What Meta’s settlement can and can’t do for your kids

A few weeks ago, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that the tech giant Meta will pay the state more than $1 billion and rebuild how Facebook and Instagram treat Texas teenagers. Under the agreement, teen accounts will have a two-hour daily limit by default, notifications will go silent during school hours, likes and reactions will be hidden to curb social comparison, and a nighttime mode will restrict access overnight. 

While these are admirable steps, other Meta platforms, like Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads, are not affected by this settlement. That means notifications and time limits won’t be impacted across the entire Meta platform. More realistically, this will mainly impact Instagram, as Facebook is widely reported to be made up of Millennials and older generations.

What really changed?

The money from the settlement is earmarked for youth mental health services, crisis resources, digital literacy programs, and grants for Texas schools. It is the third billion-dollar settlement Paxton has secured from a technology company, and his office says a trial against TikTok is scheduled for this fall. 

The Texas deal was announced the same morning Meta settled with 47 other states, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories for up to $17.1 billion, ending a trial in Oakland that had barely reached its second week. The states alleged that Meta designed Instagram to be addictive and knowingly exposed young users to mental harm, collected data from children under 13, and misled the public about all of it. Naturally, Meta denies wrongdoing, but combined with the Texas payment, the total comes to roughly $18 billion, paid in annual installments over ten years.

Critics are already calling this the tech industry’s “Big Tobacco moment.” The comparison is fair as far as it goes; the 1998 tobacco settlement retired Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man and rewrote how an entire industry marketed to children. However, during the big tobacco reckoning, it cost the cigarette makers an estimated $206 billion over the first 25 years, with annual payments that continue in perpetuity.

Meta’s bill comes to roughly $18 billion. Less than a tenth of what tobacco paid. 

So while $18 billion is certainly not insignificant, it’s not nearly the financial gut punch Meta might want the public to think it is. Meta reported $15.85 billion in profit last quarter on $60.8 billion in revenue, which means the largest child-safety settlement in American history costs the company a little more than three months of earnings.

So what should Christian parents make of a settlement like this one?

Two ways we should respond

First, we can acknowledge that this is a step in the right direction. 

Texas families will benefit from real, enforceable changes, and the funding will support mental health and school programs our communities need. However, I would suggest that what is far more significant is that the settlement establishes in law something many of us have known in our living rooms and kids’ bedrooms for years: these platforms were intentionally built to hold our children’s attention captive to their own detriment, and they did so at a cost. 

Like the wealthy merchants of Amos, who “trample the needy” while manipulating commerce for their own gain, the sin is not merely that harm occurred; it is that people with power designed a system that enriched them by taking advantage of those (i.e., children) with less power. 

Second, we should have a realistic grasp of the current social media landscape. 

Meta already prohibits users under 13, yet children can easily bypass that rule by entering a false birthday. The new two-hour limit can be lifted with a parent’s approval, which means the safeguard is only as strong as the parent who receives the request. And the most far-reaching provisions depend on YouTube and TikTok adopting the same standards, which, as of this writing, they have not agreed to do.

Put differently: the state has built a fence, but our kids know where the gate is. More is needed, but we’re far better off looking to Scripture than the courts as our source of help.

The responsibility is still yours

It’s good to pause and recognize that while fences and guardrails are good and needed, Scripture did not assign the formation of children to a legislature or a corporation. In Scripture, parents are exhorted to teach God’s words to their children: “when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deuteronomy 6:7). 

This settlement is a welcome reminder to all parents and guardians that outsourcing our unique role in the growth, discipleship, and development of our children never works. We cannot outsource their safety to a technology company that wants to promote their safety while also profiting from it, any more than we can outsource their spiritual growth and development to teachers and local pastors. They can certainly aid and support, but the charge is ours. 

God is already at work and invites us to join him where he is working. This month, He appears to be at work in courtrooms in Oakland and Austin to help bring restorative justice to the vulnerable. But more importantly, he has been and continues to be at work in kitchens and car rides and bedtime conversations. 

Following this settlement, parents and guardians across the nation are invited to take time to intentionally sit down with their child. Talk with your teenager about why likes will disappear from their feed and what social comparison has been doing to their heart. And if the request comes to lift the two-hour limit, treat it as a conversation to have rather than a button to press.

Eighteen billion dollars is a serious sum, but it is also a fraction of one year’s revenue for a company that still needs and is actively seeking our children’s attention to make money. So, while the settlement changes the rules, only parents can change the household. The kids are still ours to shepherd, but thankfully, so is the grace to do it.

For more details on this story, the Culture Brief podcast did a deeper dive into Meta’s $17.1 billion settlement. Watch or listen to that conversation here.