The Responsibility of Growing Up
It takes a village to raise a child.
That old African proverb is quite true: a kid would grow up with grandparents, cousins, teachers, neighbours, all keeping half an eye on them. Growing a kid takes a lot of work, and everywhere in the world, community turns out to be the best way to do it, whether that’s through a village, or public services.
Over the last few decades, a growing share of community work, childcare, private schooling or entertainment, has moved into private hands. Much of the time, they were not given the responsibility, but there was a market gap. Sometimes even, the framework guiding that work isn’t a broader curriculum, set by something like a ministry and shaped by public debate: it’s whatever the company has decided on its own. In fact, plenty of these private actors never asked themselves what the impact would be before rolling their model out onto one of the most basic community responsibilities: raising its young.
In August 2026, this has become louder.
On the fourth day of a trial in Oakland, California,1Tech Policy Press, August 2026.
Meta Platforms agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to settle claims by forty-seven US states, the District of Columbia and three territories that it had knowingly designed Instagram and Facebook to addict and harm children.2CBS News, 26 August 2026.
The Attorney General for DC, Brian Schwalb, called it
“the largest state consumer protection settlement in history outside of the Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s”3Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia, 2026.
The case that ended in Oakland began in October 2023, when a coalition of thirty-three US state attorneys general, led by California, filed suit against Meta.4California Office of the Attorney General, 24 October 2023.
The complaint accused the company of building addictive features into Instagram and Facebook, and of hiding what it knew about the harm they caused to youth, as well as wide violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
The spine of the case, and of most of the litigation now moving through American courts, is the phrase they knew.
In September 2021, a former Meta product manager named Frances Haugen walked out of the company with thousands of internal documents and delivered them to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Congress, and The Wall Street Journal. Among the slides was a line from an internal presentation in 2019 that read
“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls”5Reproduced in the House exhibit filed with the Wall Street Journal documents.Internal Meta presentation, 2019
Another, from March 2020, reported that 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. Internal figures showed that 13.5% of teenage girls said Instagram worsened suicidal thoughts, and 17% said it worsened eating disorders.6Wells, Horwitz & Seetharaman, 14 September 2021.
Meta disputed this. Its research chief argued that the Journal had mischaracterised the work, and released annotated decks showing that on most difficult issues, more struggling teen girls said Instagram helped them.7CBC News, 30 September 2021.
Both things may be true.
What cannot be argued is that the company’s own researchers discovered all this way before a regulator or a court forced anyone to reckon with it.
Meanwhile, in a federal courthouse in Oakland, there is consolidated litigation now approaching 3,137 claims from parents, school districts and attorneys general against Meta, TikTok, Snap and YouTube.8American Enterprise Institute, 2025.
In Europe, the Commission opened formal proceedings against Meta under the Digital Services Act in May 2024,9TechCrunch, 16 May 2024. and by late 2026 had issued preliminary findings that Instagram and Facebook were failing to keep under-thirteens off their platforms.10European Commission, 29 April 2026.
The gap between the moment platforms saturated children’s lives and the moment policy protected them is fifteen to twenty years, in that gap, an entire generation grew up.
The US Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that the share of teenage girls reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness rose from 35% in 2011 to 57% in 2021,11Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 13 February 2023. a near 60% increase and the highest in a decade.
30% of girls seriously considered suicide. The CDC’s director of the Division of Adolescent and School Health, said her country’s teenage girls were living through
“an overwhelming wave of violence and trauma”12Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 13 February 2023.
In 2023, the US Surgeon General took the extraordinary step of issuing a public advisory in which he warned that “our children have become unknowing participants in a decades-long experiment”13From Social media and youth mental health, the Surgeon General’s advisory.Office of the Surgeon General, 2023
Since roughly 2012, adolescent mental health has deteriorated sharply across the countries where smartphones and social media saturated first.
One of the most basic political principles holds that the whole reason to have a state at all is that individuals cannot protect themselves against certain threats. A child cannot negotiate the terms on which an algorithm optimises her attention, she cannot audit the recommendation engine that decides which video she sees next.
In the language of old text books, she is precisely the sort of subject whose interests the sovereign exists to defend.
In March 2021, after consulting more than seven hundred children across twenty-eight countries, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child issued General Comment No. 25, the first authoritative statement that these rights apply, in full, in the digital environment, and that states are obliged to regulate business accordingly.14OHCHR, General comment No. 25, 2021.
The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, endorsed by the Human Rights Council in 2011, rest on three pillars: the state’s duty to protect against abuses by third parties including business; the corporate responsibility to respect; and access to remedy for those harmed.15OHCHR, Guiding principles on business and human rights, 2011.
A $17.1 billion settlement sounds like a number that will hurt, but it probably won’t. Meta’s net income in 2025 alone was $60.458 billion, spread over ten years, the settlement works out to roughly $1.7 billion a year, less than 3% of one year’s profit.16under 3%$17.1bn over ten years against $60.458bn in 2025. Worst of all, none of it reaches a family, there is no consumer fund, no individual claim. Meta promised to change, but the company itself acknowledged that the relevant measures were not yet in effect at the time the settlement was announced.17Open Class Actions, 2026.
Is this familiar?
This is the shape tobacco took for decades. Courts can fine a company all they want; if it can absorb the fine, nothing changes. What changes a business model is a law that makes the design itself illegal, enforced across the whole market, not a settlement it can write off as an expense.
Legislators already know how to regulate a product to keep someone using it. They did it once with tobacco, over decades of an industry insisting the science wasn’t settled and that people were freely choosing to smoke.Meta and its peers spend tens of millions of dollars a year lobbying the very legislators who are supposed to regulate them,18OpenSecrets, Meta lobbying profile. not once, not at election time, but constantly. The people whose job it is to protect a thirteen-year-old from an algorithm are, in the same room and taking calls from the company that built it.
In the current system, the job falls to watchdog organizations: the attorneys general, the handful of non-profits tracking this with a fraction of the resources the industry spends defending itself, such are what’s left standing in the gap democracy is leaving open.
I do not believe that what’s been missing is a legal instrument, I believe it’s the will to use one, the same will that eventually got a warning label onto a cigarette pack. Ed Markey said it plainest, in the hearings after Frances Haugen came forward: Instagram, he said, was
“that first childhood cigarette, meant to get teens hooked early”
19CBC News, 30 September 2021.