Australian teenagers have spent months trying to convince social media platforms they are older than they really are. After today’s live Tech Policy Press podcast on Meta’s settlement, I started wondering whether adults may start posing as teens.
Alissa Cooper, Executive Director of the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI) asked: “Why do only minors get these protections?” Fewer notifications. Hidden ‘like’ counts. Nighttime restrictions. The chat quickly filled with adults saying they wanted the teen version too. If Meta’s age-assurance system asks, apparently I’m 14.
What stayed with me was not just that the teen version suddenly sounded better. It was the reminder that these products could have been designed differently all along. That leaves me with five questions.
1. What about the rest of the world?
The settlement is American, but Meta’s business is global. Only about 37% of Meta’s 2025 revenue was attributable to the United States. Nearly two-thirds came from elsewhere, according to Meta’s financial filings with the US government.
“This settlement has implications far beyond the US,” Owen Bennett, a UK tech-policy expert, told Tech Policy Press: “If I were a regulator sitting in Brasilia, Brussels, or Canberra, I would see this as a huge opportunity.”
Meetali Jain of Tech Justice Law Center made the broader point at the end of today’s podcast: “These companies have a transnational footprint, and so too should we.”
This month, the Council on Tech & Social Cohesion and the African Internet Rights Alliance kicked off a working group with seven leading African digital rights organizations and networks, focused on how African civil society and regulators can use design-focused approaches to strengthen tech accountability and make digital experiences safer and healthier. The timing coincides with the launch of a new guide from African Regulators and UNESCO, which similarly points attention upstream—to the systems, incentives and design choices that shape online harms.
The Meta news broke mid-conversation and sharpened the question for the African civil society members: If these protections are possible for American kids, why not for kids in Africa?
2. What about the algorithm?
According to the settlement, teens can switch to a chronological feed, but the engagement-maximized personalized feed remains the default. Cooper called this the “real central miss.”
KGI’s Better Feeds work argues that chronological versus algorithmic is the wrong binary anyway. The better question is: what is the algorithm optimizing for?
Personalization can be useful (and chronological can be boring). But maximizing clicks, watches and shares is not the same as maximizing value to users—or to the information environment around them.
Why couldn’t feeds optimize partly for long-term satisfaction, credibility, constructiveness or bridging across disagreement, while giving users more say over those objectives?
3. What about the incentives?
Former Meta executive and whistleblower Kelly Stonelake captured the underlying problem in her Overturned newsletter: “The problem was never that Meta didn’t understand the harm … It was that, until now, it had too little incentive to do so.”
Time limits and fewer notifications matter because they push, however modestly, against a business model that benefits from capturing attention. That tension may help explain why the settlement links roughly $5 billion in additional payments and stricter Meta protections to comparable obligations being imposed on TikTok, YouTube and Snap: Meta does not want to make attention harder to capture while its main competitors play by different rules.
Conversational AI companies are watching this closely. In recent weeks, both Google and OpenAI have talked about their products for students and for teens.
The products are different, but the incentive question is familiar: what happens when systems designed to maximize engagement become increasingly intimate, persuasive and difficult to leave?
4. Where does regulation go from here?
This settlement arrives amid a global rush toward age restrictions and bans. Tech Policy Press counted 42 countries that had passed, implemented or were considering such measures.
Europe is pushing on product design itself. In April, the European Commission preliminarily found Meta in breach of the Digital Services Act for failing to keep under-13s off Instagram and Facebook. Then in July it preliminarily found Meta in breach again over the addictive design of the services, specifically pointing to infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications and highly personalized recommender systems.
The Meta settlement suggests a similar alternative to the ban-first approach: change the product, not simply who is allowed to enter it. That does not make bans disappear, nor should one US settlement become a global template.
But it strengthens a regulatory path focused on design and consumer protection, and gives policymakers more concrete things to demand: safer defaults, different recommender objectives, limits on manipulative design and meaningful independent scrutiny.
5. How will we know if it works?
The settlement calls for an independent audit, but the podcast exposed a fundamental weakness: implementation is not the same as impact. Earlier this year at the Digital Rights and Risk Forum in Dublin, I heard participants describe the “compliancification” effect of the Digital Services Act—the risk that internal incentives become centered on passing the audit and avoiding fines rather than asking whether mitigation measures actually improve people’s experiences.
Cooper argued that measurement should capture whether users sleep better, focus better and experience improved wellbeing; not simply whether Meta deployed the required tool. One model is the USC Neely Center’s Social Media Index, which uses rolling surveys to track positive and negative experiences across platforms.
The Council on Tech & Social Cohesion’s Prosocial Tech Design Regulation: a Practical Guide guide proposes exactly that: rolling user panels and short surveys tracking time well spent, credibility, exposure diversity, unwanted contact and sleep disruption.
That feels like an important corrective. Success cannot just mean proving a switch was installed. It should mean asking whether people’s lives online actually improved.
Have thoughts about the settlement, and what it means as we look ahead? We’d love to hear from you!
Lena Slachmuijlder is Senior Advisor for Digital Peacebuilding at Search for Common Ground, a Senior Practitioner Fellow at the USC Neely Center, and Co-Chair of the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion.
I thought the same thing!