As part of a $17.1 billion settlement, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has agreed to impose limits on how minors interact with its products. Among the coming changes for teenagers are a two-hour daily usage limit across all of Meta’s products; a default block on access between midnight and 6 a.m.; automatic interruptions in response to prolonged use; and the default hiding of likes and reaction counts. In addition, Meta has agreed to more aggressively verify users’ ages — especially when it suspects that a user is under 13 — and to limit what data it collects and uses for advertising and marketing.
This outcome is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Social media does seem to have a pernicious effect on many young people, and the safeguards to which Meta has agreed seem mostly sensible. Nevertheless, the manner in which those safeguards have been imposed on them ought to alarm a self-governing people. They were not effected via publicly debated legislation, followed by transparent rulemaking and judicial review. Rather, they emerged via a backdoor legal effort that crammed a host of highly specific policy objections — the lack of two-hour usage limits, nighttime lockouts, school-hour restrictions, and so forth — into a set of broad statutes that were silent on those questions. They were not applied to all social media companies; only to some. And, because Meta elected to settle before the trial could proceed any further, it now finds itself bound by rules that the judiciary may lack authority to impose.
Most worryingly of all, the deal’s stricter restrictions — and well as roughly $5 billion in contingent payments — are expressly tied to Snap, TikTok, YouTube, and other companies becoming subject to the same obligations. The settlement therefore uses one company’s capitulation as the mechanism for constructing an industry-wide regulatory regime, without any legislature ever having enacted such a thing. Ultimately, Meta admitted nothing; the trial produced no verdict; and appellate review was waived, yet the agreement operates as a judicially enforceable code. That is no way to run a republic.
Rather than regarding this settlement as the end of the matter, Congress ought to use it as an opportunity to step in. Its doing so would benefit everyone. The public would get the protections for minors that it clearly desires — and, having been enacted legislatively, those protections would apply equally to all. The tech companies would know definitively what was expected of them — and, just as important, what was not. And, rather than having to wade through the current patchwork quilt of state-level regulations and judicial settlements, consumers across the country would be able to comprehend a set of uniform rules. Most questions in American life are better dealt with by the states, but, by its very nature, the operation of the internet cannot be among them. It is untenable that these key issues are being resolved by desultory appeals to a bunch of vague consumer-protection laws that are not specific to the tech industry, usually predate the release of its products, and typically say little more than that business practices should be fair. Congress’s purpose is to pass uniform laws on matters of national import and to preempt the states if necessary. It must do so here.