Today's $17 billion settlement between Meta and 47 states is a milestone. For years, Meta knew its platforms were harming kids — the addictive feeds, the metrics built for validation, the notifications engineered to pull a teenager back in at 11 p.m. — and it optimized for engagement anyway. Default time limits, an overnight block, muted notifications during school hours, hidden like counts, a chronological feed option: these are real, specific, hard-won changes, and they deserve to be called what they are. Good.
What Meta is giving up here is the minimum it takes to settle each of these lawsuits — the specific features courts and plaintiffs identified as most harmful, stripped out one settlement at a time. That's meaningfully different from making these apps appropriate for kids. Social media carries risks for young, still-developing minds that no setting fully engineers away: the social comparison, the pressure to perform, the sheer pull of a feed built to be hard to leave. A time limit doesn't erase that. It just puts a clock on it.
That's why we don't think kids should be on these apps at 13 at all — the minimum age Meta allows today. The research shows worse outcomes for younger teens, not just extreme edge cases, and no default setting changes the fact that a 13-year-old's brain is not equipped to navigate a platform built by some of the smartest engineers in the world to hold attention. Adults with fully formed brains even have trouble with this.
Today's settlement is a good step but it's still not a substitute for learning to manage your own technology. The new guardrails that Meta has committed to matter more, and do more good, for an older teen of 17 or 18 who has more developed judgment. For that older teen, limits like these could reinforce good tech habits they have already established, and genuinely help avoid some of the tragic situations at the center of these lawsuits.
But the real work of preparing a kid for social media starts years earlier, with parents helping them to develop healthy tech habits outside of social media, such as with texting and age-appropriate videos and games. Teens need to develop key skills like putting their device down, connecting with real life friends instead of measuring their self-worth in “likes,” and understanding that online content has an agenda, before they’re ready for social media apps.
Parents cannot rely on tech platforms like Instagram and TikTok to teach, or even help, their kids and teens develop these tech skills. Instead parents need to model and have their kids practice good habits, like time limits for video games, no devices in the bedroom, conversations about what’s happening in the friend group and what they’re seeing online.
That's what Pinwheel is built for: giving kids real independence at a pace parents control, loosening the reins as they earn it. So when a teenager is finally ready for social media, with solid judgment already in place, guardrails like these have something solid to reinforce instead of something to compensate for.