The amazing part to me isn’t the massive settlement amount, though obviously $17.1B is a huge amount of money. It’s more than Meta made in profit in Q2 of 2026. It’s more than a quarter of the profit Meta made all of last year.
(It’s worth noting that “only” $12.7B of this settlement is truly guaranteed. The remaining $5B of the settlement is paid only if Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube adopt similar child-safety protections. Which… okay, I guess.)
The amazing part of the settlement to me is twofold:
- These are restrictions that frankly would be great to apply to everyone who uses these damn sites, you know? Not that we need to be nannied by our websites or governments, but it doesn’t feel like adults are served any better by Facebook than teens are:
Teenagers will be limited to just two hours a day on its platforms, and blocked entirely between midnight and 6 a.m. Notifications will be silenced during school hours.
Every time a user under 18 is on Instagram or Facebook for 15 consecutive minutes, that person will receive a prompt on the screen.
The apps will limit or remove features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and the tallying of “like” counts.
- We all just expect that Meta will work hard to avoid actually following what it’s agreed to. I found this line from The New York Times understandable, disappointing, and even shocking.
It is not yet clear how aggressively Meta will work to verify how old users are, a critical component in most of its changes.