Meta’s US$17.1 Billion (AU$23 Billion) Teen Safety Settlement: A Landmark Step, But Is It Enough?

In 2023, 29 US States initiated a suit against Meta, alleging that Meta contributed to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately equipping its social media platforms- Facebook and Instagram with features that addict children, and not disclosing them in public. 

They also contended that Meta violated US federal and state child privacy laws by regularly collecting data on children under 13 years of age without their parents’ consent.[1]

A lawyer for California alleged that Meta knew millions of 11- and 12-year-olds were using Instagram and did little to keep them off, despite knowing its platforms could harm teen mental health. Meta disputed the figure, saying it had identified just over 100,000 such users, rejected claims of social media addiction, and argued that positive experiences among teens were being overlooked. The company denied wrongdoing and maintained that youth safety is a priority. State lawyers cited Meta’s internal documents as evidence that the company deliberately concealed research on social media’s impact on teenagers.

Meta’s business model was described as "Hook the users; hold them for as long as they can; harvest their data; hide the truth from the public when making public statements."[2] 

Following reports by the Wall Street Journal in 2021 that Meta was aware of the harm Instagram poses to teenagers, particularly young girls, in terms of body image issues and mental health, Meta introduced several safety features on Instagram, such as separate teen accounts, content restrictions and more messaging and privacy safeguards. However, child safety experts and former Meta employees have long since, contended that those features are mere “window dressing”. A former Meta employee said that Meta consistently prioritised profits over safety in designing its products, focusing on how often and for how long people used them, even if it was detrimental to their mental wellbeing.[2]

The Settlement

Meta has agreed to pay up to $US18 billion ($23.6 billion) and add the following child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms to settle this landmark trial:

·       Two-hour time limits across Facebook and Instagram combined.

·       Night mode (12am-6am) and school mode (8am-3pm) settings to limit notifications and app use.

·       Hidden likes.

·       Blocking "extreme" beauty filters.

·       Teens in the US will also have the choice to switch to a chronological feed and scrap the algorithm designed to keep them scrolling longer.[3]

·       Because teens navigate between multiple apps, Meta said this issue needed to be addressed across the industry, and urged YouTube and TikTok to also implement similar safety features.

Impact on Australia’s Social Media Environment

While this is a landmark settlement, its positive impact in Australia remains uncertain. Meta has agreed to make changes it was comfortable making, although there is cautious optimism that it may implement these changes globally to avoid similar cases in other countries.

The effectiveness of changes targeting teenagers will also depend on Meta’s ability to identify users under 18. Australia’s social media minimum age laws have highlighted the difficulties platforms face in accurately determining users’ ages.

Critique: Why Meta’s Multi-Billion-Dollar Fix Changes Little

While Meta’s historic multi-billion-dollar settlement and resulting feature rollouts are being viewed as a landmark for child safety, the measures do not address the underlying systems that contributed to the harms. Rather than confronting its broader business and data practices, Meta is responding to a systemic problem through product-level changes that may reduce some harms without addressing corporate accountability.

Meta’s call for industry peers such as YouTube and TikTok to face identical regulatory obligations also risks deflecting attention from its own conduct. Uniform obligations across the sector may be necessary to establish consistent safety standards, but this does not diminish Meta’s responsibility for its own documented conduct. There is a distinction between distributing regulatory responsibilities across an industry and distributing responsibility for individual legal violations. By framing the issue primarily as an industry-wide problem, Meta risks shifting attention away from the specific practices for which it has been held accountable.

The settlement also appears largely forward-looking. While it requires changes to how Meta’s platforms operate, it does not address the vast amount of behavioural data and user insights collected from teenagers in the past. Data-derived profiles, predictive systems and other insights developed from historical user activity may continue to have commercial value. If these systems remain intact, changing how the platforms operate in the future does not fully remedy the consequences of past data collection. Meaningful remediation therefore requires consideration of what should happen to data and profiles derived from children’s historical use, rather than focusing solely on future collection and platform design.

The alternative feed that allows teenagers to opt out of personalised algorithms raises a further concern. Enabling users to have more control is essential, but it can also shift part of the responsibility for avoiding harm onto the user. For minors in particular, offering a choice to disengage from a potentially harmful design does not necessarily make that design safe. Safety-by-design instead requires platforms to address foreseeable risks at the system level, rather than relying primarily on users to protect themselves from them.

This approach does not align with Australia’s emerging regulatory emphasis on safety by design. The eSafety Commissioner’s Basic Online Safety Expectations require providers to take proactive steps to address online safety risks. Against this framework, user choice should complement—not substitute for—corporate responsibility for identifying and reducing foreseeable harms. Unless regulatory responses also address Meta’s algorithms, historical data practices and accountability for systemic harms, the new features risk becoming incremental design changes rather than comprehensive solutions.[4]

Sources

1.     Meta to pay $23 billion and update Facebook and Instagram to settle teen social media addiction lawsuits. (27 August 2026). ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-27/meta-settlement-on-harm-to-teens/107082748 

2.     Kali Hayes. (August 18, 2026). Meta hooked children on Facebook and Instagram, US court hears. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly5r7vr7q1o

3.     Ange Lavoipierre. (28 August 2026). No guarantee Australian teens will benefit from Meta addiction settlement. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-28/will-metas-addiction-settlement-affect-australia/107084034 

4.     eSafety: Safety by Design. https://www.esafety.gov.au/industry/safety-by-design