Meta is mounting a vigorous defence of its youth protection efforts in a federal courtroom in California, where four states are pressing the social media behemoth for billions of dollars in damages and demanding fundamental overhauls to how the company operates Instagram and Facebook. The case centres on allegations that Meta deliberately engineers addictive features into its platforms, contributing to a deepening mental health crisis among young people. Company lawyer Paul Schmidt told the court this week that Meta takes children's wellbeing seriously and has invested substantially in safety initiatives, yet the assertion faces mounting scepticism from child welfare advocates, former employees, and academic researchers who contend the company's record reveals more window-dressing than genuine reform.
The heart of the dispute reflects a tension at the core of Meta's business model. Marc Berkman, who directs the Organization for Social Media Safety, argues that the company introduced many of its safety features not from authentic concern but in response to public and regulatory pressure. Berkman's assessment cuts deeper than mere criticism of specific tools—he characterises Meta's approach as reflecting a "lack of real institutional willingness to act," suggesting the company prioritises its revenue objectives over authentic youth protection. This framing is crucial for understanding why advocates remain sceptical even when Meta points to a catalogue of new features and controls. The company has indeed added numerous safety mechanisms over the past decade, beginning with basic tools like the ability to block users and report inappropriate content, then progressing through comment filters, warnings about harmful posts, and restrictions on who can contact teenagers privately.
In 2016, Instagram introduced the capacity for users to delete or filter offensive comments, and subsequently added features designed to make users pause before posting potentially damaging content, along with controls limiting who could comment on or tag their posts. More recently, Meta implemented age verification checks to prevent children under thirteen—the official minimum age for Facebook and Instagram accounts—from accessing these platforms, though Schmidt acknowledged that some users circumvent these protections by providing false birthdate information. The company has also positioned suicide prevention resources prominently in search results and launched "Teen Accounts" in 2024, which restrict content to roughly the equivalent of a PG-13 movie rating unless parents grant permission otherwise. These measures represent real technical development, yet they have become lightning rods for scepticism.
A September 2025 report from Arturo Béjar, a former Meta employee who became a whistleblower, alongside four online safety nonprofit organisations, delivered a damning assessment that reframes the safety narrative. The researchers evaluated 47 of Meta's 53 claimed safety features for teenage Instagram users and discovered that sixty percent of them either were unavailable or functioned differently from their advertised purpose. Haley Hinkle, policy counsel at Fairplay, one of the report's co-authors, characterised what Meta markets as cutting-edge teen protections as "very lacking in actual protections." Meta dismissed the report's methodology as "misleading" and "dangerously speculative," yet the detailed audit raises serious questions about whether the company's public commitments translate into operational reality. The disconnect between marketing messaging and actual functionality suggests a pattern in which Meta announces protections to generate favourable headlines without ensuring they deliver meaningful safeguards.
Beyond content moderation and harassment prevention, a more fundamental concern troubles academic researchers—Meta's use of deliberately addictive design patterns that exploit the developing adolescent brain. Ashley Shea, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University whose research focuses on social media and online spaces, identifies what scholars term "attention-capture deceptive designs," features common across the entire social media landscape but particularly potent on Meta's platforms. Infinite scrolling, the "casino-style" refresh mechanic where users pull downward to load new content, algorithmic recommendations that personalise feeds to maximise engagement, and push notifications all operate on the same principle: they target the neurological reward systems of young people whose brains are still developing, particularly their vulnerability to variable rewards and social validation. While Shea credits Meta with genuine efforts to combat cyberbullying, sexual predators, and harmful content, she notes an asymmetry in the company's approach—it has invested far less rigorously in counteracting the addictive structural features that keep teenagers scrolling late into the night.
Meta's response to these concerns emphasises time management tools, including parental supervision options and in-app notifications that prompt teenagers spending excessive time on the platforms to take breaks. Schmidt framed these features as evidence of the company's responsiveness to concerns about teen engagement. However, Hinkle countered that these tools are entirely voluntary, difficult to activate initially, and constitute "far too little too late." Béjar went further in testimony, characterising a feature called "Take a Break" as "designed to fail" because it requires users to manually enable it themselves—a structural choice that virtually guarantees minimal adoption among teenagers, who would naturally prefer to continue using the platform rather than restrict their own access. The difference between a feature that truly constrains engagement and one that merely offers users the option to constrain themselves reveals the gap between Meta's framing and protective function.
The legal strategy being pursued by the four states introduces a novel framework that could reshape how technology companies face accountability. Rather than focusing exclusively on objectionable content—the traditional battleground—the litigation emphasises that Meta's platforms are "defective products by design," meaning the underlying structural architecture itself constitutes the harm. This shift is significant because it moves beyond arguing that Meta failed to remove a problematic post or inadequately screened users, instead targeting the business model that treats maximising user engagement as the primary objective regardless of consequences for young brains. Berkman underscores this reality bluntly: tech companies across the industry exist fundamentally to maximise revenue, and for social media platforms, that translates directly into extending the time teenagers spend scrolling. The distinction matters profoundly because it suggests that no amount of incremental tool-building can resolve the tension between Meta's profit incentives and genuine youth protection.
Lawmakers internationally, including policymakers in Southeast Asia who increasingly scrutinise Big Tech's impact on their young populations, are watching these proceedings closely. Malaysian regulators, alongside their counterparts across the region, have begun examining whether existing consumer protection and child welfare frameworks adequately address the addictive design patterns that social media platforms employ. The outcome of the California litigation could establish precedents that ripple across jurisdictions, particularly if courts determine that designing features specifically to maximise engagement among young users constitutes deceptive trade practice or product liability. For Malaysian policymakers and regional governments increasingly concerned about youth mental health and the time young people spend on social platforms, this case offers both cautionary lessons about the limits of industry self-regulation and potential templates for more assertive regulatory intervention.
Shea emphasises that the mounting legal and reputational pressure on Meta and its competitors continues to accumulate, and for-profit companies fundamentally respond to economic incentives rather than moral suasion. As litigation multiplies and the financial stakes for noncompliance increase, Meta and other platforms will face sharper pressure to genuinely restructure their engagement mechanics rather than simply adding superficial protective layers. The question is whether that pressure will prove sufficient to overcome the structural incentive to maximise usage among teenagers, whose developing brains make them particularly vulnerable to addictive design. For parents, policymakers, and young people themselves across Malaysia and the broader region, the answer will largely determine whether social media platforms evolve into genuinely safer spaces or continue operating according to business models that, despite cosmetic improvements, treat adolescent attention as a commodity to be harvested and monetised.
