Two months ago I gave birth to our fourth child (a beautiful baby girl!), which is why you haven’t heard from me much lately. But I just had to pop out of my maternity leave for a minute to break down this landmark settlement agreement from Meta this week!
Yesterday, I explained to Fox and Friends the significance of this settlement with an analogy: “2026 is Big Tech’s Big Tobacco moment.” Watch here:
The point isn’t the 18 billion dollar price tag. The headline is the design requirements the States’ Attorney Generals are insisting on to protect kids online. This settlement gets rid of many of the most dangerous and addictive features of social media platforms and most importantly requires robust age-verification on Meta products (Instagram and Facebook) in order to keep underage users off (13 and under) and ensure these new safeguards are applied to all minors under 18. The goal is to have these same standards accepted by the other platforms in this litigation: Youtube, Snapchat, and TikTok, as well.
The settlement will also help set a global standard for comprehensive age verification for social media and hopefully other platforms in the industry will voluntarily follow this framework and also adopt the design safeguards in order to avoid the litigation these major platforms have faced.
Nevertheless, the settlement does nothing to raise the age for social media use in the US, which will still be 13. Other countries, like Australia and the UK, have raised the age to 16. Even the new two-hour-daily time limit for Meta’s apps won’t protect young brains from addiction, because in those two hours a minor is getting constant hits of dopamine to his or her brain. In addition, the settlement applies only to one platform for now, Meta, and expires in 10 years. Broader legislation is still necessary to ensure protection across the social media industry.
For parents, the best thing to do is still to keep children and teens off social media entirely. This settlement is a huge change for the industry in the right direction. But it is not a silver bullet.
To give you a little background on factors that led to this moment, four years ago I wrote a report with Brad Wilcox, Jean Twenge, and Adam Candeub which was the first to call for age verification for social media. Since that report, many states have passed age verification laws based on a model EPPC helped develop. Now, after years of fighting these laws, the public pressure and litigation has led Meta to finally agree they can and will do age verification.
This settlement is a huge win for protecting kids online that we should celebrate, but there remains plenty of work to do.
Toy Story 5
Another sign of the culture shift around kids and screens was the release of “Toy Story 5” earlier this summer. As I wrote in the Daily Wire, “The film captures something many parents have felt: the age of toys is over. Play-based childhood has ended, and we are now in the age of screens. The movie’s accurate diagnosis of the crisis in modern American childhood captures the frustrations parents feel over kids and screens. If you talk to most parents, they lament the state of childhood today, but they also feel a sense that the screens are inevitable.”
However, the film fell short in its solutions for parents. As I wrote, “‘Toy Story 5’ missed its opportunity to take a stronger stance and show parents that screens do not need to be an inevitable part of modern childhood and, in fact, a better way is possible: getting rid of the screens entirely. We don’t need better uses for screens, as portrayed at the end of the film when Lilypad connects Bonnie with a new friend in real life. We need loving, yet authoritative, parents who decisively take the screens away and instead guide their children toward a life of independent, imaginary play and in-person friendships.”
Recent Appearances
This past Sunday I was on Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy to talk about the impact of screens on kids brains, the possibility of age bans for social media, and the social media trials we’ve seen this year.
And earlier this summer, I was interviewed on the Morning Wire podcast about the effects of phones and tablets on children and what parents can do about it, listen here: “The Parenting Mistake Everyone Makes”
Upcoming Events
September 1: I will be speaking on a panel for HHS’s “Live Real Life Symposium” in follow up to their Office of the Surgeon General’s Advisory earlier this year on kids and screens. The event is from 10 AM to 2 PM (my panel is around 11:20 AM on policy solutions) and Secretary Kennedy will give closing remarks. You can watch the event online here.
September 23: If you live in the Nashville area I will be giving a talk on The Tech Exit at the Church at College Station at 6:30 PM. See information and register here.
September 26: I’ll be on a panel about AI and the impact on human relationships, children, and the family at the Pray Vote Stand Summit in Leesburg, VA. To register for the summit, held Sept 24-26, see here.