Online Harms Should Not Be Reframed as User Choices |
The Big Tobacco Playbook
Big Tobacco spent decades funding research to muddy the cancer link, marketing “low-tar” brands as safer, and insisting that smoking was a matter of personal choice, until lawsuits and internal documents showed the industry had known about the harm all along. As CIGI’s Aaron Shull has argued, this year’s verdicts against Meta and YouTube over addictive platform design mark Silicon Valley’s own “Big Tobacco moment”: the end of plausible deniability about designed harm.
In August 2026, the California federal trial against Meta culminated into a settlement, with Meta agreeing to pay up to $18 billion and enact changes to Instagram and Facebook. However, a close examination of the proposed platform changes reveals that Meta’s solution to online harms is to shift platform responsibilities onto users.
That shift matters well beyond California. Canada is drafting its own answer in Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, and the gap between what Meta’s settlement promises and what it delivers should inform it.
The lawsuit alleged that Meta had designed addictive platforms that they knew were harmful to teenagers. In the settlement, Meta does not admit any liability or wrongdoing. Instead, the proposed platform changes are described by Meta as “building on our longstanding efforts to empower parents and support teens.” Applicable to people under the age of eighteen in participating US states and territories, Meta plans to make changes that influence how long teenagers spend on the platform, when they can access it, and what the platform looks like.
For instance, Meta will set a two-hour daily time limit that applies cumulatively across Facebook and Instagram. Both the apps will be blocked between midnight and 6 am, and notifications will be muted during school hours. Each of these limits will be set by default, but it is possible to turn them off with parental permission. Additionally, they will not be able to see the number of likes and reactions on posts.
Two changes will not be applied by default. First, teenagers can choose whether their feed is determined by Meta’s algorithm and will be regularly reminded that they can choose a non-algorithmic feed. Second, they can turn off autoplay, in which case they would have to take an intentional action, like a swipe or a tap, to see more content. Here, too, parents can decide the settings for their children. There is one change, though, that parents cannot disable: Meta will be blocking teenagers from using extreme makeup filters.
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