The Meta Settlement Settles Nothing

M eta has agreed to pay up to $17 billion to settle claims that its products harmed America’s youth, an unsatisfying outcome to a worst-of-both-worlds process.

Worst of both worlds because it adopted a regulation-by-settlement approach in which the owner of Facebook and Instagram admitted no wrongdoing and successfully conditioned some of the settlement cash and policy changes it has agreed to make to curb pathological teen use on getting its competitors to adopt them as well, with Meta even going so far as to run ads on its own platforms “inviting” TikTok and YouTube to step up.

And unsatisfying because the settlement leaves largely untouched the core operating model of social media and largely unchanged the incentives of the attention economy. It does nothing to come to terms with the pathologies introduced into all our lives — not just kids and teens, but (allegedly) grown adults as well — by The Algorithm writ large.

The changes Meta has agreed to are almost certainly good ones. It agreed to limit minors to two hours of usage a day across Facebook and Instagram, to block access from midnight to 6 a.m. and mute notifications during school hours, and to beef up tools for parental supervision. These are defaults that can largely be overridden by parents, which is fair enough, as the measures follow and indeed lag what a lot of parents and school districts are already doing. Along with blanket smartphone bans in schools and some favorable trends in screen time for Gen Alpha kids, there is a growing reckoning of the harms and willingness to do something about them.

And parents and boards of ed are the right spots on the subsidiarity stack for these solutions, for creating rules around when, where, and how these platforms get used by vulnerable and half-formed brains. But even taken all together, these adaptations won’t solve what you might call the digital question: what rules govern our online lives — what rights and duties we have as, for lack of a better term, digital citizens, and what we’re owed before we become mere digital subjects.

Concerns over Big Tech are widespread, with 78 percent of Americans saying those companies have too much power and two-thirds of parents in favor of banning social media for under-16s. Those findings cut across party affiliation, and though they may differ on specifics, both left and right agree that Big Tech needs guardrails. Issues like this are what Congress and federal regulators ostensibly exist to debate and legislate around. And big-picture rules about the architecture and functioning of these platforms themselves are naturally the purview of federal legislation, not state law or school board policy, if for no other reason than that fair regulation should give these companies one set of rules and not 50 or 50,000.

And yet for some strange reason this seems to be an area with far too little policy entrepreneurship, where the ideas that are out there haven’t seemed to translate into passable legislative agendas.

So what should be done?

I don’t know, exactly, so you’ve got me there, okay? But what I do know is that a multitrillion-dollar line of business premised on keeping you scrolling with AI trash, train-wreck videos, and conspiracies propagated through bot farms run by foreign adversaries is probably not compatible with a healthy and thriving society. Nor is a social media climate that seems precision-engineered to accelerate the fertility-adjacent “loneliness epidemic,” the cratering of public trust, and the struggle sessions and show trials of “Woke 1” and its yet-to-be-begotten sequels.

What we need is something like a digital bill of rights: a durable settlement between Big Tech and the public over what control we have over our own digital footprints, what operators may take from us and serve up to us, and what we actually agree to when we click “I accept.”

Such attempts have been made. Congressman Ro Khanna (D., Calif.), before his complete descent into clown-hood, floated just such a digital bill of rights in 2018. The Obama White House had tried something similar with a digital-privacy-themed bill of rights in 2015. Neither went anywhere, and both leaned too far into top-down command and control for my tastes.

But there are some other proposals out there, including some that are consistent with innovation, dynamism, and free-market principles broadly.

One class of solutions relies on so-called “middleware.” Rooted in a Stanford working group led by Francis Fukuyama(!) and operationalized in a 2024 white paper co-published by the right-of-center Foundation for American Innovation, middleware would unbundle the platform from the feed, with third-party software companies competing to help users control and curate what they see according to their own preferences and not Mark Zuckerberg’s or his advertisers’. The novelist and futurist Cory Doctorow advocates a variant he calls “adversarial interoperability,” which is fundamentally deregulatory, stripping incumbents of protections that sometimes prevent would-be competitors from reverse-engineering Big Tech algorithms and making competitive software compatible with them. Congress once tried something like this with the bipartisan ACCESS Act, which would have mandated data portability and interoperability for large platforms, but it stalled out.

Another set of ideas works on increasing the transparency of — and hopefully thereby limiting the depredations in — Big Tech terms of service and other boilerplate and fine print. Anyone who has ever force-scrolled through a zillion-word TOS and an “I agree” click box in order to get a hamburger delivered understands that these terms are often “contracts of adhesion,” all-or-nothing propositions with no real negotiation or choice that bind you to way more than is necessary to get your Big Mac. The TLDR Act, co-sponsored by Senator Bill Cassidy (R., La.) with Democratic partners and introduced in 2022, then reintroduced since without ever escaping committee, would require providers to give short-form, plain-English summaries of terms and simple infographics showing with whom they share your data. It would also require metadata that made the full terms of service easier for AI assistants to read, so your preferred virtual lawyer could flag the most questionable provisos.

A third set of proposals takes aim at the algorithm itself, particularly its ability to weaponize, at the speed of electrons, the adage that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can put on its shoes. Social platforms reward with clicks, eyeballs, and money all forms of viciousness and bunkum. They feed on outrage, novelty, and transgression. Lies, moral perversions, and pornography — sexual and otherwise — free-ride thereupon. So-called viral circuit breakers, first suggested in 2020 by Ellen Goodman, a Rutgers law professor, and Karen Kornbluh, a former Obama hand, would pause runaway propagation of viral content much as automatic trading halts were installed in public markets to check panic selling in the wake of the 1987 crash. Frances Haugen, the former Facebook manager turned whistleblower, recommended much the same to the Senate Commerce Committee in 2021: that it doesn’t take content moderation, but merely slowing the propagation of content, to prevent vicious cascades.

To be sure, such an approach would have to be truly content-neutral, implemented in a way that didn’t amount to the kind of Big Tech bumbling and censorship that gave us the Hunter Biden laptop. But structural friction as such is consistent with liberal pluralism and free speech. And it also seems to work. WhatsApp capped message forwarding in 2019 and tightened the cap for frequently forwarded messages in 2020, a change that Meta says cut the spread of such messages by roughly 70 percent. And Twitter’s “read before you retweet” prompts measurably dampened blind amplification.

Every technology of liberation is also a technology of control. That this is true should not prevent us from acknowledging and protecting, including through law and norm, the many wonders made possible by the birth of the digital world. And it’s of course possible that the core problems of that world can’t be solved in ways consistent with limited-government conservatism. Any given proposal may prove unworkable for foreseeable or yet unknown reasons. But as conservatives, we believe that clear and durable rules beat patchworks and shakedowns, that Article I beats lawfare, and that a market in which ordinary Americans have as much information and agency as the companies that farm them is a more, not less, free market.