After years of studies about teen mental health, screen addiction, and data privacy, social media regulation for kids is actually underway. At the end of August, Meta agreed to pay up to US$18 billion to settle claims the company designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to children and misled the public about it. "Meta intentionally exploited kids for profit and then lied about it," D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb said in a statement. The settlement also requires Meta to introduce more safeguards for teens using the apps, including two-hour daily time limits, restricted access overnight, better age verification measures, and limits on 'like' counts and other features designed to make users compare themselves to others. However, the full US$18 billion will only be paid out if Meta competitors TikTok and YouTube adopt similar measures.
Even if this is a reckoning for Meta (and that's debatable), it comes about 15 years late – and it targets problems that are practically old news at this point, while Meta and other tech giants hype up the future of AI.
For now, Meta is only required to implement these changes in the US, but in Canada, Bill C-34 has been on the table since June, proposing restricted social media access for children unless platforms can meet certain safety requirements. In Australia, social media has been banned for users under 16 since the end of 2025.
Social media is undoubtedly getting worse, but its core issues – privacy, screen addiction, lax age restriction enforcement – have been problems since Facebook first launched in 2006. We've read countless headlines and studies coming out about social media’s dangers for at least a decade, if not longer. Personally, I was just 11 when I first downloaded Instagram in 2014; I’m pretty sure I was supposed to be at least 13, but no one checked or cared. And I remember my fellow Grade 6 students gleefully dubbing the app “Insta-scam,” because nobody knew what it was doing with our data. (This did nothing to stop us from posting incessantly.)
All this to say, we’ve known about these problems for a lot longer than we’ve been trying to regulate them. The world of tech wants to move fast and break things, but enacting regulations around it tends to be painfully slow and bureaucratic. In 2021, the Trudeau government introduced Bill C-36, which was meant to regulate hate speech and had significant implications for digital spaces, but the bill died when parliament was dissolved for the federal election. Then Bill C-63 (an explicit attempt at legislating around online harms) was introduced in 2024, but this, too, died when parliament was prorogued in early 2025. In the US, the federal government hasn’t attempted much in the way of regulation, but states have sought to fill the gap through the judicial system. This also takes time: The Meta lawsuit that was settled last month, for instance, was first filed back in 2023.
Better late than never, of course, but Meta's big settlement doesn’t mean that governments are done playing catch up with Big Tech. Social media captured our collective attention in the 2010s, but it’s no longer the most defining – or the most dangerous – technology of the day. Since generative AI became widely available in 2022, it's reshaped everything from how we work to how we communicate to how we think. Kids and teens are especially vulnerable to it, as evidenced by the growing (and disturbing) problem of AI-generated child sexual abuse material, teens whose suicides have been linked to their AI use, not to mention the worrying impacts of AI on education and child development. But any regulation on children' s AI usage is still almost nonexistent (though some school districts, such as New York City’s, have announced one-year AI moratoriums in elementary and middle schools).
When it comes to social media, Canada's continued attempts at legislation and Meta's recent US settlement are certainly steps in the right direction, but they hardly touch AI. And if you're wondering if Zuckerberg's learned anything from these lawsuits, he published a lengthy AI manifesto last month and has been proudly touting the Meta AI glasses. Like so many other major tech companies, Meta dreams of dominating the AI industry, which remains a vast, mostly unregulated landscape, where the company can move even faster and break even more things.
Maybe Canada will get around to passing some effective legislation around AI and children in 15 or 20 years. In the meantime, an entire generation of children will serve as guinea pigs, learning the dangers of AI by experiencing them firsthand – just like my generation had to do with social media.
