Lawmakers and parental advocates applauded Wednesday’s landmark settlement against social media giant Meta, but said Congress must still enact federal standards to protect children against digital harms.
The settlement forces Meta to pay up to $17.1 billion to the dozens of states that brought the lawsuit. It also requires the company to implement key design changes to its social media platforms, Instagram and Facebook, to reduce compulsive use that has contributed to youth mental health challenges.
“While this is a landmark settlement, Congress still needs to step up and regulate Big Tech,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
“This is one of the few issues where Congress universally agrees on a bipartisan basis that we should act, and there are a number of bipartisan bills ready for floor consideration by both the House and the Senate,” he said.
One of those bills is the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, legislation that would require social media companies to set minors’ accounts to the strongest safety and privacy settings by default, implement more parental controls and alter design features that drive compulsive use.
The settlement includes some steps toward those aims by requiring stronger enforcement of Meta’s existing policy barring children under 13 from the platform and usage restrictions for teenagers ages 13-17, including a daily two-hour time limit, nighttime blocks and notification restrictions during school hours.
“The product design changes imposed under this settlement are a first step toward giving kids and parents the tools they need to take back control of their online lives, but they can be strengthened,” said KOSA’s coauthors, Sens. Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee Republican, and Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat.
The settlement still “demands” Congress pass KOSA, Ms. Blackburn and Mr. Blumenthal said, arguing Congress should do so before the end of the year.
“Meta notes that these terms are only required to stay in place for 10 years — we must ensure permanent change,” the senators said. “We also need safeguards that apply across the board — to all social media companies — not just Instagram and Facebook.”
Meta has made $5 billion of the available settlement funds contingent on the states getting its major competitors — Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube — to adopt comparable design changes.
Teens’ two-hour daily time limit will end after five years if the other companies do not get on board, but will drop to one hour and extend to 10 years if all platforms agree.
Parents for Safe Online Spaces (ParentsSOS), a coalition of families who have lost children due to online harms, applauded the Meta settlement as “watershed moment — the most significant accountability yet for Meta’s harmful and addictive design.”
“The injunctive relief — including restricting nighttime use, turning some harmful features off by default and subjecting Meta to new monitoring requirements — will make a huge difference for America’s families,” said ParentsSOS co-founder Maurine Molak.
But the settlement also sheds light on the need for Congress to pass KOSA and its legal duty-of-care standard “to ensure that Meta stops designing for addiction both now and in the future and that our children are protected no matter what platform they use,” she said.
“We need Congress to build on this momentum, and we call on our Senate leaders to bring the bill to a floor vote next month before we lose more children to online harms,” Ms. Molak said.
Sen. Michael Bennet, Colorado Democrat, said the Meta settlement is a “significant victory” but “we cannot rely only on court orders to regulate Big Tech firms — who will always move faster than our legal system.”
“Now more than ever, it is clear we need a dedicated federal agency, as I have long proposed, able to set rules of the road to protect the American people and our children and prevent harm before it takes place, not after,” he said.
