On Wednesday night, I was picking up my daughter from volleyball practice when something about the line of middle-school girls waiting in the hallway caught my attention. It wasn’t just that they all had smartphones—that was to be expected outside of our little homeschooler bubble. And it wasn’t that half of them, at any given time, were looking at their screens rather than talking to one another—if anything, that’s a pretty healthy ratio these days. It was what they were doing when they weren’t looking at their phones. Rather than hanging limply at their sides, their phone-holding hands were oddly fidgety, restlessly gripping and stroking the polished glass.
Slightly disturbed, I looked it up and discovered this is a documented phenomenon—a 2020 article in the Journal of Consumer Research, “The Smartphone as Pacifying Technology,” described users “self-soothing” with phones like a child with a teddy bear. Unlike the teddy bear, however, the phone was both comforter and tormentor for these teens.A sinister Stockholm syndrome was on display in that hallway, as these girls sought rest in the source of their restlessness.
Ironically, I was headed home after volleyball practice to celebrate with my wife after one of the greatest victories for child online safety in my lifetime: that day, 51 state attorneys general had announced a landmark settlement with Meta for $17 billion for its decade and a half of systemic child abuse in what many commentators were calling Big Tech’s “Big Tobacco moment.”
The price tag, big as it is, is chump change for the trillion-dollar behemoth. No, what caught my eye were the terms of the settlement agreement, an extraordinary 45-page document that may presage one of the greatest policy revolutions in the history of the digital economy. Here was the beginning of the end of a business model built upon the torment of those restless and anxious girls I had seen in the school hallway—if parents and policymakers have the courage and clarity to capitalize on the moment.
It is important to be clear about what the settlement did and did not accomplish. While victims, parents, and advocates across the country celebrated the news, Meta’s investors also breathed a sigh of relief that a theoretical $1.4 trillion liability had been reduced to just $17 billion, and the stock ended the day slightly up. A combative James Uthmeier, Florida’s Attorney General, refused to join in the settlement, calling it a “slap on the wrist” and expressing his determination to see Meta in court. And the lawyers for thousands of individual plaintiffs and school districts girded up for ongoing battle against the tech giant.
The terms of the settlement were, as always, more nuanced than early headlines made them out to be. Meta, after all, is only one of the defendants in a barrage of multi-district suits that also target its major rivals YouTube, Snap, and TikTok (indeed, Meta’s platforms are not even the most popular social media apps among teens anymore). The settlement reflects this fact, with some of the stricter provisions and higher monetary fines only taking effect if the other companies agree to similar terms, and until they do so, the settlement could have the perverse incentive of driving teens to more permissive, even less safe platforms. Advocates and lawmakers should not rest on their laurels but press their advantage.
In many ways the settlement constitutes Meta’s capitulation to the framework of the Kids Online Safety Act that it has long fiercely opposed in Congress, which would mandate design changes and parental controls for teen users. Meta’s lawyers, of course, were as miserly as possible in haggling over the terms of these concessions. Teens are still free to sign up for Facebook or Instagram without parental consent, and the settlement’s “supervisory parent accounts,” which give parents some visibility into risky activity and the ability to customize key settings, are purely optional; indeed, they seem more designed so teens can lobby their parents to relax default restrictions rather than to allow for more robust controls. These default restrictions are less impressive than advertised.
The new “night mode,” offering a blackout of both Facebook and Instagram, only lasts from midnight to 6am (extendable to 10pm-7am if Meta’s rivals agree to similar provisions), and does not apply to DMs. The “school mode” (automatically in effect from 8am-3pm) leaves app access unchanged, constituting only a default mute of notifications—again, excluding DMs. Moreover, even as the settlement compels Meta to implement many of the particular design provisions called for by KOSA, it does not create a generalizable “duty of care” for the company toward minor users. The settlement imposes no obligation on Meta to refrain from collecting personal data from minors to use for targeted advertising, even if it does allow the option of creating a non-personalized, purely chronological feed (something only millennials may remember from the olden days of Facebook).
In other words, Meta is still counting upon a steady pipeline of teens to juice its user base over the coming years. It’s easy to see why investors breathed a sigh of relief. Why then call this settlement the greatest victory for child safety in my lifetime, or the harbinger of a profound policy revolution?
It’s because Big Tech’s walls have now been critically breached. It is not invulnerable. It is governable, after all, and it remains only for good policy to pour through the gaps in its now-cracked defenses.
Consider: For years platforms like Meta have argued that meaningful age verification is technically infeasible, egregiously privacy-violating, and constitutionally untenable. This last argument was profoundly weakened by the Supreme Court’s dramatic ruling last year in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, but many had argued that it applied only to obscenity. By the terms of this settlement, Meta has not only committed to carry out such age verification (and to submit to stringent efficacy standards), but waived the right to contest these terms as unconstitutional. For years, the platforms, aided and abetted by free market fundamentalist cheerleaders, have denied that there was anything harmful or addictive about their products.
Any attempt at regulation, they declared, was a naked example of nanny-state interference in the free and rational utility-maximizing choices of the platform’s young users. If teens spent six hours a day scrolling Instagram, that was an expression of revealed preference that no one should second-guess. If parents chose to buy their children smartphones, that should be taken as implicit consent to set their children loose in the cesspool of sextortion and self-harm content that would soon inundate their feeds. These free market just-so stories seem outdated now; both the law and Silicon Valley have moved on. Even if Meta made no admission of wrongdoing in this settlement, every one of the features that Meta agreed to remove from teen accounts is one that hijacks teens’ psychology in predictable and pernicious ways. If even Meta isn’t claiming otherwise now, economists shouldn’t either.
And the specific design concessions are worth pausing over, because two in particular constitute an unprecedented retreat from the central logic of the attention economy by the company that first pioneered it.
In perhaps the most quietly astonishing passage of the agreement, under the heading “Social comparison,” the text declares: “Meta SMPs [social media platforms] will, by default, disable Teen Users from seeing numbers of likes or reactions on Meta SMPs. This default for Teen Users cannot be modified without approval from a Supervising Parent.” If you’re heading to college this fall, you were barely alive when Facebook first introduced the legendary “like” button, creating social media as we know it: an engine of relentless social comparison that prompts each of us to seek our happiness not in the qualitative affirmation of a hug, a smile, or a fist-pump, but in that cruelly quantitative counter, which is somehow always stuck at a lower number than our friends’.
Through this and other instruments of social comparison, platforms like Instagram conscripted millions of teenage girls into the attention economy—not merely in the sense of customers paying Meta with their attention, and its resulting data value, but as what Byung-Chul Han calls “entrepreneurs of the self” in his book Psychopolitics. Rather than directing their energies toward learning and play, they are catechized from tenderest years in a capitalist creed of cutthroat competition, seeking to optimize their production, market share, and profit/loss ratios within this attention economy.
To be sure, young people have always been more than capable of hyper-competitive social comparison without technology, as any viewer of Mean Girls knows. But before the phones, at least the mean girls didn’t follow you home, and there was a limit to how much they could torment you during Chemistry class. Today, thanks to the notification-machines burning a hole in their pockets, today’s young people have nowhere to go from the rat race of selfies, stories, and streaks, whether they’re in the middle of a midterm or burning the midnight oil. As Han writes in another book, Non-Things: “The smartphone is a mobile labor camp in which we voluntarily intern ourselves.” In this too, today’s young people are being catechized in the creed of contemporary capitalism, which long ago abolished the Sabbath that had once offered workers and families some respite from the torments of the market, and has since relentlessly colonized every spare moment of our time.
Riddled with exceptions though they may be, then, Meta’s screen-time concessions—only two hours per day across its platforms, a blackout between midnight and 6am, and no notifications during school hours—represent an abandonment of a second of the central dogmas of life in the age of the smartphone: “thou shalt be always available.” These apply by default to all teen accounts and can only be overridden by supervising parents. They thus constitute the first faint outlines of what we might call a “digital sabbath principle,” a recognition that we require periods of rest from our own devices. It turns out that we do not need, as so many tech advertisements have told us for two decades, to be continually connected 24/7 by 5G internet access. And certainly our children do not need to be. For Meta to acknowledge this is astonishing.
To capitalize on this victory, parents and policymakers must press their advantage on this implicit concession that children should not be treated like market actors or market commodities, and force the companies to make it explicit.
Why, after all, are children allowed to enter into contractual agreements with these platforms in the first place? In a recent lawsuit against Roblox for the suicide of a thirteen-year-old girl, Roblox sought to have the suit dismissed on the grounds that the child had signed away her rights to redress and agreed to arbitration when she clicked “Yes” to a terms of service agreement at age 8. Absurd. Only parents have the right to contract with companies on their children’s behalf. If we were actually serious about governing the online world the way we do the analog world, no minor would be able to set up a Meta or Roblox account in the first place without parental consent.
Lawmakers must move swiftly in codifying the critical concessions in this settlement into a law that governs all platforms equally. But they must also tackle this problem at the root: children do not belong in the attention economy, whether as data mines for Silicon Valley to exploit, or as self-exploiting “entrepreneurs” addicted to producing what Silicon Valley demands. Parents may not be perfect gatekeepers—but it’s time to at least give them back the keys.
For nearly two decades now, Meta and its rivals haven’t given their restless young users a rest, bombarding them with ads and notifications night and day. Neither should we give them a rest now. It’s time for parents, advocates, and lawmakers to demand a lasting transformation of the digital economy that gives our children space to be children again.
The hiding of Like and Share counts is a truly amazing concession, and gives you an idea just how terrified meta was of this thing going to jury.
The thing is, no one really cares about the money; we care about the business practices changing.
Solid reasoning. Parents would do well to limit/deny their children access to social media.