Meta’s settlement with US states puts the company at a crossroads: officials and child-safety advocates see a rare forced redesign of social media, while privacy experts and critics question whether the safeguards can be enforced without intrusive age checks.

The agreement requires Instagram and Facebook to impose a default two-hour daily limit for users under 18, block access overnight, mute notifications during school hours and hide public like counts. Parental controls will also expand, while cosmetic-procedure filters will be barred for young users. The package, reported at between $17 billion and $18 billion over a decade, remains subject to court approval.

For state attorneys general, the central victory is not the payout but the shift from optional tools to mandatory defaults. California Attorney General Rob Bonta called the agreement “transformative” and a “watershed moment.”¹ Meta’s earlier safety features often required families or teenagers to activate them; Instagram chief Adam Mosseri acknowledged that “the opt-in rates are low.”²

Meta, while continuing to deny wrongdoing, presents the settlement as a model for the wider industry. Its chief legal officer said, “Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution.”² The company has urged TikTok and YouTube to adopt comparable limits, with part of the eventual payment reportedly tied to rival platforms making similar changes.³ A retweeted X post made the competing argument more bluntly: “Parents, not social media companies, should have the final say” over children’s online time and exposure.Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (TRobinsonNewEra)⁶

The biggest uncertainty is identification. Meta must improve its systems for determining whether users are teenagers, but cybersecurity experts warn that “those checks are imperfect.”³ Privacy advocates also object to the potential collection of identification, facial-recognition and behavioral data, citing breach and law-enforcement risks.²

That leaves the settlement’s success resting on two tests: whether age verification works accurately without creating new privacy dangers, and whether competitors follow Meta’s lead. As former Instagram engineer Arturo Béjar put it, “Meta needs to be held accountable for results, not efforts.”⁴