Meta’s $18 Billion Reckoning: Are We All Addicted?

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**Michael Smerconish** (1:03)
So there's the New York Post. Face Slap. Facebook and Instagram agreed a historic 18 billion settlement for harming kids. The average American spends 35 minutes a day in the company of another human being. 35 minutes. 20 years ago, it was 45 minutes. So we've lost a fifth of our face-to-face time in two decades. That number, by the way, comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's not a poll. It's a governmental study. And what they do is they walk 6,000 people, big sample size, through their daily routine, hour by hour, and makes them account for every minute of it. It doesn't count work. Time on the job is counted as work. That's a separate category. Even if you had talked all day, the coffee break with a colleague, lunch with, I don't know, the man or woman from accounting, that doesn't come into play. I'm talking about non-work hours.
It does not count the phone either. Not a call, not a text, not a FaceTime. All of that gets counted somewhere else. So 35 minutes is what you've got left. When you take out the screens and take out the paycheck, it's the time that we volunteer for one another. 35 minutes a day. Does that make sense? Does that apply as you think about your day yesterday? Was that your number when I asked at the outset of the program today, how much time do you spend in the company of others? It's shorter than the average commute. It's shorter than one hour of a television program with commercials built into it. And yes, the steepest drop in terms of the time that we spend with others belongs to the young. Teenagers and young adults used to spend a full hour a day in the company of other people. Now they're down to the same time that we adults are, the 35 minutes. They used to be the ones who hung out with one another, right? They gave it up faster than any other demographic group. And they've got no job to hide in for a teenager time in class. That's counted as school, so that's not what's driving these numbers. Meanwhile, ready for this? The average teenager spends four hours and 48 minutes a day, four hours and 48 minutes a day on social media. So consider that as you evaluate the Meta news, the news yesterday that they've agreed to pay close to 18 billion dollars to settle claims that have been brought by 48 states and the District of Columbia, claims that allege that Facebook and Instagram harm kids.
Here's some of the terms. Ten years of payments, no admission of wrongdoing, for perspective on the 18 billion, Meta made roughly 16 billion dollars in profit last quarter, profit last quarter alone. But the money's really not the big story. The money, I think, is instead the settings and how this is going to work. Two hours a day, that's the new default for a teenager on Facebook and Instagram combined. Two hours a day. It takes a parent's permission to turn that off. The apps go dark at midnight. They stay dark until six in the morning. Notifications are silenced from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon. So, the school day essentially is when there's a prohibition. Like counts disappear from the teenage posts. The cosmetic surgery filters go away, and a teenager can shut off the algorithm entirely. Now, read that list again or think of that list and apply it to yourself. Two hours, that's the default for Facebook and Instagram combined. Everything dark at midnight, stays dark until 6 in the morning. Notifications silence from 8 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon. No more like counts, and you can shut off the algorithm entirely should you choose to do so. Apply it to yourself and tell me, could you live with those parameters? Two hours a day, total across every app on your phone. Nothing after midnight, no alerts from midnight until 6, nothing from 8 until 3, your entire workday.