Social-media giant Meta has agreed to pay up to US$18 billion to US states and make changes to its Facebook and Instagram platforms, settling a legal case about whether its technology harms kids’ mental health. But how effective will these changes be in protecting children and teenagers?

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The 26 August settlement, which is legally binding only in the United States, is the latest in a series of global efforts to protect kids from harmful social-media use. In the coming months, US Facebook and Instagram users under 18 years old will see a flurry of new restrictions on their accounts, including a two-hour daily time limit and a block on using the platforms between midnight and 6 a.m. Some of the restrictions will require the permission of a parent or guardian to be switched off.

Research is divided on whether social media harms teenagers’ mental health, and whether changes such as the ones announced by Meta can even be enforced. Australia banned social-media use by children under 16 in December last year. But three months afterwards, a survey of almost 900 parents by the country’s Internet safety regulator found that nearly seven in ten reported that their child still had accounts on a top social-media platform.

Kathryn Modecki is a psychologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth who is leading a study on Australia’s social-media ban. Xiaoran Sun is a psychologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis who investigates how teenagers and parents use social media. Nature spoke to both to understand the likely outcomes of Meta’s settlement.

What do you think about the settlement and proposed changes?

Sun: There is definitely more to be done, and I don’t think we should be satisfied with this case, but this is a big step that I’m happy to see.

Modecki: My concern is that people will think, ‘Oh yeah, now young people are safe.’ A lot of experts would disagree. It’s important to acknowledge the efforts that went into making this decision — the substantial progress being made.

But the pessimistic side of me knows that Meta, in this case, is defining the game. It’s defining what harm is. And it’s choosing, selectively, how it is going to engage with this issue. If you take a step back and ask, ‘What if our goal was truly to make social media safer for everyone, including kids who might have caretakers with less digital literacy, or who aren’t able to be deeply involved?’, we would be coming at this in a different manner. I get asked a lot whether the Australian ban is working, and I always say, what if we instead ask, ‘How do we make social media better for all of us, kids included?’

Will restrictions on screen time help children’s mental health?

Modecki: In the research these days, screen time is not usually what we’re focused on. If I were looking to ensure safety, I would not be doing these cosmetic-level changes. I would be going to the ‘engine’ underneath [the algorithms that determine what content kids see]. All of these adjustments Meta has agreed to have been about engagement, not safety, and none of that’s really being dealt with. [Meta has agreed to allow under-18s to switch off the algorithms targeting them with content, but the default setting will have the algorithms switched on.]

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The option should not be to opt out — it should be to opt in. If I was really concerned about harm, I would never make opting out the default.

Sun: My colleagues and I published a study in the journal JAMA Pediatrics¹ in which we collected data from teenagers’ smartphones to look at not just the total time spent on social media, but also on individual apps. We found that Instagram was the most-used social-media platform by median time — kids used it only about 13 minutes per day. And the median daily social-media use across all platforms was about 80 minutes. That makes me question the two-hour allowance that Meta is proposing.

I do think that limiting access to apps, especially at night, is a step in the right direction, because our data shows that social media is detracting from teens’ sleep. When their sleep is deprived, it can lead to worse mental-health outcomes and academic performance.