A Historic Settlement Over Social Media Addiction
The Daily
Meta has reached a historic multibillion-dollar settlement over claims that its social media platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, ar
Key takeaways
- The settlement marks a significant shift in accountability for Big Tech, with Meta agreeing to structural changes that directly impact its core business model of maximizing user engagement.
Main topics
- Social media addiction
- Legal accountability for tech companies
Notable quotes
This is a really big deal. This is a landmark settlement between Meta and nearly every state.
Conclusion
This settlement represents a transformative moment in tech regulation, signaling that even
Transcript preview
Speaker 7 (0:00) Hi, I'm Solana Pine. I'm the director of video at The New York Times. For years, my team has made videos that bring you closer to big news moments. Videos by Times journalists that have the expertise to help you understand what's going on. Now, we're bringing those videos to you in the Watch tab in The New York Times app. It's a dedicated video feed where you know you can trust what you're seeing. All the videos there are free for anyone to watch. You don't have to be a subscriber. Download The New York Times app to start watching. Speaker 5 (0:31) From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bilbaro. This is The Daily. Speaker 3 (0:43) Today we are here to announce an incredible landmark settlement with Meta. On Speaker 5 (0:49) Wednesday, Meta, the world's biggest social media company, reached a multi-billion dollar legal settlement. Speaker 3 (0:57) It has directly contributed to our growing youth mental health crisis. Over Speaker 5 (1:01) claims that its technology, including Instagram and Facebook, are addictive. Meta knew about these risks. And a danger. to children. But Speaker 3 (1:11) the size of the settlement is not what matters most to me or this team. What matters is that this agreement changes what young people will experience when they open their apps. Speaker 5 (1:20) And perhaps most importantly, the company agreed to impose sweeping new limits on how kids use its products. Today, business reporter Cecilia Kong on why a company and an industry that never backs down finally cut a deal, and whether or not this truly marks a new era of accountability for big tech. It's Thursday, August 27th. Speaker 6 (1:58) Cecilia, thank you for making time for us on an extremely busy deadline day for you. Speaker 1 (2:04) I'm really happy Speaker 5 (2:05) to be here, Michael. Thank you. Speaker 6 (2:06) My pleasure. At a very high level, I wonder if you can describe this just hours old legal settlement and why it's being treated as so historic and so important. Speaker 1 (2:20) This is a really big deal. This is a landmark settlement between Meta and nearly every state. And it's about a pretty novel legal theory, which is that social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube are addictive, like cigarettes or opioids. And that was a really new argument presented in court starting this year. And it hinges on this idea that the company has harmed users by presenting one picture. of its platforms as quite safe and healthy for young users, whereas internally, the company knew differently, that it was actually really grappling with platforms and technologies that could be harmful for users. That Speaker 6 (3:06) they knew that this was dangerous, which frankly reminds me a lot of the case that was made against the tobacco companies. They were telling the public one thing when they knew something else. Speaker 1 (3:18) That's right. At the heart of this is consumer deception. If the company deceived its users about the true nature of its product. And tell us Speaker 6 (3:27) in very broad strokes, what's in the settlement? Speaker 1 (3:31) So the settlement has a big monetary penalty piece of $17 billion that META will pay to nearly every state and the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. It will be distributed amongst those states for different programs to sort of try to correct this problem of social media addiction. And then, which I find really interesting and could be the most lasting changes, are changes to the products themselves. Meta has agreed to implement several tools and different changes to their platforms to make them safer for young users. Such as? There are several different things that they've agreed to. They've agreed to limit the number of hours that any teenager can be on any of its apps in a day. So two hour limits per day for teenage users. So Speaker 6 (4:23) quite spelled out, two hours a day. Speaker 1 (4:25) Exactly. And they've also limited... the use of these apps during sleep time hours, just complete blockage between midnight and 6 a.m. and a limit of notifications. So users, young teenage users, won't get notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. They've also agreed to do away with some... tools that have been known to be pretty pernicious when it comes to the effect they have on young people. They're known as social comparison tools like the like button. And so one thing they've agreed to do is to do away with the count of likes that any post will have. And, you know, anybody who's on these sites know what it's like. You see the like button tally the number of hearts you get. So that will be barred as a default for teenagers. Another feature that will be banned is known as beauty filters. And these are really interesting. They're otherwise known as plastic surgery tools. They take your photo and they essentially edit it in the way that you want to change your appearance. And that also has been known to be really negative and harmful for body image, for the mental health of teenagers. So they're going to ban that as well. I Speaker 6 (5:40) mean, these are being described as sweeping changes. And it does strike me that the restrictions Meta is now imposing, they're not just on overall use, hours or time of day, but a very specific features like you just described that have been understood to undermine the self-image and the mental health of young brains. And overall, I'm really struck that in this settlement, Meta is doing something that companies do not frequently do, which is... drawing a big red circle around its marquee products and saying, we're going to cut people off and we're going to limit the amount of time and the features you can use. That's very rare in our system. Speaker 1 (6:27) Yeah, I find it stunning, Michael, because it really strikes at the heart of Meta's business, which is a business of keeping you on as long as they can. This is a business that's about engagement. so that they can target ads to you. So by limiting the amount of time teens are on, by limiting what they can do and the kinds of features that are known to be really sticky that lead to compulsive use, these are things that can really strike at the business model that MEDA has built over these years into this powerhouse. Speaker 5 (6:59) Right. And Speaker 1 (7:00) the settlement is studying for another reason in that... Meta is a fighting company. It came into these cases and these trials extremely confident. They felt like they had a very strong defense. And I've been covering this company for nearly two decades. And I would describe them as like a pretty pugnacious company and defiant. And to see them settle fairly early on in a set