Commentary: Meta, under duress, finally does the right thing for teens

If those apps do agree – none had offered comment by midday Wednesday – Meta will make its daily use limit even stricter, cutting it to just one hour (as will those other apps).

Plainly, YouTube and TikTok will have more to lose because teens now use those apps for longer than they do Instagram and, it hardly needs pointing out, Facebook.

It may well be that an hourly limit on YouTube, an app that 76 per cent of US teens use at least once a day, with 17 per cent saying they used it “almost constantly”, might be a growth driver for the stagnant Facebook, where just 20 per cent of US teens say they visit it daily, according to data from Pew Research.

Instagram might experience a similar boost. According to eMarketer data from May 2026, US social media users ages 12 to 17 spent an average of one hour and 36 minutes on TikTok each day but just 34 minutes on Instagram. A teen who might have spent her entire night on TikTok seems very likely to me to turn to Instagram’s Reels feature rather than put her phone down.

Meta is making lemonade from lemons, then, with an undetermined hit to its advertising model. I’m not naive enough to think that the company won’t have found various loopholes – or “innovations”, more generously – along the way that will protect that business. 

Industry watchers will recall the company screaming bloody murder over Apple’s move to give users more power to block ad tracking, going as far as to take out full-page newspaper ads calling the move “devastating”. Within months, it had rolled out technical workarounds that left the company’s ad business more lucrative than ever. Perhaps Meta can persuade advertisers to pay more to make sure they reach teens before their daily limits, or night mode, kick in.

This settlement is tangible progress and proof that a well-constructed case can bring accountability to technology companies. It’s progress that many predicted would be, at best, snarled up in endless appeals – progress that might have been stymied by the opposition of wrong-headed privacy campaigners whose role lately seems to be to dismiss any attempt at protecting young people while rarely suggesting productive alternatives. 

Meta, for all its faults, and under obvious duress, has produced an impactful and technically feasible list of ways to finally start to put things right. Its executives are well within their rights to call on its competitors to do the same, even if their motives aren’t in the least bit altruistic.