Facebook, Instagram settlement is a start to fix our attention span crisis

“Let’s figure out how to get as much of this person’s attention as we possibly can. How much time can we get you to spend? How much of your life can we get you to give to us?”

This classic quote from Tim Kendall, Facebook’s former director of monetization, delivered in the 2020 documentary “The Social Dilemma,” is as powerful and relevant today as it was then. The same driving mission is no doubt verbalized in boardrooms at all the major social media companies today. These platforms are deliberately designed to be addictive for adults as well as children — since the longer your child scrolls, the more money these companies make.

This week’s announcement that Meta has agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by 47 states marks a significant moment in the fight to protect children from the harms of social media. The states’ attorneys general accused Meta of intentionally designing features on Facebook and Instagram such as infinite scroll and algorithm recommendations to keep kids and teens hooked — and of misleading the public about the risks its platforms posed.

The final terms of the settlement must still be approved by the court, but some of the provisions include a default daily time limit of two hours for kids under 18, a nighttime block between midnight and 6 a.m., eliminating push notifications during weekday school hours, and a ban on displaying the number of “likes” to posts made by kids under 18.

As a parent, it’s still too early to know how many of the settlement provisions will have real teeth. What we do know with certainty is that the settlement provides additional compelling evidence that the tide is shifting in favor of giving parents more effective tools to manage kids and screens. And that tide is turning, in part, thanks to the tireless work of Jonathan Haidt and the Anxious Generation movement he started, as well as countless child safety advocates and parents who have worked for years to try to implement safety measures to protect children from the harms of addictive technology.

While Haidt beautifully brought to light the mental health harms addictive technology has unleashed on an entire generation of young people, lately he’s been arguing that the destruction of our attention span is potentially an even larger harm. He said recently at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology lecture: “There’s something bigger. It is the destruction of the human capacity to pay attention. Because this is affecting most people, including most adults. And if you imagine humanity with 10 to 50% of its attentional ability sucked out of it, there’s not much left. We’re not very capable of doing things if we can’t focus or stay on a task for more than 30 seconds.”

The sheer amount of time kids spend on social media is staggering because these tech companies and the world-renowned child psychologists they employ are exceptionally good at their jobs. In fact, the average American teenager spends 4.8 hours a day on social media alone, and that doesn’t include time on screens for schoolwork. That’s almost five hours every single day that kids could be spending on the things we know they need for a healthy childhood — developing genuine connection with parents and friends in the real world, having real world experiences in which they experience both success and failure and learn from both, and getting quality, uninterrupted sleep.

I hope that once the full settlement details emerge and implementation begins, we can look back on this week’s announcement as a real step forward.

But we must also acknowledge how much work still remains to be done in our homes, in our schools, in Congress and in the courts in order for parents to fully reclaim family life, as well as our children’s attention span and mental health from the pull of the slot machines in their pockets. In a very real sense, as Tim Wu writes in his book, The “Attention Merchants”: “We must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living.”

Katherine Coughlin was an attorney at the United States Department of Justice, Civil Division and worked in the United States Senate. She is now a technology consultant, a mom of two teenagers, and a 17-year resident of Kansas City.

This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 1:51 PM with the headline “Facebook, Instagram settlement is a start to fix our attention span crisis | Opinion.”