For so long, Big Tech has been unstoppable. Congress granted the industry legal protection back in 1996, making it nearly impossible to hold the companies liable in court. And despite growing signs of how tech was enabling lies, discrimination, harassment and scams, lawmakers from both parties, awash in tech money and beset by tech lobbyists, repeatedly failed to regulate the sector.
Now, we are finally stumbling our way into an era of accountability. It’s not as thoughtful and holistic as it could have been if we had followed the lead of nearly every other nation and passed comprehensive legislation protecting our privacy and data security and reining in algorithmic manipulations. Rather, we are taking the approach of death by a thousand cuts. As judges and juries grow increasingly skeptical of Big Tech’s claims that it should bear zero responsibility for consumers harmed by its products, the lawsuits and fines are piling up.
This week, 47 states, the District of Columbia and some U.S. territories took a big swipe at Meta, getting the owner of Facebook and Instagram to agree to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties over claims that it deliberately misled the public about the harm that its platforms were inflicting on teenage users.
The fine, while huge, is far less than the $1.4 trillion that Meta said the states were seeking. It pales in comparison to the tobacco industry’s $206 billion settlement in 1998. And Meta will dole out the full amount only if its archrivals YouTube, TikTok and Snap also limit kids’ time on their apps, a clever move given that teens already spend more time on some of those platforms than its own. That may explain why Meta’s stock price barely took a hit after the announcement of the settlement. I’m skeptical that the protections it promises for young users will yield meaningful changes to teen mental health.
But every blow counts as Meta enters its zombie era, with a stagnant user base, declining profits, mounting legal liabilities and the astronomical costs of trying to break into the A.I. market.
This settlement, while imperfect, may be a sign of how desperate Meta is to unload some of its legal liabilities in advance of a separate avalanche of more than 100,000 individual lawsuits from users who claim that the company’s platforms were deliberately designed to be addictive and lack child safety protections. Courts have rolled those lawsuits into a bundle that could yield another global settlement.
As it stares down the barrel of those cases, its old legal arguments growing increasingly ineffective, Meta has agreed to make substantive changes to Facebook and Instagram. It entered into an agreement with attorneys general to limit teens to two hours of social media use a day, to block notifications at night and during school hours, to turn off algorithmic feeds and to ban beauty filters, among other changes. Parents will have the right to bypass or adjust the limits, finally giving them their first meaningful controls over their kids’ accounts.
As much as I’d like to applaud any effort toward harm reduction, it’s unlikely that just giving parents a few more knobs and buttons will lead to meaningful shifts in teen social media behavior.
For one thing, teens may find the new limits easy to evade. When Australia banned children under the age of 16 from social media in December, many simply found ways to circumvent the ban by using virtual private networks that let them appear to be connecting from outside Australia and by setting up fake accounts. “A substantial proportion of Australian children under the age of 16 continue to retain accounts, create new accounts or pass platforms’ age assurance systems,” an Australian government report declared in March.
In the settlement, Meta has carefully avoided any accountability for teens who circumvent its limits. The company agreed to ensure that its tools for age assessment — virtual ID checks and face scans — have error rates lower than 10 percent. But Meta has agreed only to apply its “best efforts” to combat popular workarounds.
What’s more, the settlement fails to address two of the most nefarious design choices in social media: the infinite scroll, or the endless unrolling of content to keep users hooked; and the variable rewards of other people’s likes and comments that keep users refreshing their pages in the hopes of obtaining a new dopamine hit.
Indeed, Meta’s changes do nothing to help adult users, who are also vulnerable to the manipulations of Big Tech. I get that it’s politically popular to focus on protecting kids, whose brains are developing and therefore more vulnerable to manipulation, but there is ample evidence that social media harms many adults — particularly seniors who are getting scammed online at increasingly high rates, according to the F.B.I.
The focus on age verification is also dangerous to our ability to be anonymous online — a key freedom that we take for granted in the real world but have been too willing to give up in the virtual one. We would never agree to show our passport before reading a flier posted on a local bulletin board. So why are we doing the equivalent online? We live in an age when a Texas father married to an ICE protester can be sentenced to 30 years in prison for conspiring to conceal documents (he moved a box of home-printed magazines). We need the freedom to share and consume information without being surveilled.
While I am glad that Meta is creating some bare-bones safety features for kids, the far better option would be to make these platforms safe for everyone. We all benefit from seatbelts in cars, or hard hats in construction sites. Shouldn’t we all be protected from Big Tech’s predations too?
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