I would love to think that Mark Zuckerberg saw the light. Meta, Zuckerberg’s massive tech company that owns Facebook and Instagram, agreed to a $17 billion settlement with 47 state attorneys general who had sued the company for deliberately addicting children to its products. In addition to the financial penalties, Meta agreed to implement features that would support youth mental health, such as a default daily time limit of two hours, alongside nighttime blocking features, for users under 18. These protections would end after five years. If industry peers TikTok and YouTube adopt identical measures, the protections would extend to 10 years.

Even Meta seems to realize that the settlement does not fully address the problem. A Meta official told reporters, “I think legislation would have been the best answer to this issue. It would be better to have this done by a legislature, which can immediately bind all of our competitors to the same rules.” The official added that “we didn’t get there this Congress” with the Kids Online Safety Act but that “this deal is designed to lead us to basically the same place.”