Last week, Meta reached a settlement with attorneys general from 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. The social media company committed to paying up to $17.1 billion and to imposing controls, such as time limits and stronger parental oversight tools, on teenagers using its products, which include Facebook and Instagram. Stephen Stromberg, an editor in Opinion, chatted about the deal with Julia Angwin, David Wallace-Wells and Daphne Keller.
Stephen Stromberg: How big a deal is this settlement? Let’s start with the money Meta will pay.
David Wallace-Wells: $17.1 billion is just a tiny fraction of Meta’s revenue. For me, the growing sense that these products have caused significant harms is much more consequential. We are moving from one social media era to another. We are collectively treating this technology like a drug. I have my doubts about the merit of this approach. But whatever the merits, this settlement marks a clear break from the past and the beginning of a new phase in how we see social media.
Daphne Keller: This settlement is a win for Meta. It is not that much money by their standards, and the company doesn’t have to pay the full $17.1 billion unless the attorneys general persuade Meta’s competition, including future competitors, to commit to the same terms it just negotiated. That’s a great deal for them! Particularly since data shows teens using Facebook and Instagram less than YouTube and TikTok. If other companies agree to or are forced to accept limits like those Meta just adopted, teens might turn to Meta after hitting a two-hour cap on YouTube.
Wallace-Wells: That would be a devious kind of victory!
Keller: Maybe just making the best of a bad situation. But cleverly.
Julia Angwin: This may be too optimistic, but I think of this as the beginning of an era where Meta is facing death by a thousand cuts. It’s not this settlement, or any of the others, but the fact that Meta is now playing defense full time. They are staring down over two hundred thousand individual claims from people who allege they were harmed by social media, lighting incredible piles of money on fire as they try to break into the artificial intelligence business, and facing consumer backlash on all their products.
Keller: I worry that this may lock new competitors into models that look like Meta’s. A newcomer might come up with genuinely better ways to protect kids, but be stuck with the — in many cases untested — theories of child protection that Meta just negotiated. Those companies might even be forced to collect data the same way Meta does, which is another nudge in the direction of business models like Meta’s. That’s a downside for kids and parents who care about privacy.
Stromberg: So Meta — or all the big social media players — should expect more lawsuits. What’s the likelihood that a significant number of them succeed, ending either in settlements or judgments against the companies?
Angwin: The courts have bundled together a large number of lawsuits against Meta. Earlier this year, a plaintiff identified as K.G.M., who alleged that she was harmed by her social media addiction, won a bellwether suit. These early cases will most likely set the terms for a larger financial settlement with all the plaintiffs. But the most important result is that, for the first time, Meta will have to think about future liability when designing its products — a responsibility that it has been able to avoid until now.
Keller: I would love to know how the plaintiffs in other cases feel about this settlement. Maybe their lawyers could have negotiated better commitments from Meta. Can Meta now say, “Sorry, we can’t do that” to all those other plaintiffs?
Wallace-Wells: It is striking to me that, as Daphne noted, these were Meta’s terms and not those dictated by Congress, for instance. Many of the commitments they’ve made to policing the behavior of teens on their platforms extend or reiterate commitments they’ve already made. Basic safety standards are sometimes established through litigation rather than legislation, but this case makes me uncomfortable.
If the country as a whole has decided that social media companies have been behaving irresponsibly, those companies shouldn’t be dictating the terms of the arrangement designed to solve the problem. It is tempting to see a news story like this as the concerned public re-establishing some oversight or democratic control over technologies which have taken over so much of our lives. But in other ways it looks like a story of corporate self-preservation.
Keller: David, one reason this settlement is strange is that the sides are navigating some serious First Amendment problems. If the states used legislation to make Meta restrict lawful content that teenagers have a right to see, that might violate the First Amendment. Doing it through a nominally voluntary agreement is an attempted end-run around the Constitution.
Wallace-Wells: I’m not a free-speech absolutist on these points. I do think social media technology has corroded our national life. And I would like some aspects of those effects to be managed a bit more aggressively. But I still get squeamish about some of these policies.
Teen mental health has improved by many metrics over the last few years, and I think it’s quite possible that the negative trends we saw in the prior decade mostly reflected changes in therapeutic culture — more people seeking treatment. I don’t doubt that some kids are suffering as a result of social media, but I also remember a decade or so ago when we heard a lot about teenagers struggling to find communities — queer kids, kids in abusive families — who found real stability and support online. It seems strange to me that this part of the internet has been all but forgotten in the now dominant narrative that smartphones and social media are singularly responsible for almost everything wrong with our world. That seems … awfully convenient to me.
Keller: There was an amicus brief filed a few of years ago by The New York Times Company and the Student Press Law Center that I love. It is about the importance of teenagers seeing real information in the news, to be exposed to the reality of violence and other bad things in the world. It uses examples such as the 13-year-old activist who wound up being a petitioner in the First Amendment Supreme Court case about wearing black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War, and all these other amazing stories about teen activists and journalists.
It was written in opposition to a California online content law that effectively made private platforms enforce speech rules that would be unconstitutional for the government to impose directly. The brief said, “The fact that the Act achieves these curtailments of minors’ rights through nonstate actors does not alter their First Amendment impact.” The same could be said of this settlement.
Stromberg: If Congress were to step in, what rules, if any, should the government impose on social media companies?
Angwin: I would like us to broaden the scope of our conversation beyond our current frame of, “What is it doing to the children?” The harms of social media extend to all of us, and the evidence of how seniors are being harmed through scams and frauds is devastating.
The most important solutions are boring but proven: transparency, accountability and oversight. The platforms should be required to be transparent about their moderation practices, they should be accountable to the people their decisions affect and they should be subject to regular oversight and auditing.
I know this is not an exciting rallying cry like, “Ban social media.” But we do want what social media promised us — for everyone in the world to be able to broadcast to the public. That has surfaced many voices that were previously unheard.
Wallace-Wells: There’s been some fascinating research suggesting that some of social media’s negative effects may be stronger on older Americans — especially when it comes to sharing political misinformation. And I agree that this suggests the ideal solutions aren’t things like time and age limits, but something that changes the nature of the algorithm and how it shapes our experience of the social world.
Angwin: The movement toward age assurance as a social media safety mechanism is about as wrongheaded and perilous an approach as you could possibly find. In an era where authoritarianism is rising around the globe, the idea of requiring people to show identity papers before reading posts online is absolutely hair-on-fire dangerous.
Keller: Yes, the Meta settlement locks in age assurance practices that should worry us. This part of the settlement alone — the requirement to ask users for their age and then do ongoing surveillance of every single user to sort the kids from the adults — poses threats to privacy and free expression. We have good studies telling us how adults change their behavior when they know they may be being watched. The PEN American Center showed that writers were more careful about the stories they wrote and what they said on the phone and in emails. Raw data about Google and Wikipedia use showed that people tended to avoid topics that seemed sensitive to them — including abortion and gay rights.
If the government tried imposing such requirements for much of the content Meta is promising to age-restrict, Supreme Court precedent, as it stands now, tells us it would be unconstitutional.
Wallace-Wells: I share some of your misgivings about age-verification and the surveillance impulse on which it depends. But I also think, common-sensically, that it probably would be good if a 12-year-old wasn’t casually accessing the same internet as a 22-year old. Is that naïve of me?
Angwin: I have to disagree with you, David. Parents have had to police TV, radio, even the library for their children, and they have to police the internet for their children, too. They need better tools for that, and they need the platforms to make it easier. But I do not believe that we as a society should make those decisions for parents and children.
Wallace-Wells: I came into this conversation expecting to play the role of the defender of the free internet and enemy of social-media hysteria, but I’m getting negatively polarized! It’s true that there are a lot of places where children access the same material as adults, but the material in those spaces is considerably more tightly controlled than the internet, right? There isn’t pornography on NBC, for instance. Part of growing up is learning to find your way into adult spaces over time, and I do think the internet is — or can be — a valuable part of that process. But …
Angwin: I understand the dream of building safe online spaces for children. But history has shown us that those spaces often attract the worst elements. Predators often choose to impersonate children to access those spaces. And then without other responsible adults in the same space, it becomes really hard for adults to know what is going on there before it is too late.
Stromberg: It feels like we need to talk about Australia, which has imposed a youth social media ban. It doesn’t seem to have worked, because kids are good at evading age verification systems.
Keller: There was a study showing that one impact on kids in Australia was a steep decline in access to news. We should be realistic about what it means to ban social media access (there) or put social media companies in charge of deciding what is legally safe for kids to see (here, under the Meta settlement). Platforms have every incentive to over-enforce and to remove even content that none of the plaintiffs or AGs would have wanted removed from teens’ feeds.
Angwin: What Daphne is describing is sometimes called “malicious compliance” — and the platforms are expert in it. Australian officials in charge of enforcing these laws have been complaining that the platforms are doing everything they can to undermine the law. They want to make sure that no other country wants to follow Australia’s lead.
Keller: I do want to raise the issue of kids with bad or abusive parents. The parental controls that the settlement gives are remarkable. Parents can see who their kids talk to and decide what information they should be able to find. We all want to imagine good parents using those controls to help their children. But the reality is that there will be kids in dangerous home situations who are being trapped and cut off from a lifeline.
Stromberg: After rogue A.I. agents hacked Hugging Face, debating what to do about social media feels almost passé. Is the government capable of keeping pace with technological development?
Keller: One answer to that is to point to ongoing litigation about kids and harms from chatbots. Those have a lot of parallels to the social media litigation, and — to speculate — might move faster to settlements like Meta’s. If the government can dictate what A.I. tells us about history, politics or current events, that gets Orwellian fast. So we should not want laws or settlements opening the door to that kind of abuse in the A.I. context any more than we want it in the social media context.
Wallace-Wells: Public perception plays an interesting role here. Many Americans are suspicious that government is capable of intervening in big tech, or social media, and improve outcomes. But many also doubt that the companies themselves are capable of robust self-oversight. It’s a pretty vivid illustration of our broader crisis of trust; we are watching the arrival of some truly significant new forces in political and social history and don’t know where to turn to take control of them.
Angwin: A.I. and social media aren’t as different as we think. They are ultimately about corporations controlling access to knowledge and applying their own, private rules about what types of information they surface. Their financial, cultural and political power comes from their ability to control the narratives we are exposed to. And that power has never before been so heavily consolidated and corporatized.
As flawed as government can be, it is our best mechanism for collective action. We have the power to decide that we don’t want a handful of profit-seeking, amoral institutions to control and package all of our public information.
Wallace-Wells: One thread of A.I. backlash, I think, reflects regret that we didn’t do more to take control of social media when it first appeared. Many Americans acquiesced to the techno-libertarian narrative being peddled by the big tech companies 15 years ago, and they seem much less sympathetic to that worldview — or the products it produces — now.
There are important distinctions between the two cases — perhaps most importantly, undoing social media networks presents different challenges from combating or taking control of rapidly improving technology. But we have to remind ourselves, whatever the A.I. founders say, that we are not giving birth to a new superhuman species but contemplating how best to implement — and regulate — a new technology. Perhaps A.I. will prove powerful and transformative. But humans are both designing these new tools and deciding how to regulate or manage them. When we talk about these stories in deterministic terms, attributing world-historical agency to the trajectory of progress, we are taking our hands off the wheel and relinquishing control. That is a choice.
Daphne Keller is the director of platform regulation at the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology.
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