Peter Griffin: Meta is not changing because it discovered a conscience. It is changing because the cost of refusing has become intolerable. Photo / Getty Images

The most telling thing about Meta’s $30 billion settlement over youth harm is not the eye-watering number. It is that, at last, Facebook and Instagram are being forced to change the machinery that made children compulsive users in the first place.

For years, Silicon Valley’s response to evidence of youth harm in the digital world has been an insipid cocktail of carefully worded blog posts, voluntary “safety” features buried in settings, and suggestions that parents keep a closer eye on their kids.

Now, litigation is hitting where it hurts – the balance sheet, the product roadmap and the executive suite. While $30b doesn’t seem like much for a company that generated around $340b in revenue last year, there’s a good reason Meta settled the case rather than face a federal civil trial: it saw stiffer penalties on the horizon.

Under the settlement with US states, Meta has agreed to impose two-hour daily limits for young users unless a parent overrides them, block late-night use, and stop push notifications during weekday school hours.

It will beef up its age assurance systems, strengthen parental controls, limit social-comparison features such as “like” counts, and tackle bullying, self-harm and eating-disorder material more seriously. An independent auditor will monitor compliance.

All those White House dinners and donations to President Trump’s pet projects could not offset US states’ desire to act on behalf of their citizens. The company that designed the casino is being told to remove some of the slot machines. The nature of Meta’s platforms is that the changes will likely be pushed out globally, just as New Zealand heads in a different direction.

National’s proposed under-16 social-media ban, which has Labour’s support but won’t make it into legislation before the election, would require platforms to take “reasonable steps” to verify age, with potential fines of up to 10% of global revenue. It also proposes risk assessments and reporting requirements.

I understand the sentiment, which channels the frustration of parents at their wits’ end. But the Australian ban that took effect last December hasn’t worked, with studies suggesting more than 80% of 12- to 15-year-olds are still using social media due to poorly designed age verification, workarounds and a lack of enforcement.

A 15-year-old abruptly excluded from Instagram may be safer in one narrow sense. But a 16-year-old delivered back into the same attention-harvesting machine at midnight on their birthday is not.

The American legal offensive is more promising because it attacks Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s design choices. The real problems are the endless feeds, incessant prompts, and algorithms optimised for engagement. Those are not immutable features of the internet. They are commercial decisions.

An age gate won’t solve social media’s design problems. Indeed, the changes are reliant on Meta running an even more sophisticated surveillance operation with its age-verification system, which is problematic in itself. New Zealand has built a taxpayer-funded digital verification system. That should underpin any age verification, keeping data in the hands of users, not Meta, TikTok or YouTube.

But forcing changes that make these platforms safer and less addictive could start to finally make a difference. If Parliament is serious, it should require the same protections Meta is now conceding elsewhere, including default time caps, night-time shutdowns, quiet school hours, local independent audits and large penalties for non-compliance.

Meta is not changing because it discovered a conscience. It is changing because the cost of refusing has become intolerable. This lesson must be delivered here, too.

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Peter Griffin: Why Meta’s US$18b settlement matters