A day after Instagram’s top executive was questioned in court about his team’s efforts to “limit” its access to teens’ safety data, Meta opted to settle rather than continue several weeks of litigation. Meta’s agreement with state attorneys general requires it to make sweeping changes to how teens use Facebook and Instagram, including stricter age verification measures and limits on notifications, like counting and overall screen time for teens. It also agreed to provide up to $18 billion to 48 states and four U.S. jurisdictions to fund additional online safety initiatives.
But the terms of the settlement also include more unusual provisions: Nearly a third of Meta’s payments, or about $5.3 billion, depend on TikTok and YouTube agreeing to product changes and similar fines. “We want to ensure that teenagers benefit from this new industry standard, but we cannot do it alone,” Meta wrote in an open letter to its competitors. “These protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers – TikTok and YouTube – to put the same measures in place.”
“It’s very unusual,” says Nikolas Guggenberger, an assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center. “This merges the interests of the AG and Meta, in the sense that both can now put pressure, and have an incentive to put pressure, on the other players to enter into a similar agreement.” It’s a strategy that appears designed to exert maximum pressure on the rest of the industry, according to legal experts interviewed by Woozad. And there’s a good chance it will work, they said.
Under the proposed settlement, the restrictions accepted by Meta will become even stricter if its counterparts also accept the changes. For now, Meta has committed to limiting teens’ screen time to two hours per day and completely banning them from posting or scrolling between midnight and 6 a.m. But, “if Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube accept comparable conditions,” explained Colorado Attorney General Phol Wiser during a press conference, “the daily limit on each platform will drop to 60 minutes for 10 years.” Likewise, the nighttime blockade would extend from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. if all companies signed the agreement. The judge in the case has yet to approve those conditions, although she indicated she likely would do so at a hearing Wednesday.
TikTok, YouTube and Snap were not directly involved in the states’ lawsuit against Meta, which centered on allegations that the company misled the public about the security of its apps and wrongly collected data from children. While it’s no surprise that Meta would want its competitors to be forced into similar concessions, these companies apparently have little incentive to do so.
We do not yet know how Meta’s competitors will react. Google and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment. A Snap spokesperson declined to comment. But all three companies “probably feel more exposed” as a result of Meta’s settlement, according to James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell University.
“They just lost Meta as an ally on their side in lobbying against legislation or pursuing litigation over it,” Grimmelmann said. “The attorney general has (had) success in this first (case) and (is) emboldened to continue, and public opinion against social media companies is really strong.”
TikTok, Snap and YouTube also face their own legal dilemmas. TikTok was sued by a coalition of state attorneys general. New York City sued the three companies for their alleged impact on adolescent mental health. The companies also collectively face thousands of lawsuits from school districts and individuals who claim their apps harmed them.
Meta’s settlement could end up fueling even more lawsuits against all social media companies, Guggenberger said. “It reinforces the general principle that these types of lawsuits and court actions and this type of litigation can be successful.” With this on the horizon, Snap, Youtube and TikTok will likely have even less appetite for another fight with the states.
For their part, states have made it clear that they hope this agreement will mark the start of new industry-wide standards for social media platforms. “With the momentum we’ve created and the success we’ve had here, we’re going to focus on the rest of the industry,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a news conference. TikTok, YouTube and Snap, he added, “should think very carefully” about their next step. “We also expect similar results from them, and there are many ways we can achieve this.”
