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Meta settles in landmark child safety trial but stops short of meaningful default improvements
Facing a landmark trial over child safety, Meta agreed to pay close to $17 billion but the settlement leans on access restrictions and optional features, rather than fixing the engagement-driven design at the root of the harm by default.
Today, Meta settled a landmark case in California brought forward by more than half of all US States, agreeing to pay close to $17 billion in penalties and to change how Facebook and Instagram operate for minors in the US.
This case represented a crucial opportunity to secure court-ordered changes that redesign Meta’s products with children’s rights at the heart and to set a precedent for all tech companies that the cost of harming children is far greater than the cost of making their products safe.
“No business pays out billions without recognising that there was a strong case against them and now the message for tech firms everywhere, not just social media, must be crystal clear: the cost of harming kids is greater than the cost of making your product safe.
Tech should be safe by design and default and independently certified so before ever reaching children. This, and all future cases, must be stepping stones towards that.”
Leanda Barrington-Leach, Executive Director at 5Rights
However, the changes agreed upon in the settlement fall short of meaningfully shifting the responsibility to keep children’s safe back to Meta.
Improvements like non-personalised, chronological feed and the ability to turn off autoplay remain optional and many changes centre on limiting teens’ access to Facebook and Instagram. In practice, this still places the burden of managing risks with children and parents.
Requiring a child to switch on a safety feature does not fix the underlying cause of harm, particularly given these companies’ track record of doing little to alter the design choices that create risks for children in the first place.
Just last week, former Meta employees testified that the company was obsessed with growing the number of its users and that it knew young users were exposed to harmful experiences at far higher rates than it acknowledged publicly.
This isn’t the first case of its kind and it won’t be the last. Every lawsuit, every regulatory challenge, every fine keeps building the moral, legal and financial case for one standard: technology accessed by children must be safe for them by design and default and it must be independently certified as such before it ever reaches children, no matter where they live.
