Meta would rather pay out billions to teen mental health programs than risk losing teen addicts on Instagram.
The day before running full-page ads across the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times calling on competitors TikTok and YouTube to adopt tougher child safety standards, Meta settled a landmark lawsuit brought by 52 state attorneys general accusing Instagram of intentionally addictive design. Community organizer and parent advocate Amanda Getty says Meta’s efforts to spin its predatory business model as a responsible parenting issue are meant to distract users: Big Tech’s bottom line depends on hooking teens as young as possible.
Meta denied knowingly exposing minors to serious harm and misleading the public, but agreed to pay up to $18 billion over 10 years – workable for a company that made $60 billion in profit last year alone. Getty points to Meta’s track record of failing to implement – and actively lobbying against – the kinds of guardrails this settlement ostensibly imposes, including a 2024 investigation that found only a fraction of Instagram Teen Account safety protocols were functional. Meanwhile teens are still being bullied and nudged toward features associated with predatory grooming. Getty cites a 2018 internal strategy memo instructing Meta employees to “win big with teens” by bringing them in “as tweens.”
Meta fears losing young users to less regulated platforms; Getty argues that’s why it’s begging Google and TikTok to get in line, all the while shifting responsibility onto parents for a business model built on addiction by design.
“There’s no version of reform here that leads to an actual win for parents,” Getty says, arguing the fight isn’t about better parental controls – it’s about confronting economic predation targeting kids at scale
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