COLUMN | Meta's New Social Media Rules Should Have Started With Teens

Editors' Note: Sarah and Kimberly are pseudonyms for two students interviewed for this column. The Emerald is withholding their names to protect their privacy.

Sarah has the same routine every school night. After dinner, she goes up to her room, takes a breath, and thinks: The day is over; I can be on my phone now.

From that point, she's on her phone between everything she does. She showers, then checks the phone to see what happened in the 10 minutes she was gone. She brushes her teeth while watching a video. She texts a friend on Snapchat, and while waiting for a reply, flips to TikTok, then back again. Her homework sits there, unfinished.

"When I'm tired, the only thing that I have enough energy to do is scroll," she said.

She puts the phone down around 11:30 p.m. or midnight. The screen being the last thing she sees before sleep.

Sarah is a junior at Seattle Prep, where she takes a class on artificial intelligence. She can explain how a recommendation algorithm works. She gets notices from the app telling her when she's been scrolling a long time. None of it has changed her nightly phone habits.

"It's hard to break it on your own," she said. "You can't really do it yourself."

This August, Meta agreed to a court-approved settlement worth up to $18 billion over allegations that Instagram and Facebook harmed young users. For years, concerns have mounted that social media platforms engineered addictive features such as infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendation feeds, and incessant push notifications. According to the lawsuit, these features exploited vulnerabilities of young people and contributed to rising youth anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia.

As a result, within the next year teen accounts will have a default two-hour daily limit across Instagram and Facebook, a blackout from midnight to 6 a.m., silenced notifications during school hours, hidden "like" counts, stronger filters on content involving self-harm and eating disorders, and a revamped age verification process instead of a self-reported birthday.

This is the most aggressive attempt in history to change what happens on a teenager's phone.

Yet, there was one glaring omission: No teenager was in the room.

Sarah's class spent a week reading through the settlement this fall. Asked what she would have told the attorneys general if one of them had called her first, her reply was simple and direct:

"That it's not gonna work."

In 2025, Sarah was flying home from a softball tournament in California. She wanted to repost photos a teammate had taken on the trip. Instagram wouldn't let her. Her account was registered to someone under 18, which she was, and reposting required a public account, which required being older.

So she changed her age to her early 20s. Then Instagram asked her to verify it with a face scan.

Her coach, early 20s, was sitting in the row behind her and didn't mind. So Sarah scanned her coach's face.

"And just like that, as far as Instagram knew, I was in my 20s," she said.

Sarah's classmate Kimberly, a sophomore, had heard about the story and was not surprised.

"There's a million ways that any kid who really wants to be on Instagram could get around that," Kimberly said.

Jason Yip, a researcher and professor at the University of Washington's Information School, agrees. Yip, who also directs KidsTeam UW, a lab that designs technology together with children rather than for them, says kids are too crafty for tech bans.

"Youth are incredibly smart and cunning," he said. "They will figure out every way to break through any limits you put on them. I don't think any ban by itself will change behavior."

Australia is the most recent test case. It barred social media accounts for youth under 16 in December 2025. Three months in, the country's internet regulator found that more than 81% of children were still using age-restricted social media platforms, a modest decline from nearly 86% before the ban. Daily use also went down, but again, by only a modest amount. And about half the kids who kept their accounts said the platforms had never even checked their age at all.

Adults continue to litigate and alter rules for teens without efforts to consult youth. This perpetuates a cat-and-mouse game with new restrictions and teens finding backdoors.

"Teens should totally have a seat at the table," Sarah said. Adults may have built these systems, "but we're the ones with the user experience," she notes.

Yip said he is not aware of any large-scale effort that has been designed with young people rather than about them. When teens are asked, he said, they tend to produce good limitations on social media use. The real problem is what those limits cost.

"They come at the cost of capitalism," he said, "meaning less money is generated when you put in good and healthy restrictions."

Sarah said if every app on her phone vanished tomorrow she would be distraught, because that is where her friendships live. But what if the loss was universal?

"If everybody stopped having social media, it would be completely fine, because we would find other ways to communicate," said Sarah.

What she's describing is a collective action problem, not a willpower problem. Which is why many teens prefer the more universal restrictions that come out of this settlement, like the overnight curfew.

"Everybody's like, 'Okay, this is the set time where it goes off, and we can't do anything about it,'" Sarah said. "People might be disappointed, but then, yet again, it's a universal disappointment."

Kimberly agreed, and extended the logic to the school-hours notification blackout. "It's better that they do apply to everyone," she said.

Sarah identified a key flaw the settlement's authors built into the new agreement: The two-hour daily cap can be switched off by a parent.

"What we need to think about is the parents that don't care about their kid's screen time," she said. For those kids it becomes: Mom, can you turn my phone back on?

It also opens the door for clever youth to switch off the cap themselves.

Putting this rule in place with an off switch makes it less of a rule. And expecting parents to enforce it raises another question: What guidance will they receive?

In fact, none of the settlement money is promised to Washington classrooms or designated for parent information nights. The settlement directs Washington's share, $237 million guaranteed and up to nearly $339 million over 10 years, to the Attorney General's Office, which will spend part of it on enforcement and legal costs, and part on programs addressing "the mental health impacts of youth social media use." How these programs will work, who will have access, and what they will cover remain open questions.

Perhaps there is still time to propose solutions to the AG's office, and for these upcoming programs to be codesigned by teens.

There are a few things that parents can do right now: Look at your own screen time as well as your kid's. Start a conversation. Ask them how they feel about the amount of time they spend on the phone and if they believe it's healthy.

That is the move the attorneys general skipped: understanding the user before you write the rule.

Reflecting on the new rules and the idea of universal changes to social media access for teens, Sarah is optimistic.

"People will adapt," she said. "We've always adapted to changes."

An 11th grader has already offered to give up her beloved nightly phone routine. The only condition is that everyone is in it together.

Di Zhang is a teacher and librarian in South King County. Passionate about promoting digital citizenship and information literacy in all forms, Di has taught these skills to media organizations, educators and students, librarians, and the general public. He lives in Federal Way with his wife, daughter, and son.