Meta has agreed to a settlement of up to $17 billion with dozens of U.S. states, requiring major changes to its Facebook and Instagram platforms. However, Arturo Béjar, a whistleblower and former Facebook employee whose testimony was central to the government's case, said the agreement falls short of ensuring product safety for young users.
Béjar, who worked directly with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, testified that the company lied about its commitment to child safety and disregarded warnings about harmful content. He described the settlement's restrictions as surface-level—akin to permitting smoking for limited hours—rather than addressing the underlying product design.
More than a dozen states had sued Meta, alleging the company designed addictive products that contributed to mental health problems among young people, including disordered eating, depression and suicide. The agreement, reached Wednesday, mandates strict limits on the time teenagers can spend on Instagram and Facebook. Meta must also set a non-algorithmic feed as the default for teen users and introduce parental controls that allow feeds to revert to non-personalized content.
Additional requirements include creating a night mode and school mode to restrict app usage during specific hours. Social comparison features such as beauty filters and likes will be disabled by default for young users.
Béjar's core criticism centers on the unchanged algorithmic design choices that he believes make Facebook and Instagram addictive. He had advocated for the agreement to address how social network algorithms steer young users toward engaging content and to include independent auditing and quantifiable obligations for reducing harm.
Meta rejected Béjar's assertion. A Meta spokesperson pointed to the default non-algorithmic feed and enhanced parental controls as evidence of extensive protections for teens.
The company's ad-driven business model relies on maximizing user engagement, particularly on Facebook and Instagram. While the settlement introduces friction through time limits and default settings, the underlying algorithmic mechanisms that drive engagement remain unchanged. For Meta, this means its core competitive moat in attention capture is largely preserved, albeit with new regulatory guardrails for a critical demographic.
Béjar maintains that the product remains harmful after the settlement, drawing parallels to tobacco and opioids. He stated that work to ensure safety for young people must continue, signaling a long-term challenge for Meta's user acquisition and retention strategies among younger demographics.
State attorneys general have publicly hailed the settlement as a victory. Meta, in turn, has called upon other social media platforms to implement similar policies, a move that could standardize compliance costs across the industry and potentially level the competitive landscape if these restrictions meaningfully impact engagement.
For Meta, implementation of these changes will require capital allocation toward product development, engineering resources for new features like night mode and school mode, and ongoing compliance monitoring. This diverts resources that might otherwise fund pure growth initiatives or new product innovations.
