Too little, too late?

Conservatives often like to extol the virtues of the self-regulating market. Too often, however, some market actors only seem willing to go to the trouble of regulating themselves when they are scared stiff of outside regulation. Meta’s recent announcement of “Teen Accounts” for its Instagram platform seems like a case in point. The new suite of features has been advertised as a way to put parents back in the driver’s seat of their children’s online lives and protect teenagers from Instagram’s widely documented harm.

The timing of the announcement, however, is striking. Earlier this year, Jonathan Haidt published his bestseller The Anxious Generation, which singles out Instagram for its outsized role in the tsunami of depression, gender dysphoria, and even suicides among teenage girls. In the months before and since, lawmakers in dozens of states have been emboldened to finally take action against Big Tech, passing laws that would require social media platforms to verify the age of their users and keep smartphones out of public schools. Even our slow-moving Congress got in on the act, with the Senate passing the Kids Online Safety Act in late July and the House currently debating the bill. And most recently, a federal appeals court ruled that social media platforms can be held liable for encouraging their users to harm themselves.

Meta has consistently opposed all such measures to date, arguing in numerous lawsuits that it has a First Amendment right to the speech of the minors whom it lures onto its platforms. Now, they seem to have adopted the motto, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

Of course, on closer inspection, the supposedly “sweeping changes” on Instagram are underwhelming, to say the least. Key modifications include making under-18 accounts private by default, turning off notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., and allowing parents to see more of what their children are doing on the platform (though still not the content of their messages). Such features and more should have been standard on Instagram from its inception, but one of the wealthiest and most innovative technology companies on the globe somehow took 12 years to roll them out. Throughout the 2010s, the driving imperative at the company was to hook as many teen users as possible to its product to profit from their addiction. Today, Meta hopes to self-police just enough to keep regulators and lawyers off its back.

Worst of all, while the new features apply by default to all accounts where users have indicated that they are under the age of 18, there is still nothing to stop kids from lying about their birth date when they sign up, which makes nonsense of Meta’s claim to be putting parents back in the drivers’ seat. Moreover, most of the changes seem geared toward addressing only the most egregious of the abundant harmful activity on Instagram: allowing sexual predators unlimited access to browse photos of minors in suggestive poses and then message them, often posing as a peer. It’s good that Meta is finally taking steps to combat this, but the “Teen Accounts” settings do nothing to address the most pervasive harm to teens on the platform: weaponizing their desire for social affirmation against them and encouraging teenage girls to engage in a hypersexualized race to see who can get the most likes and followers.

An analogy may put things in perspective. If a drug dealer had spent a decade handing out packets of crack cocaine laced with dangerous levels of mercury to your kids and then promised that from now on he’d be reducing the mercury content and packaging the drug in a child-safe container, you would probably be unimpressed. Indeed, far from empowering parents, there is a good chance that Meta’s half-measures on Instagram will just intensify the conflict between teens already addicted to the platform and parents trying to supervise them.

That said, while we should certainly be cynical about Meta’s recent announcement, there is reason to be encouraged. Regulation is not an end in itself and can be bureaucratic and cumbersome. Indeed, it can simply provide a system for market actors to game to their advantage. Our goal should be a society in which individuals and corporations alike can govern and regulate themselves. The motion picture ratings system, for instance, which still does a decent job of keeping younger viewers out of age-inappropriate films, is the product of the Motion Picture Association of America’s self-regulation. Other forms of self-regulation, like those of the tobacco industry, have been part of lawsuit settlements. If the threat of legal action and new regulation is driving platforms like Meta to seriously reconsider their business models, that is something to be affirmed, and we should applaud each baby step but do so without backing off on the pressure for more lasting change.