Meta has spent years introducing features designed to make Instagram and Facebook safer for children and teenagers. Private accounts by default, restrictions on messages from unfamiliar adults, parental supervision tools, sensitive-content warnings and dedicated Teen Accounts are among the measures the company points to as evidence of its commitment to youth safety. But as a major new court case unfolds in the United States, the debate is shifting from how many protections Meta offers to whether those protections actually work.
A federal trial in California has brought allegations from four U.S. states that Meta contributed to the youth mental health crisis by designing features that encourage young people to remain on its platforms for extended periods. The states are seeking billions of dollars in damages as well as fundamental changes to how Facebook and Instagram operate. Meta rejects the allegations and argues that children’s safety is an area in which it has invested substantial resources.
The company has made significant changes. Instagram Teen Accounts place younger users into a more restricted environment, with private profiles by default, tighter limits on who can contact them and restrictions on certain categories of content. Younger teenagers also need parental permission to change some of these settings.
Instagram has restricted users under 16 from livestreaming without parental approval and introduced protections against unwanted images in direct messages. Meta also provides warnings around suicide and eating-disorder content and tools designed to encourage teenagers to take breaks from the platform.
Those measures have not ended the criticism. One of the central issues is the difference between having a safety feature and demonstrating that it works effectively. A study examining Instagram’s teen protections evaluated 47 of Meta’s 53 listed safety features and concluded that roughly 60 percent were either unavailable during testing or did not operate as advertised. Meta strongly disputes those findings.
An even deeper disagreement concerns the fundamental design of social media itself. Critics argue that individual safety controls cannot fully address the problem while platforms continue to rely on infinite scrolling, algorithmic recommendations, autoplay and frequent notifications designed to keep users engaged.
That question is increasingly central to the legal battles surrounding Meta. Former company safety employee Arturo Béjar has argued that Meta possessed information about harmful experiences among young users but failed to make sufficiently fundamental changes. Meta disputes such allegations and points to the continuing expansion of its safety systems.
Pressure is no longer coming only from advocacy organisations. Earlier this month, a New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $567 million toward measures addressing harms to young people. The judge also imposed additional safeguards involving usage limits for minors, restrictions involving AI chatbots and mandatory warnings.
The case illustrates how dramatically the debate over social-media safety has changed. Several years ago, the central question was whether technology companies should provide parents with better controls. Regulators and courts are now increasingly asking whether the platforms themselves need to be redesigned.
The stakes for Meta are enormous. Instagram remains one of the most influential social platforms among younger users, leaving the company with the difficult task of maintaining engagement while responding to regulators and demonstrating that its safety systems work beyond corporate announcements.
The issue therefore cannot be reduced to a simple claim that Instagram is either safe or unsafe for children. Meta has unquestionably introduced substantially more protections than it offered several years ago. The unresolved question is whether those measures are sufficient when the underlying economics of social media still depend heavily on capturing and retaining users’ attention.
