The ink on the multi-billion dollar settlement agreement that Meta struck with 47 US states, the District of Columbia and a number of US territories has barely had time to dry – and already, officials and campaigners in the US, the EU, the UK, and at the UN are using it to press for similar rules to be imposed elsewhere.
In the UK, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said that Meta should apply the new rules in that country as well, while the government there has its own plans to ban social media for under-16s and impose nighttime curfews.
"We don't want a situation where young people in America have got a higher rate of protection than young people in the UK," he said.
The British plan is to ban social media for those under 16 by spring 2027, and impose nighttime curfews on older teenagers, the Independent is reporting. To enforce this, platforms will have to know whether a user is a child or an adult, stepping up the pressure on companies to introduce age checks.
In the EU, the Commission is also piling on the pressure on Meta to "export" the US deal.
"We expect adequate management of screen time, appropriate parental controls on these platforms," said digital spokesperson Thomas Regnier. "It is now up to the company to propose these commitments within the European Union in order to also protect our children here."
The official revealed that the Commission has already been in talks with Meta since the US agreement was announced, and that the goal is to give children in the EU "at least" the same protections as those in the US.
Meanwhile, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk is using the settlement to call for global protections for children from what he says is the harm caused by excessive social media use.
In the US, District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb, one of those behind the lawsuit that led to the settlement, said that Meta "will not be the last" company to be forced to agree to such terms.
His California counterpart, Rob Bonta, said that Meta is "not the only player in the industry" to have "visited enormous mental health harms on kids through their products and their designs," and added, "others rightfully must be held accountable."
The settlement contains financial incentives for states to bring similar cases against other companies. Snap, TikTok, and YouTube are mentioned by name in this context.
Not everyone is happy with the deal, however. Arturo Béjar, a former Meta employee who was a witness in the trial, said the protections are insufficient and that the product remains harmful.
"The limitations that are in the agreement are the equivalent of saying: 'Well, you can smoke as many cigarettes as you can in two hours a day,'" he said. "It doesn't make the cigarettes any safer."
Meta responded by saying that Béjar is ignoring some of the other provisions of the settlement, such as non-algorithmic feed defaults and stronger parental controls.
"We have a huge raft of built-in protections," a spokesperson said, and argued that teenagers also derive "substantial" benefits from using social media.
