GENEVA/BRUSSELS: The United Nations called on Thursday for child-safe design across the social media industry after tech giant Meta agreed to sweeping limits on teen use of Facebook and Instagram in some US states.

Meta agreed to pay a coalition of US states as much as $16.7 billion and to impose the limits, according to a court filing on Wednesday ending a landmark trial in California.

The settlement resolved claims by 29 states that Meta deliberately engineered its platforms to hook young users, misled the public about the risks and unlawfully collected data from children under 13.

Some 51 states and territories, plus Washington, DC, initially settled with Meta. Texas reached a separate agreement with Meta, which increased the total payout to around $18 billion.

Tech giant agrees to pay a total amount of $18bn to almost all US states after a landmark trial

“Children should not have to wait for a lawsuit to be safe online,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said on X. “The design changes that Meta has now agreed to implement on its social media apps align with what my office has been calling for. But we’re not there yet.

“Safe design should be applied across the industry. Governments need to step up rather than wait for courts and companies to act.”

Back in May, Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, called for tougher measures by governments and tech firms to make online platforms safe places for children, through better design, data protection, regulation, oversight and accountability. He called for action to ensure that “those responsible for harm can be held to account”.

Turk said simply focusing on age restrictions would leave unaltered the designs and algorithms that made the platforms unsafe in the first place.

Addictive design features

Earlier this year, the UN rights office produced a set of 10 guidelines entitled “Getting Children’s Safety Online Right”. These included ensuring the maximum protection of children’s data as a default setting, while the “micro-targeting” of children for commercial purposes, based on a digital record, “should not be permitted”.

They said emerging concerns such as restrictions on artificial intelligence chatbot use or addictive design features may warrant age restrictions. Measures should be subject to independent oversight, with legal consequences that serve as deterrents, the guidelines said.

There should also be access to remedy for children whose rights are violated, they said. Peggy Hicks, the UN human rights office’s thematic and special procedures director, warned at a press conference in May that tech companies faced a choice: “change how their platforms are designed and operated to better protect children’s rights and safety; or be forced to do so through increasingly restrictive legislation, jury verdicts, and regulatory fines.”

EU concerned

The EU said it expects Meta to address “addictive” features of its platforms in Europe, after the tech giant agreed to sweeping limits on teen use of Facebook and Instagram in some US states.

The European Commission last month found Meta to be in breach of its Digital Services Act (DSA), one of several laws aimed at reining in Big Tech in the 27-nation bloc, ordering it to propose changes to make its platforms safer for children.

European Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said the EU has had new “exchanges” with the firm since the landmark settlement in the United States, which he said Brussels had been following “very closely”.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2026