A Historic Settlement Over Social Media Addiction

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Jira by Atlassian, where your team and your coding agents work from the same context. Try it free at jira.dev. That's J-I-R-A dot D-E-V.

**Michael Barbaro** (0:11)
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:23)
Today we are here to announce an incredible landmark settlement with Meta.

**Michael Barbaro** (0:29)
On Wednesday, Meta, the world's biggest social media company, reached a multi-billion dollar legal settlement.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:37)
It has directly contributed to our growing youth mental health crisis.

**Michael Barbaro** (0:41)
Over claims that its technology, including Instagram and Facebook, are addictive.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:47)
Meta knew about these risks.

**Michael Barbaro** (0:49)
And a danger to children.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:51)
But the size of the settlement is not what matters most to me or this team. What matters is that this agreement changes what young people will experience when they open their apps.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:01)
And perhaps most importantly, the company agreed to impose sweeping new limits on how kids use its products. Today, business reporter Cecilia Kang on why a company and an industry that never backs down finally cut a deal. And whether or not this truly marks a new era of accountability for big tech, it's Thursday, August 27th.
Cecilia, thank you for making time for us on an extremely busy deadline day for you.

**Cecilia Kang** (1:44)
I'm really happy to be here, Michael. Thank you.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:46)
My pleasure. At a very high level, I wonder if you can describe this just hours old legal settlement and why it's being treated as so historic and so important.

**Cecilia Kang** (2:01)
This is a really big deal. This is a landmark settlement between Meta and nearly every state. And it's about a pretty novel legal theory, which is that social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube are addictive, like cigarettes or opioids. And that was a really new argument presented in courts starting this year.
And it hinges on this idea that the company has harmed users by presenting one picture of its platforms as quite safe and healthy for young users, whereas internally, the company knew differently, that it was actually really grappling with platforms and technologies that could be harmful for users.

**Michael Barbaro** (2:46)
That they knew that this was dangerous, which frankly reminds me a lot of the case that was made against the tobacco companies. They were telling the public one thing when they knew something else.

**Cecilia Kang** (2:58)
That's right. At the heart of this is consumer deception. If the company deceived its users about the true nature of its product.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:07)
And tell us in very broad strokes what's in the settlement.

**Cecilia Kang** (3:11)
So the settlement has a big monetary penalty piece of $17 billion that Meta will pay to nearly every state and the District of Columbia and US territories. It will be distributed amongst those states for different programs to sort of try to correct this problem of social media addiction. And then, which I find really interesting and could be the most lasting changes, are changes to the products themselves.
Meta has agreed to implement several tools and different changes to their platforms to make them safer for young users.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:48)
Such as?

**Cecilia Kang** (3:50)
There are several different things that they've agreed to. They've agreed to limit the number of hours that any teenager can be on any of its apps in a day. So, two hour limits per day for teenage users.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:03)
So, quite spelled out, two hours a day.

**Cecilia Kang** (4:05)
Exactly. And they've also limited the use of these apps during sleep time hours, just complete blockage between midnight and 6 a.m. and a limit of notification. So users, young teenage users, won't get notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. They've also agreed to do away with some tools that have been known to be pretty pernicious when it comes to the effect they have on young people. They're known as social comparison tools, like the like button. And so one thing they've agreed to do is to do away with the count of likes that any posts will have.
And anybody who's on these sites know what it's like you see the like button tally the number of hearts you get. So that will be barred as a default for teenagers. Another feature that will be banned is known as beauty filters. And these are really interesting. They're otherwise known as plastic surgery tools. They take your photo and they essentially edit it in the way that you want to change your appearance. And that also has been known to be really negative and harmful for body image, for the mental health of teenagers. So they're going to ban that as well.