In “The Social Reckoning,” a dramatic flashback scene depicts Mark Zuckerberg’s board of directors lamenting a drop in engagement as Facebook’s audience aged. After an argument over how to respond, the CEO decides to tweak the company’s algorithms to increase engagement.
The film argues that Zuckerberg’s choice is responsible for various societal harms. Whether or not it’s a fair depiction, that scene glosses over an important point. The company’s audience was getting older not because young people stopped using social media, but because they moved to other platforms like YouTube, Snapchat, and later TikTok. And that trend has continued ever since.
In August, Meta settled with state attorneys general for up to $18 billion and agreed to child protections, including strict daily time limits, stronger parental controls, and age verification. It is a real win for child safety, but its impact will be limited unless other companies follow suit. Meta-owned Instagram ranks a distant fourth in usage among social media sites used by children 12 and under. Child safety advocates have rightly called on YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat to adopt the same measures.
There’s no good reason for these companies not to follow Meta’s lead. Sure, one can fairly argue that Meta agreed to these measures only under the duress of litigation, and that the other companies weren’t on trial in this case. But the measures are sensible and should be the industry baseline for all social media companies.
Does TikTok believe its default settings should allow teens to scroll through the middle of the night? Does Snapchat believe parents shouldn’t be able to disable autoplay on Spotlight, its endless feed of short-form videos?
The harms of YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat to children are well documented. Researchers have found YouTube recommending videos with violent and sexually suggestive imagery in their thumbnails, even during searches for content popular with children. According to a state lawsuit, TikTok’s internal teams repeatedly warned its beauty filters risked damaging teen girls’ mental health. Predators and drug dealers have used Snapchat to prey on minors.
Moreover, all three firms face lawsuits similar to the one that led to Meta’s settlement. Rather than delay the inevitable, they should voluntarily implement these same safeguards nationwide. Doing so would immediately relieve American families who have waited long enough and suffered through years of inaction in Washington. Industry-wide adoption of stronger, independently verified safeguards could also trigger additional terms in the Meta settlement contingent on competitors’ participation, including tighter daily time limits, expanded nighttime restrictions, and extending those protections from five to 10 years.
Even if Meta’s competitors adopt the settlement terms, policymakers should not be under any illusion that their work on child safety is done. Social media sites are just one piece of a complex web of Internet harms facing children and families.
The Apple and Google app stores are rife with “nudify” apps that enable users to create non-consensual sexual imagery. The Federal Trade Commission is suing an app for allegedly targeting children with misleading messages and tricking them into subscriptions. Not to mention how predators have exploited games like Roblox and Minecraft to search for victims.
Legislation like the App Store Accountability Act would require age verification and parental consent for minors downloading apps, while establishing clearer age-rating disclosures to protect kids from age-inappropriate experiences. Congress should also consider measures like the GUARD Act and CHATBOT Act to deal with “companion” chatbots that target children, especially in light of tragic instances of AI chatbots apparently encouraging young users to self-harm.
Parents and child safety advocates have watched for years as lawmakers did little legislatively while youth mental health plummeted. The Meta settlement marks a significant and long-overdue win. But it should serve as a building block, not a finish line.
The next and most critical step is for YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat to adopt comparable protections nationwide so that they extend to the platforms kids spend more of their time on. If these platforms choose not to do the right thing, then Congress, or judges and juries, should force their hand.
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Evan Swarztrauber is a senior fellow at the Digital Progress Institute and a former policy advisor at the Federal Communications Commission.
