It’s being called a landmark settlement. Billions of dollars will flow to states. And the social media giant Meta will make dramatic changes to its Instagram and Facebook platforms as a result.
Meta on Wednesday agreed to pay as much as $17 billion to 51 states and territories to settle claims that the company’s products are addictive and harmful to children.
But what does this mean for schools? Will it affect their day-to-day operations and address some of their challenges educating America’s children? The short answer is yes.
There are many details in the settlement that Christopher Thomas, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Florida, Gainesville, expects educators will be excited about.
“The kind of changes that Meta agreed to make, [and] structured the settlement in such a way as to kind of put pressure on the other big social media companies to accept those changes as kind of an industry standard, I think those could have massive implications for schools,” he said.
In a statement, Meta said, “We want to get this right for parents and teens, and that’s why we partnered with state attorneys general to set a new industry standard.” It also called on rivals TikTok and YouTube to make similar changes to their products.
Here are four ways schools will likely see an impact from the settlement, according to technology and legal experts.
Fewer interruptions during the school day
As part of the settlement, Meta has agreed to disable push notifications for teen users during school hours, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday from Aug. 15 through June 15 each year.
Social media notifications have been a major source of distraction in classrooms, with one 2023 report finding students receive a median of 273 notifications daily. In addition to reducing in-class chirps and dings that draw students’ attention to their phones, these design changes to Instagram and Facebook could also help teachers and school and district leaders as they try to enforce student cellphone restrictions.
School teachers know, principals know, parents know, there's this arms race for your kids' attention, and there's also a lot of really harmful content, particularly for vulnerable kids. This is a really big win for schools in addition to being a big win for kids and families.
Meta will also disable push notifications for teen users overnight, from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. When students don’t get enough sleep, they struggle to focus and learn. Meta will extend its nighttime limitations to last from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. if other social media companies agree to similar restrictions for young users on their platforms.
Teachers also won’t be fighting such an uphill battle when it comes to teaching digital literacy if social media apps aren’t vying for kids’ attention quite so much, said Jim Steyer, the CEO of Common Sense Media, which has advocated for more regulation of social media companies and changes to their platforms.
“School teachers know, principals know, parents know, there’s this arms race for your kids’ attention, and there’s also a lot of really harmful content, particularly for vulnerable kids,” he said. “This is a really big win for schools in addition to being a big win for kids and families.”
Schools could get money from the settlement
The money that states receive from the settlement is intended to go toward initiatives largely of states’ choosing to help protect and restore kids’ mental health. According to the settlement, those may include youth mental health programming, digital literacy counselors, phone-free school zones, outdoor activities, after-school and summer programming, as well as grants to school districts or other local governments.
New York’s attorney general said in a statement that initiatives that could be eligible for money from the settlement are grants to implement phone-free classrooms and training for mental health professionals to serve students.
In Texas, the $1 billion the state is slated to receive as part of a similar but separate settlement reached with Meta this week will go in part to digital literacy initiatives, after-school programs, and grants to the state’s schools.
The payments in the multistate lawsuit will be distributed in annual installments over 10 years. Meta has agreed to pay states almost $12 billion in total. If other social media companies agree to make similar product changes and their own payments to states, Meta’s total payments will rise to almost $17 billion under the settlement.
Kids’ mental health stands to benefit
The argument states made in the lawsuit was that Meta has contributed to the state of poor mental health among youth by designing addictive social media products. (Meta denies these claims, and the settlement is not an admission of the company’s liability.)
As with gambling, it can be hard for users—especially young ones—to stop using social media, said Michael Parent, a principal researcher at Hopelab, a nonprofit focused on young people’s mental health and well-being.
“Social media platforms are designed with what are called compulsion loops that are made to keep users engaged,” he said. “To the extent that those platforms have employed those strategies, then that certainly can promote the overuse of social media, particularly among young people who may have less impulse control or self-regulatory strategies.”
(Education Week receives support from Hopelab for coverage on building connections and overcoming polarization. EdWeek retains sole editorial control over its articles.)
As part of the settlement, Meta is limiting “social comparison” features for young users such as “likes” on content and beauty filters. It’s placing a hard, two-hour daily time limit on teen accounts and will prompt teens to take a pause after 15 minutes of continuous use as well as at 60 and 90 minutes of cumulative daily use. Teens will be able to turn off autoplay for videos and features that personalize their feeds based on their use.
Meta’s apps will also be blocked by default for teens at night, meaning kids won’t be able to post to or view their Feed, Stories, Explore, or Reels, the company said in a statement. Poor sleep can also contribute to poor mental health.
Many of these safeguards will be switched on by default for teens but can be disabled by a parent. If they work as intended, they could help improve kids’ mental health and sleep, which would help kids show up ready to learn at school, Parent said.
“We found [in our surveys] that kids were losing hours and hours of sleep every week to doom-scrolling at night,” he said. “Things that can help people exit from those compulsion loops while doing that would be good.”
Meta is also strengthening parental controls and making them easier to use.
However, it remains to be seen whether these features will work as intended.
Sometimes people respond to design restrictions in counterintuitive ways, said Jackie Silverman, an associate professor of marketing at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. She studies behavioral tracking and consumer motivation.
Research has found that limiting push notifications does reduce people’s social media use, she said. But her own research on screen time limits has found those maximums can actually increase how long people spend on a screen.
“If time limits are really high, say two hours a day, and you were originally only spending one hour a day on average, now suddenly that hour a day browsing TikTok doesn’t seem so bad,” she said. “It can lead people to spend even more time up to the limit amount.”
That’s why it will be important to follow up with research on whether Meta’s design changes achieve their intended results, Silverman said.
Success also depends on other social media companies adopting similar measures, Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said in a statement.
“Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution,” he said. “As a parent, I’m proud of both the work Meta has done to protect kids historically, and of this new groundbreaking agreement. But its success depends on all other social media platforms following Meta’s lead.”
The settlement could affect school district-led lawsuits against social media companies
This settlement doesn’t resolve lawsuits brought separately by school districts and individuals that have made the same argument that Meta and other social media companies have designed addictive products that harm kids’ mental health.
In those cases, school districts argue that social media companies constitute a public nuisance.
It’s hard to know if this settlement means Meta and other social media companies might be more willing to settle the lawsuits brought by school districts and individuals, said Thomas, of the University of Florida. But this could be a signal that social media companies want to put these lawsuits, which come with high financial and reputational costs, behind them, he said.
“The fact that Meta was willing to settle, that just shows how worried [they are] or how seriously they’re taking this,” Thomas said.
In some ways, school districts are already getting what they want in terms of design restrictions that will help improve teens mental health and learning, he said.
“This settlement, with all these different states, accomplishes a lot of what the schools were trying to do in their litigation,” Thomas said.
