Move Fast and Settle Things

Therefore, if you take a step back, it's basically Meta getting to write the standards for child safety across the big players of the internet.

And if you don't believe that Meta has been particularly good, like what amazes me of the people celebrating this are the same people who are like Meta is terrible and we don't trust them.

And now you have handed them the pen to write the rules of how internet safety for children works across the internet.

And even if you say, well, it's just limited to these biggest players, if they can convince YouTube and TikTok to go along with it, the trickle down of this is also really problematic because now what is happening is you've blessed these specific things, the two hour limit, the hidden likes, the things that we don't know whether or not they actually work.

But if any other platform wants to avoid getting sued in the future, the easiest thing to do is just say, well, we're doing the industry-wide standard as defined in this settlement between Meta and all of these states.

And so the way to reduce liability, if you're a company, a smaller company, an upstart trying to do something different, maybe you have an idea of how to actually protect children more.

That's now risky.

The easiest thing, the thing to do to reduce and avoid liability is to just go with the flow, take what Meta has agreed to and say, we're just going to do that because that is the industry standard.

And that really concerns me, especially when we don't know what actually works right now.

The laws of unintended consequences is likely to be seen heavily here. Sadly, Meta is probably going to love this. It puts them in the driver seat to put walls up making it harder for new players to enter the market.