mental health is not a settled question," she said. "We need to look at the context, which means not just how much time they're spending on these platforms but also how they're spending that time."

The $17 billion will be distributed among the states and territories involved in the lawsuit, and, according to De Choudhury, the funds will be a critical part of the settlement achieving its intended outcomes.

"The grassroots portion of this is asking: How do we empower young people and their families with information so that they can make the right decisions for themselves? This money can be used to provide social media literacy efforts and to train parents and teachers to better guide kids. We often hear that adults want to help, but parents and teachers didn't grow up in the social media era, and given how fast it changes, they don't always have the right answers," she said.

Getting Others on Board

Certain portions of the settlement, such as financial penalties and exact time restrictions, are contingent upon Meta's competitors, TikTok and YouTube, adopting similar measures. De Choudhury says research shows that when one platform becomes more restrictive, users will migrate to another.

"The kids who want to access social media between midnight and 6 a.m., when these platforms won't be available, will go to TikTok or they'll go somewhere else," she said. "This means that what we end up doing is not mitigating the harm but shifting it elsewhere. And that doesn't help anyone. So, this is welcome if it means the scope of this implementation can be broadened, and it would go a long way."

Social Media in the AI Age

De Choudhury implores regulators to consider additional measures to protect children in the future, particularly those that safeguard their data in the age of artificial intelligence.

"All of our data is getting used to train these AI models. This is especially true for a company like Meta, which has its own AI models. We are talking about minors. They can't meaningfully consent to the use of their data to build AI models. So we need to expand the scope of harm here, which is not just the mental health harm that can happen but the impacts of these companies storing and using children's data," she said.

A federal "right to be forgotten" that allows individuals to request deletion of their data from social media sites and other online profiles is a step De Choudhury recommends, mirroring the European Union's policy.

Protecting the Vulnerable

Adults aren't immune to the dangers of social media, De Choudhury explained, but teenagers are more susceptible to triggers based on their stage of brain development. She hopes the recent settlement sets a precedent for active oversight.

"We have seen lawsuits in the past where specific school systems sued a social media company. We have seen some individual states taking action as well, but the scale of this settlement is something we haven't seen before," she said.

The changes to the platforms will take effect over the next 12 months, but should Meta fail to do so, Jerry Liu, lecturer in the Scheller College of Business and teacher of legal and ethical aspects of business, says states would not need to relitigate the case, in which Meta did not admit wrongdoing. Rather, they could ask the court to seek enforcement with contempt remedies, like additional financial penalties or sanctions.

The Meta case has drawn comparisons to lawsuits against big tobacco in the 1990s. Liu says both cases invoke similar questions surrounding legality and ethics in business.

"There is a broader, ethical issue with this case, which is drawing the line between making an engaging product versus deliberately designing the product around human vulnerabilities to make a product addictive, particularly for children, and concealing harmful consequences," he said.

"With big tobacco, the problem wasn't simply that cigarettes were addictive. It was the allegation that the industry knew about the addictive nature of cigarettes, manipulated nicotine levels, and concealed or minimized that knowledge. Similarly, as with Meta and social media, the question is whether the social media companies know that particular design features or algorithmic tools can create unhealthy or compulsive behavior, particularly in children, and whether they have an ethical obligation to disclose that knowledge and redesign the product accordingly."

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice retain federal enforcement authority in this case, but Liu said that individuals (including class-action suits) can potentially pursue separate state-law or other claims against Meta.