Meta Settles Child Safety Suit With 47 States

Sophia Lorey, outreach director for the California Family Council, said the deal proves tech companies can check ages when forced to. "We believe age enforcement is feasible to protect students, and Meta just proved it. These companies can tell an advertiser your age, your income, and what you bought last Tuesday, so they can determine whether a user is 13," she told The Center Square. "There is nothing free about a market where a corporation signs up your 12-year-old behind your back, sells their data, and designs the product to be addictive. That is not liberty. That is a company monetizing a child without even necessarily the knowledge of a parent. Conservatives who care about parental authority and protecting children should be the loudest voices in this fight."

California Assemblymember Dawn Addis, a Democrat from San Luis Obispo who sits on the Assembly Education Committee, called it a start and not a finish. "Big Tech has raked in record profits while knowingly harming our children for far too long. This settlement is a step in the right direction, but is not the final solution," she told The Center Square.

Others say the number is smaller than it sounds. Raffaele Ciriello, a senior lecturer in business information systems at the University of Sydney, told The Center Square the money is "spread over 10 years and amounts to less than 1% of Meta's annual revenue," and warned the deal "gives Meta a lasting carve-out from state COPPA-style claims for retaining and using children's data to train its age-assurance systems."

Rob Nicholls, a senior research associate at the University of Sydney's Centre for AI, Trust and Governance, said the enforcement teeth are real because breaching the consent judgment could amount to contempt of court: "The risk is that senior managers could be jailed for the breach." He expects the biggest classroom effect to be how Meta's platforms behave during school hours, while cautioning that "the Australian experience from school bans is that social media harms occur outside of the time when schools act in loco parentis."

Joanne Gray, chair of discipline, media and communications at the University of Sydney, said the changes only matter if outsiders can check them: "How well they work remains to be seen - and requires Meta to make future data available for research and independent evaluation."

The Christian Science Monitor's editorial board framed the settlement as one step in a longer effort to protect and prepare young people growing up online.