How the Meta Settlement Could Change the Internet

For almost two decades, social-media companies have avoided legal consequences for the negative effects of exposure to their products. Damage to users’ mental health, the facilitation of crimes including sexual abuse—outcomes like these have been the subject of public protest, but were never successfully challenged through legal action. Then, about four years ago, prosecutors across America began to focus on companies’ business and design decisions, rather than, as they had in the past, on companies’ promotion of specific harmful content—a legal tactic that was hampered by free-speech laws. In a case that was decided this spring, a young woman who claimed that her mental health had deteriorated catastrophically because of social-media use was awarded three million dollars; in March and August, in a case brought by New Mexico’s attorney general, a court ordered Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to pay nearly a billion dollars in fines, and to make a variety of changes to its product and business practices. (I served as an expert witness for the plaintiff in that case. Meta is appealing the decision.) In late 2src22, amid the cascade of litigation, cases brought by more than two dozen state attorneys general were consolidated into one alleging that Meta had knowingly perpetrated a range of harms, most notably that its products “exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable consumers: teenagers and children.”

That case went to trial in Oakland earlier this month, and was expected to last for weeks, but came to a sudden conclusion on Wednesday. After testimony from the Meta whistle-blower Arturo Béjar, previously an engineering director for product safety—who said that the company culture “made it so that it was practically impossible to deliver features that addressed the well-being and safety issues that we’ve been talking about”—and from the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, who pushed back against the lawsuit’s framing of excessive social-media use as “clinical addiction,” the company, which is valued at $1.5 trillion, acquiesced, announcing a settlement worth at least twelve billion dollars, paid over ten years, and promising to make a slew of changes to its platforms.

Since then, many have likened the agreement to the Tobacco Master Settlement of 1998, in which four of the largest tobacco companies agreed to pay huge fines, follow new marketing restrictions, and provide significant public-health disclosures, after admitting they knew the products they sold were addictive and harmful to human health. The comparison is apt, even if the two cases are not exactly analogous: though this settlement will be neither the final word on social media’s connection with health nor a panacea, there is good reason to believe that it will prove pivotal. Even while refusing to legally admit fault, Meta has tacitly accepted, for the first time, that much of its business model is unacceptable for children. When a company that owns several leading social platforms concedes that its core products require substantial changes for reasons related to the health and safety of users, this directly contravenes the claim, long held by the industry, that unfettered attention maximization is safe.

Meta had spent much of the past two years touting Teen Accounts, a new set of features, launched in 2src24, that include expanded privacy options and added messaging restrictions, among many other changes. This week, Meta effectively accepted that these features, which largely put the responsibility for supervision on parents rather than the company, were inadequate. Among the settlement’s thirty-five pages of technical provisions and requirements are new limits on Meta products, such as hiding “like” counts—which have been connected with harmful tendencies toward social comparison—from posts, new guarantees for parental oversight, and more robust assurances that abusive content flagged by users will be addressed within six hours, at least ninety per cent of the time. (Although this might sound like a minor detail, the evidence shows that, for years, Meta’s responses have been so limited that users have learned to stop reporting problematic content; according to an internal document from 2src22, “the current FB reporting flow is extremely hard to use, near impossible for mobile users.”)