3 min readAug 31, 2026 06:05 AM IST First published on: Aug 31, 2026 at 06:05 AM ISTThe settlement between Meta and 29 US states over the harm its platforms can cause children is a veiled admission of a truth that Big Tech has spent years resisting: That these platforms are built to capture attention, and therefore have a responsibility towards how they affect young users. Meta will pay up to $18 billion over a decade and introduce a series of restrictions on Facebook and Instagram, including two-hour daily limits for under-18 users, a midnight-to-6-am curfew, stronger age verification mechanisms, default safety settings, and reduced notifications during school hours. The company has denied wrongdoing, and the settlement leaves untouched some of the more fundamental questions about personalised recommendations and the advertising-driven business model. Even so, it marks a significant step towards recognising that children’s safety can no longer be treated as a matter of self-control or parental vigilance, that product design itself should come under regulatory scrutiny.That is the direction that global regulation has been increasingly moving towards. There is a recognition of the fact that these platforms are built to make stopping difficult — the infinite scroll ensures recommendations continuously supply the next piece of content; notifications and other “hooks” are designed to bring users back; likes, streaks and personalised feeds turn attention into a measurable commodity. They are features of an engagement economy in which time spent is valuable because attention can be monetised. Technology companies have long pushed much of the responsibility towards parents who must monitor screen time and users who must exercise self-control. The new curbs begin to move responsibility upstream, towards the companies that build and profit from systems engineered to resist disengagement.AdvertisementThe American settlement offers a useful model for India as it contemplates regulation around children’s social-media usage. A system reliant solely on parental supervision will inevitably leave protection uneven, depending on digital literacy, time, and household resources. Regulation should instead ask harder questions of the platforms: Why should an engagement-maximising feed be the default for a child? Why should a young user have to opt out of personalisation rather than have a safer feed by default? And why should the burden of resisting an infinite stream of content fall on the user rather than on the company that created it? Meta’s US deal could mark the beginning of a broader effort to redraw the boundaries of responsibility.