Meta Owes the Rest of the World Its Teen Protections

Nighat Dad is the founder and executive director of the Digital Rights Foundation and a member of the Oversight Board. She writes here in her personal capacity.

Announcing its settlement with state attorneys general in the United States this week, Meta said that ensuring "teens have a safe and productive experience on our platforms" is an absolute imperative for the company. Its chief legal officer added that the framework only works if the whole industry joins.

Both statements are correct, and I want to take them seriously. Meta is closer to the right answer here than its critics allow, and one decision away from something far more valuable than the deal it signed.

Look at what the company has agreed to. Subject to judicial approval, a default two-hour daily limit for teens across Facebook and Instagram, counted cumulatively. A midnight-to-6 a.m. block. Notifications muted during school hours. Like counts hidden by default. The option of a feed that is not shaped by Meta’s recommendation systems.

The details matter. The two-hour limit and nighttime block for teens are initially commitments for five years; if TikTok and YouTube adopt specified measures, they become stronger and extend to ten years. And direct messaging is excluded from the nighttime, time-limit and school-hour restrictions.

But whatever else the settlement settles, it ends one long argument about feasibility. Those of us who work on these harms outside the US have spent years being told that defaults like these would break the product, that the answer lay in parental supervision and digital literacy, that regulators misunderstood the engineering. Meta has now demonstrated that substantial changes to the product are possible. Which makes the limits of this agreement harder to ignore.

The deal applies to under-18s in the participating US states and territories. It does not require Meta to extend the same protections to teenagers elsewhere. Meta itself says it has put hundreds of millions of teenagers into Teen Accounts across Instagram, Facebook and Messenger.

There are roughly 22 million people aged 13 to 17 in the United States, according to US Census Bureau population estimates. That is the size of the US population in this age group, not the number of Meta users, so it cannot by itself tell us how many teenagers the settlement reaches. But it does underline the scale of the disparity that the protections negotiated by US states apply to a relatively small part of the global population of teenagers Meta says it serves.

In the years since the Digital Rights Foundation opened Pakistan's first cyber harassment helpline, the calls that have frightened me most have come from teenage girls. An edited image moving through a school WhatsApp group. A stranger who spent three patient weeks before asking for photographs. A blackmail thread that ends with a girl pulled out of school, or worse. Colleagues running helplines across South Asia, West Africa and Latin America describe the same calls in different languages.

I have spent fifteen years arguing with platforms about what they owe users in countries like Pakistan, and I have seen this company do difficult things once it accepted that it was right.

A global commitment is the fastest route to the industry standard Meta says it wants. Meta's argument to TikTok and YouTube is that teenagers move fluidly between apps, so protections on one platform achieve little on their own. True. But these companies are growing in Jakarta, Lagos, São Paulo, Dhaka and Karachi, not Ohio. A standard limited to the US asks them to change where they have the least to lose. A global standard puts pressure where their businesses are growing and lets Meta set the rules instead of simply following one US agreement.

It is the only credible alternative to prohibition. Australia's under-16 social-media restrictions took effect in December 2025. Three months later, more than eight in ten Australian teenagers under 16 were still using social media, according to Australia's eSafety Commissioner, even though account ownership had fallen. The finding does not prove that the policy has failed in every respect, but it does show how difficult prohibition is to enforce when age assurance is imperfect.

And prohibition is spreading. New Zealand's government introduced a proposal this week to ban under-16s from social media. Indonesia began implementing restrictions on under-16 accounts on designated high-risk platforms in March 2026. Other countries are debating or developing age restrictions of their own.

Governments are reaching for prohibition in part because they have not seen platforms make sufficiently consequential changes to the products themselves. With the US settlement, Meta has just demonstrated that design can change. A company that can make that argument credibly, globally, is harder to ban than one that cannot.

And it is cheaper than the alternative. The choice is between one coherent global default and a growing patchwork of national regimes, each with its own age-verification mandate, each tied to a government identity system, in countries where the state is not a neutral party and citizens are surveilled.

So, three things Meta could say this month, at little cost. That the same defaults will reach every teenager on its platforms, on the same timetable. That the auditor's findings will be published and broken down by country. And that a share of this money will follow the harm, into language coverage and the frontline services doing this work on a rounding error of these budgets.

The settlement Meta signed protects teenagers in participating US states. The exclusion of everywhere else is a choice. Meta can make a different one.