Meta Apparently Seeks to Spread Settlement Pain to Its Competitors—With Snapchat Conspicuously Absent

Meta is reportedly about to pressure its competitors hard to join it in limiting its platform’s functionality for young people. The New York Times’ Mike Isaac says tomorrow in multiple major U.S. newspapers, Meta will publish what it calls “An open letter to TikTok and YouTube to join us in supporting teens.” On Wednesday, after the ordeal of a high-profile trial that went on for over a week, Meta arrived at a $12.1 billion settlement that also comes with potentially costly changes to its apps. The changes are obviously the more painful concessions—so painful that Meta is evidently eager to take steps to spread the pain to other companies, even though, in a fascinating and creative legal flourish, spreading the pain could result in Meta forking over more money, not less. But intriguingly, the proposed settlement says that if a triumvirate of competitors joins Meta in restricting teens, the monetary part of the settlement would be increased. Perhaps for that reason, Meta doesn’t mention one part of that triumvirate: Snap. The Snapchat parent company’s non-participation in the teen protection effort would potentially save Meta billions. Gizmodo reached out to Meta for comment on this aspect of the settlement, and its exclusion of Snap in its outreach to competitors. We did not hear back. The most dramatic change in the settlement, if it moves forward, would be a two-hour daily usage limit for teens on Meta’s apps Instagram and Facebook, along with alerts for every 15 minutes of use, and an overnight block aimed at preventing youngsters from losing sleep due to their social media fixations. Other changes include new parental controls, and a limit on push notifications intended to prevent teens from being disrupted during school. This all stems from a case alleging that Meta’s platforms are knowingly designed to addict minors, and that the apps surveil young people illegally. It was brought to trial by the state attorneys general of California, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Colorado. The structure of the settlement proposal compensates Meta somewhat because the three “Core Industry Members”—a term defined as “Snap, TikTok, and YouTube, for so long as the product or service is available to US Teen Users”—aren’t currently on the hook for anything. But by my reading of the legal filing, Meta’s settlement would rise from about $12.1 billion to about $17.1 billion in certain circumstances, one of which is that they all handcuff their apps in the same manner as Meta. That being the case, the specifics of Meta’s request that these changes be adopted more widely becomes all the more fascinating. A video already online as of Wednesday evening features Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney saying: Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution. We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away. Mahoney adds that “success depends on all other social media platforms following Meta’s lead.” The term “all other social media platforms” implies Snapchat, I suppose, but it also implies, for instance, Mastodon, and it’s doubtful that many teens are staying up at night using that one. So Snap is evidently not a “peer” even though it has been the subject of similar teen addiction lawsuits, including one earlier this week. But unbridled teen use of Snapchat may simply not be a threat to Meta. According to usage data compiled by Statista, last year Facebook and Instagram each had at least 3 billion monthly active users globally, while Snapchat had less than one billion. YouTube had 2.6 billion, and TikTok had about 2 billion. The settlement may call them all “Core Industry Members,” but it appears Meta considers YouTube and TikTok the real competition.