Corralling Facebook
Experts say the settlement is a crucial turning point that dramatically puts ‘controls on a powerful tech company,’ and how its largely unregulated social media platforms here, Facebook and Instagram, operate.
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Experts say the settlement is a crucial turning point that dramatically puts ‘controls on a powerful tech company,’ and how its largely unregulated social media platforms here, Facebook and Instagram, operate.
Regulatory officials, policymakers and lawmakers better get up to speed on Facebook’s recent huge legal setback if they’re serious about bringing Facebook and other media giants to heel.
If they don’t, not only are they missing a watershed moment, but they’ll just be blathering idiots continually bewailing the fatal pox social media has twistedly brought to bear on innocent kids and the rest of us.
Facebook’s legal setback is about Meta’s, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, recent settlement of a lawsuit brought by 29 US states that accused the company of designing addictive products that harmed young people.
Meta agreed to pay $18 billion and to drastically overhaul key features of its platforms in the US to protect teenagers.
Was Facebook corralled? Financial experts say that while Meta is paying huge damages the settlement won’t markedly threaten its business.
Nevertheless, experts say the settlement is a crucial turning point that dramatically puts “controls on a powerful tech company,” and how its largely unregulated social media platforms here, Facebook and Instagram, operate.
In fact, Meta agreeing to put in new guardrails on American teenagers’ use of its apps could fundamentally change the social media experience of young Americans as well as reshape how other social media giants like YouTube and TikTok operate in the US in the coming years.
Generally, the four biggest changes which Meta agreed to are: American teenagers can’t change default safety settings without their parents’ permission; placing time limits on app usage by teenagers, including imposed “night mode” and “school mode;” the disabling of “like” counts and “cosmetic” filters; and the installation of more stringent identification and facial recognition verification systems.
Still, even if the changes look powerful enough to alter American teens’ behavior and perhaps curb social media’s worst ills, it may not actually do anything given the fact that teenagers are now so tech savvy they can skirt around any imposed restrictions.
Nonetheless, as we can quickly see, the guardrails readily give interested, though struggling, Filipino regulators useful baselines on measures to take that will likely shift their current approaches to protecting Filipino kids.
As one American expert told a tech news site: “If I were a regulator sitting in Brasilia, Brussels, or Canberra, I would see this as a huge opportunity,” the measures regulators have spent years trying to secure from Meta are now likely occupying “a meaningful share of Mark Zuckerberg’s headspace.”
Similarly, the Meta settlement arrives at a heady time when Filipino lawmakers are seriously studying how far to go — beyond their usual empty rhetoric — in legislating meaningful restrictions on children’s access to social media and online gaming.
In fact, if Filipino lawmakers are to hold hearings on an online safety bill for children, they should start by having Facebook executives testify on Meta’s recent US settlement. And, in the course of the hearings, they should demand the same concessions that Meta agreed to in the US.
Our lawmakers should have an easy time getting those concessions, too since the US settlement, as Amnesty International put it, demonstrated “that social media platforms can change the design choices that drive harm to children when they are held accountable.”
And, with the legislators focusing on making the platforms fix themselves first, they avoid unnecessarily penalizing innocent Filipino children for gainfully using modern digital technologies.
“Rather than excluding the young people from online spaces, policymakers should ensure the platforms are safe by design,” said Amnesty International.
