Congress, Not Settlements, Should Set Social Media Rules

Meta cutting a settlement that includes new safeguards around how it handles kids' data and content moderation sounds like good news until you ask the obvious question: why is this happening in a courtroom instead of a committee room? Settlements are negotiated by lawyers trying to make a lawsuit go away. They're not designed to produce durable, consistent rules for an entire industry. Whatever Meta agreed to applies to Meta, in this case, under these specific facts. TikTok, Snap, X, whatever comes next, none of them are bound by it.

That's the real problem here. We've spent nearly a decade watching Congress hold hearings, wag fingers at tech CEOs, and produce almost nothing in the way of actual legislation. So now the rules get written piecemeal, through consent decrees and state attorneys general and class action settlements, by whichever plaintiffs happen to have the best lawyers and the most leverage at a given moment. That's not governance. That's outsourcing.

There's also something a little too convenient about a company agreeing to safeguards after the damage is done and the lawsuit is filed. It costs Meta far less to accept some behavioral tweaks now than to fight a protracted legal battle, and it lets them claim credit for "doing the right thing" without ever facing a law that applies equally to every competitor. Congress writing the rules means no company gets to pick its own level of accountability through negotiation.

None of this is an argument against the specific fixes Meta says it's making. Some of them probably are sensible. But sensible fixes adopted unevenly, company by company, lawsuit by lawsuit, aren't a substitute for actual law. If lawmakers think kids need better protections online, they should pass something that says so and applies to everyone, instead of letting trial lawyers do their job for them one settlement at a time.