Meta Wants Its Rivals to Follow Its New Teen Safety Rules

This story will be featured in the upcoming Financial Poise Weekly newsletter.

Fresh from its settlement over alleged harm to young social media users, Meta is now turning up the pressure on its biggest rivals.

According to Madlin Mekelburg, Riley Griffin, and Alexandra S. Levine from Bloomberg:

• Meta’s settlement requires it to introduce new safeguards for young Facebook and Instagram users, including daily time limits and restrictions on overnight use.
• But $5.3 billion of Meta’s payout depends on whether its rivals adopt similar safeguards and make comparable contributions to state initiatives for children.
• Meta is responding by publicly pressuring its rivals to follow suit.

And Meta isn’t being subtle about it. The company is running full-page ads in major US newspapers calling on TikTok and YouTube to adopt similar protections, arguing that the safeguards will only be effective if they become an industry-wide standard.

Our take? Meta’s latest campaign is less about teen safety and more about leveling the playing field. The company may be embracing tougher rules, but it also has a strong competitive incentive to drag its rivals along. But is that a bad thing? We’ll leave that up to you to decide.