Meta got off lightly last week in the United States when it settled a lawsuit over allegedly getting a generation of teens addicted to harmful social media for $24 billion. Australia’s teen social media ban shows why the company was happy to pay up.
Facing a multipronged social media addiction lawsuit that the tech behemoth said could leave it to pay nearly its entire market value – $US1.4 trillion ($1.95 trillion) – in penalties, Meta cut a deal.
Meta has promised to adjust its settings for under 18s, including imposing two-hour time limits, overnight curfews, hiding the number of “likes” and modifying extreme beauty filters. The company will have to pay fines in every US state, and will fork out more money if Snap, YouTube and TikTok settle ongoing separate lawsuits.
Despite the scale of Meta’s payout – the biggest by any social media company ever – the company has made those product changes essentially on its own terms. It has also avoided admitting fault and being drawn into a bruising trial that would have dragged Mark Zuckerberg before a courtroom in Oakland, California.
And crucially, it has avoided facing Australian-style restrictions in a far more sizeable and important market.
That’s not to say the ban here has been a rousing success. A recent report by parental control app Qustodio found that, some nine months after the government’s landmark policy came into force, use of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat is rising again. According to the report, 25.9 per cent of 13- to 15-year-olds were on TikTok, a humble single percentage point drop since the ban came into effect.
To celebrate the law coming into force last December, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was lit up in green and gold, and emblazoned with the slogan “Let Kids Be Kids”, a reference to the News Corp campaign championing the change.
Nine months later, the kids are doing just that: finding novel ways to break rules. It’s doubtful that the average teen in 2026, having ditched their phone because of the government, is living the kind of free-range, outdoorsy analogue life that the prime minister used to sell the policy.
The government’s own data tells the same story. According to the eSafety Commissioner’s figures, within three months of the ban coming into effect, 81 per cent of 10- to 15-year-olds were still on social media.
None of the big tech companies have been fined for breaching the teen ban here.
Therein lies the real risk for Meta: muscular American regulators adopting a teen ban backed by vastly greater legal firepower.
And despite the settlement, there’s another risk looming.
Following the US settlement news last week, local firm Shine Lawyers announced it would be investigating a potential Australian class action against Meta and other companies related to the harms of social media addiction.
The firm will team up with Mark Lanier, the renowned American litigator who tried the Los Angeles case, and who has called his crusade against big tech a “righteous case” and “holy war” (he moonlights as a Sunday School teacher after all).
Shine’s head of class actions, Craig Allsopp, said the firm was still at an investigative stage, looking at expressions of interest from prospective plaintiffs that could use a range of different areas of the law to target companies such as Meta.
“There’s personal injury, there’s negligence, there’s consumer law claims like unconscionable conduct. It all comes back to these algorithms intentionally being designed to be addictive,” he said.
The firm hopes it can drive Meta towards making similar product changes in Australia. Allsopp said that the Australian ban, coupled with dozens of ongoing lawsuits across the world, are all connected.
“It’s all part of a societal shift in recognition of the harm that social media has caused,” he said.
That sense of techno-pessimism underpinning the Meta lawsuit is only going to accelerate, especially with artificial intelligence threatening to either decimate white-collar work or become a bubble that bursts so spectacularly that nobody will be safe from the blast radius.
The Albanese government’s ban hasn’t forced more kids to play outside. It has shown that governments everywhere are getting sick of Big Tech’s slow degradation of contemporary life. No wonder Zuckerberg cut a deal.
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Kishor Napier-Raman is a senior business writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Previously he worked as a CBD columnist and reporter in the federal parliamentary press gallery.Connect via X or email.