Meta's $18 billion child-safety settlement has India looking for the wrong answer

**Snigdha Sharma** (0:00)
Alexis Spence was 11 years old when she first opened an Instagram account, and she did it behind her parents' backs. They had said no, and anyway, the app was supposed to be shut to anybody under 13
But it barely took Alexis any time to find a way around it, and soon she was on it for hours at a time, and most of it was late night and alone. Now, her family would later argue in court that whatever the app kept showing their 11-year-old daughter pushed her slowly towards starving herself, hating her body and even harming it. Things got so harrowing that ultimately the Spencers took Meta to court. And their lawsuit was the first to bring up Meta's own leaked internal research, in which its researchers admitted that they had long-known Instagram worsened body image for teenage girls. The reason that you've probably heard of the case of Alexis Spence is because she's American.
In 2024, researchers interviewed 15 teenage girls here in Kolkata, India, about what Instagram did to the way they saw themselves. And what they described was a version of the same thing. The filters that quote-unquote corrected their faces, the bodies that just didn't look right according to the app, basically they were in the early stages of the same disorders that had put up Alexis Spence under treatment.
The difference between the cases here and the ones in the US is the ending. And that gap became the most evident last week. Nearly every US state had sued Meta together, accusing it of knowingly designing Instagram and Facebook in a way to addict children. And Meta, rather than finishing the trial last week, decided to settle and agreed to pay up to $18 billion over the course of a decade. Now, just to clarify, this money will go to the states. And what the families, like the Spencers, will get is the other half of the deal. The apps will be rebuilt around their children. A two-hour daily limit, the apps going dark post 12 a.m., no drastic beauty filters, and also like gowns being switched off.
All of this is for American teenagers. And there is nothing for our children here in the country that happens to be the single biggest market that Meta has in the world. So every op-ed page since last week has naturally been asking the same obvious question. If Meta can protect a teenager in California, why should a teenager in India wait? And it is a fair question. But I think it is the wrong one. It is wrong about who we are asking, and also wrong about who we are asking for.
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host, Snigdha Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will bring you one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 3rd of September.
The harm that Meta's own researchers documented does not politely stop at the American border. And now that the remedy exists, people asking why a child in India should be left behind on the older, harmful version of Instagram is a very reasonable question. But the trouble is who we're pointing this question at. Because think about it, we are essentially expecting Meta to choose to be decent to us based on what? The goodness of its heart? That it should just look at what it has agreed to do in America and volunteer to do the same here?
We know exactly how this goes. In fact, Indian reporters even asked the tech giant whether these protections were coming to India. And the company gave them a non-answer and pointed them to a blog post that mentioned India nowhere.
Generosity, as it turns out, is a thing that companies keep for themselves. $18 billion spread over the course of a decade with terms and conditions applied is peanuts for Meta. Just for context, by the way, the company makes around $16 billion in a single quarter.
Reality is that Meta changed its product when there was legal pressure. A teenager in California is protected today because state attorney generals took the company to trial and did not back down. The Indian state also has the power to do something like this. And also, it is not like India has been sitting on its hands. We have the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, whose final rules were notified in late 2025 And it says that no company may handle the data of anybody under the age of 18 without verified consent from a parent. It also bars platforms from profiling children or serving them targeted ads. The catch is that the part built for children does not fully take effect until 2027 And then, we've also had multiple states autonomously push for social media bans for children. This March, Karnataka announced that it would ban social media outright for anybody under 16 Andhra Pradesh said it would do the same for under 13 and then floated pushing that up to 16