Meta has a problem. Everyone, their mom, and their state attorney general is mad at them for their role in contributing to the ongoing mental health crisis for teens.Last November, Meta’s head of global safety, Antigone Davis, published a blog post urging government regulation on the issue of children and teens accessing Instagram and other social media. She proposed that Apple and Google take charge of age-gating and getting parental consent through their app stores. She wrote:Parents should approve their teen’s app downloads, and we support federal legislation that requires app stores to get parents’ approval whenever their teens under 16 download apps. With this solution, when a teen wants to download an app, app stores would be required to notify their parents, much like when parents are notified if their teen attempts to make a purchase. Parents can decide if they want to approve the download. They can also verify the age of their teen when setting up their phone, negating the need for everyone to verify their age multiple times across multiple apps.It sounds like Meta is just trying to wiggle out of having to clean up its own mess.But Meta does have a point: it would be a lot easier for Apple and Google to implement age-gating at the app store level versus leaving this work to every individual app.According to a report this week from The Wall Street Journal, Apple is not at all willing to entertain this idea. When state legislators in Louisiana were considering a bill that would make app stores responsible for age verification, Apple set out a team of lobbyists to help shut down the bill. It worked — that part of the bill was dropped.This is a new wrinkle in an ongoing low-key feud between Meta and Apple. Meta resents Apple for several reasons: Apple hurt its ad business with the “Ask app not to track” feature; its App Store takes an onerous 27% cut of some in-app purchases; and worst of all: Apple gets away with a smarmy, holier-than-thou attitude about privacy.
You might imagine why Apple isn’t excited to jump forward with a plan to be responsible for age-gating all social apps. Apple doesn’t want to handle age verification, because that’s a privacy nightmare. And likely, it resents having to clean up Meta and TikTok’s messes. Plus, Apple already has parental controls and age ratings in the App Store that allow parents to block apps rated over a certain age.So Apple and Meta are at a standstill.Everyone seems to agree that there’s a big problem with young people and social media, but there is no one clear and obvious solution. Age verification isn’t ideal (I certainly don’t want to have to upload my driver’s license to use Instagram), and simply keeping kids under 13 (or 15!) off these apps doesn’t solve the thorny problems of how young people get miserable once they’re on social media.Meanwhile, individual states are making piecemeal laws about social media and teens. New York passed a bill this summer that prohibits “addictive” algorithms on young users’ feeds. Other states, including California, Arkansas, and Utah, have also tried to pass their own laws regulating social media for teens, although these laws have faced scrutiny from courts on First Amendment grounds.The best hope for an immediate change in policy, it seems to me, is for individual schools to ban cell phones from class. This would probably make teachers happy and get kids to pay more attention in class, but it’s only one part of the larger issue.Both Meta and Apple could be doing more to solve the problem of kids and phones — and so could the government. For now, parents are left struggling on their own.
